DG: The Memoirs of a British Broadcaster [antikvár]

Prelude I don't remember ever being as nervous as I was on the morning of 10th December, 1981. This was the day of the appointment board for the job of Director General. Although I had been interviewed five years earlier when Ian Trethowan was appointed, that had been more of a canter round the course than a serious race. Ian had clearly been groomed for the top. But, this time, for me it was real. As Managing Director of BBC Television and Deputy Director General, I was assumed to be the front-runner, but front-runners often fall. I knew that if I fell, I could not stay in the BBC. The job had been advertised outside, as it had when Ian got it. I knew what the competition was. The BBC applicants - Bill Cotton, Aubrey Singer, Dick Francis - I had personally urged to have a go. I was aware of the outsiders - Tony Smith, now Director of the British Film Institute and a man from the Cambridge University Press - because I happened to have seen a list in large type poorly concealed in George Howard's outer office a couple of days earlier. I was due on first at 9.15 a.m. I have a bad habit of being too early for things, a trait I think I inherited from my grandfather who always had us down at the Caledonian Station in Edinburgh at least an hour and a half before our holiday train was due to leave. This morning, I was at Broadcasting House at 8.30 a.m. and bumped into George Howard, the Chairman, on the front doorstep. Both of us were a touch embarrassed. We bid each other good morning and went our separate ways. I had been told to present myself at his office at 9.10 a.m. but I could not possibly sit there for forty minutes like a schoolboy waiting for a dressing-down from the headmaster. Where to lurk in the meantime? All potentially friendly offices were firmly locked. I settled, feeling hunted, for the lavatory on the second floor where I paced up and down until discovered by a friendly face and forced to flee. Somehow, I filled in the intervening time. Once in the Board Room, with all Governors present, the interview followed a pattern I did not expect. George, the soul of affability, invited me to sit next to him, where the Director General normally sits, and chatted away amiably to me for twenty minutes or so, while the other Governors 1