The 2012 story has to be told warts and all
Here at the BBC we’ve the simple aim of being the place where the story of London 2012 is told. But we’re aware of the traps: one is that we bore everyone senseless by swamping the airwaves and peaking too early, and another is that we under-report and under-cook the biggest UK event in our lifetimes.
There’s also a risk of being caricatured as cheerleaders because we have such a stake in Olympic broadcasting, and we’re conscious that our project team operates largely among people who are utterly consumed by the Olympic year in prospect – which isn’t the case for most of our audiences.
So the trick is to make sure the independent journalism is being done now, and the longer-term programmes are being commissioned, ready for the point when “Olympic world” and “real world” coincide.
The Olympic Stadium nears completion
One of the pleasures in this job is seeing how ideas in this area are already becoming reality.
An example: in the autumn of 2008 I went to a meeting of our Global News teams – the people who run World Service radio, BBC World and our internationally-facing websites – to chat about how the main BBC 2012 project could work with them.
This has a fantastic opportunity in that we’re enormously proud of our global broadcasting role and it would be nuts for it not to be a main plank of the BBC Olympic story, but also the pain that the rights restrictions mean it can share very little of the action when the Games themselves get under way.
So what’s essential is that they show imagination and ambition in what the wider story means for the UK and for the world.
At that meeting, Tony Phillips mentioned a thought that the Olympic boroughs already have ‘the world’ living there: local residents in Hackney come from Jamaica and Senegal, from India and Algeria.
This is part of the theme I’ve touched on before about the incredible diversity of London in general and the East of the city in particular.
So wouldn’t it be interesting to follow their story between now and 2012 – to see how an Olympics based on the concept of “the world in one city” tries to deliver what it promised?
Well, that partly-formed thought of 18 months ago is now a series on the BBC World Service. Its website is here and you can listen to the most recent episode here.
You’ll see that this is interactive too: you can email some of the people featured in the programme, and the excellent “World Have Your Say” has already been to Hackney to connect global audiences to the place where their greatest athletes will compete in two years’ time. It’s available as a podcast here.
Meanwhile on television last week, audiences in London could see “The Day The Olympics Come to Town” – unfortunately not available on iPlayer because of rights restrictions – which was an imagining of the way London might operate in 2012. It’s the latest sign of the way that BBC London will follow the Olympic story for audiences in the capital.
I should say that these kind of programmes aren’t controlled by the 2012 project team.
It’s right that the BBC journalists operate independently, and I’ve often said – both now and previously as director of sport – that my personal role is to let programmes like Newsnight be Newsnight and not to seek to limit our programme-makers’ ability to operate freely.
London is well known for its diversity
Indeed, what we’re doing as a project team in addition to our core planning function is encouraging creativity around the BBC: helping make connections, liaising with the outside bodies and making sure that there’s an attractive range of programmes for all our audiences as Olympic fever grows.
There’s another reason too, of course, why there are “Chinese walls” at this stage between the 2012 project and some of our programme-making.
We spend a lot of time with Locog, www.london2012.com and our other key partners, and it wouldn’t be right for us to hotfoot it from an external planning meeting to feeding the juiciest morsels to our output teams.
There’s nothing new about this in that confidentiality and daily news co-exist on a whole range of issues – and it’s the same with some long-form documentaries where exclusive filming access can give you scoops which have to be saved until the scheduled transmission time.
The crucial thing that guides us is public interest: the public interest in London 2012 being planned safely and successfully for the UK and the world, and equally non-negotiable the public interest in asking the awkward questions and holding the decision-makers to account.
It can be a difficult tight-rope to walk, but I can’t see any other way of doing it – and if the story is to be told properly it has to be “warts and all“.
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