Getting Out Alive by Roger Mosey Biteback Among the most respected figures in broadcasting, Roger Mosey was a senior figure at the BBC for 20 years, including as editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, head of television news and director of the brilliant 2012 Olympic coverage. But is the BBC a treasured British institution, admired the world over, or a lumbering out-of-control behemoth without a central brain? In a sense, Mosey has already found the answer. Now the Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, he decided – as his book title implies – that his best course of action was to get out. He left without a crock of gold as a pay-off, but well before the posse arrived. Far too many of his trusted colleagues became – however innocent – wound up in the bitter fights within the corporate sprawl of the BBC, the BBC Trust and the news media after the Jimmy Savile revelations. Just after the success of the Olympics coverage, Mosey found himself in the thick of it. The meetings, conference calls and emails went on relentlessly. The BBC can sail along for months providing excellent news and current affairs, then hit a really distasteful event – and nothing could have been more distasteful than the stories about Savile – then it suddenly becomes the focus of blame. “The BBC was in danger of eating itself alive,” Mosey recalls. The BBC is so top-heavy with superfluous layers of management that it never fails to turn a bit of a rumpus into a full-blown crisis. The Hutton Inquiry fiasco that resulted in Greg Dyke’s removal as director-general began in 2003 as a simple failure to acknowledge lapses in the reporting of the death of Dr David Kelly. This enabled Alastair Campbell to occupy the moral high ground and so do serious damage to the corporation. More recently, something as simple as dealing with a punch thrown by Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson at his producer triggered emergency meetings almost on a par with the Whitehall Cobra sessions that follow a terrorist attack. Mosey is clearly now a much happier man in the academe at Cambridge. This article first appeared in the latest edition of the Catholic Herald magazine (07/8/15). Take up our special subscription offer – 12 issues currently available for just £12!