BBC Axes Birt's "Producer Choice" Internal Market

Thirteen years after Director-General John Birt brought the internal market system into the BBC, calling it Producer Choice, it looks as though Mark Thompson the present DG has called time on it, according to reports in Ariel, the BBC in-house journal.

The words "Producer Choice" were supposed to offer the programme makers freedom to make creative choices about their programmes, while teaching them to true costs of the programmes they were making, by a system of charging back for central services that the BBC used to provide at no cost. The idea was to channel producers to find cheaper ways to make their programmes, freeing up millions of pounds that could be ploughed back into programmes.

   MUSIC CHARGES

Music that was previously provided free by the BBC Gramaphone Library now came with a charge and it wasn't cheap. Which is why all the music shops in Oxford Street were busy with BBC researchers exercising their programme producer's choice buying far cheaper commercial CDs.

At the prestigious Radio 4 daytime current affairs programmes The World at One and PM, staff were barred from using any material from the BBC's gramophone library because the cost was too high. "The greatest sound archive in the world is effectively closed to us," said a World at One reporter.

     CUMBERSOME SYSTEM

The cumbersome internal market system came under attack from luminaries like Sir David Attenborough, Mark Tully, and former BBC entertainment chief Paul Jackson. Now at ITV,  Jackson memorably described Producer Choice a decade ago as an "abysmal act of vandalism". The very year that it was introduced - 1993 - 5,000 BBC staff lost their jobs.

If an actor was unsure about the exact pronounciation of a word in the script, no-one would consult the Pronounciation Department because it was held to be too expensive. Best guesses usually prevailed.

    DYKE DITCHED GRAMS CHARGE

The Birt legacy has been slowly dismantled by his successors, Greg Dyke and now, Mark Thompson. The "pay as you go" library went in Dyke's time, Thompson is demolishing the rest.

Plain simple fact-checking was also prohibitively expensive at charges exceeding £150 a pop. Researchers now rang up bookshops rather than using the expensive in-house library,  while radio producers found it was cheaper to book a hall in London's West End rather than hire a radio theatre in Broadcasting House.

Defenders of the Producer Choice system pointed out that with the newly imposed quota system for independent production, a way had to be found to discover precisely how much each programme cost.

For many BBC staff though, with producer choice whatever the cost, it was much too high a price to pay.