Adrian Van Klaveren, the new controller of BBC Radio Five Live, seems far from confident that his staff are signed up to their controversial move from urbane west London to urban Salford, in the northwest of England.
Interviewed in the Guardian, he was asked whether the move, scheduled to start in the next 18 months, would be a success or whether perhaps his staff would be stick-in-the-muds.
“Not everybody’s going to want to come,” says the new controller. “We have got to be realistic, that won’t be the case. But I think enough will want to come for us to be able to make a success of it.” Which isn’t what you would call an overwhelming endorsement of the policy.
Mr Van Klaveren goes on: “I think the question is not a numbers game. As long as you can get that absolute core of the people fundamental to the station’s success, then you have got a position where you build from and make a success of it.”
I wonder how big an absolute core is? Doesn’t sound like a majority, does it? But should he even be confident of bringing along that “absolute core”? For instance, he has said that he will not contemplate allowing presenters of the station’s main daytime shows to work from London studios.
So all the main voices will be expected to trek northwards. People such as Nicky Campbell, Victoria Derbyshire, Simon Mayo and Peter Allen.
It seems to me that senior managers at 5 Live have previously underestimated the depth of antagonism to this idea at producer level. The reality is that supporting a family in west London on a BBC producer’s salary is not child’s play, so most have working spouses and in many cases they will be the main breadwinner. There are dozens of men and women who are effectively being asked to choose between continuing in their job or asking their partners to leave their own careers and relocate 150 miles northwards.
Mr Van Klaveren’s words suggest that he now realises this to be the case and is repositioning the move so that as long as they manage to get the “names” to move, it can be portrayed as a success. But as hostages to fortune go, that is a big one.
Having abandoned the possibility of broadcasting some daytime shows from London, is he not effectively handing the definition of success for this enormous project over to a fairly few well-known presenters? It’s one thing, as former 5 Live executives have done, to hint that BBC staff who won’t move north are elitist Luddites – Kersal Moor in Salford was the rallying point for 30,000 British Army troops who put down the Lancashire Luddite rebellion in 1812 – but to focus on a small hub of opposition is a rather high-risk strategy.
I don’t know how strong trade unionism is among radio presenters, but it wouldn’t take a movement on the scale of the Luddites to throw a spanner in the works.