Sir John Tusa Meet the Author

crime, it's reported the letter

was addressed to Prince Harry

and Meghan Markle.

Now its time for Meet the Author.

Now it's time for Meet the Author.

This week on Meet the Author,

Jim Naughtie talks with the arts

administrator, journalist and author

John Tusa about his new book

Making A Noise - Getting it Right,

Getting it Wrong, In Life,

the Arts and Broadcasting.

John Tusa has been broadcast,

BBC executive, a tsar in

performance and in academia,

but now he's brought it all together

in a memoir called Making A Noise.

From his own experience,

getting it right

and getting it wrong, as he puts it.

And from the people

he has worked with.

It's more than a personal portrait,

it's a picture, drawn from

an intriguing angle of what kind

of country we live in today.

Welcome.

It is a story of modern Britain,

isn't it, seen through some of our

institutions in the arts?

And of course, here in the BBC.

Yes, I think it is,

and I think that what

it is is trying to understand

what makes major organisations work.

This tussle over the

last 20, 30 years as

to how efficient

organisations have to be.

The answer is, yes, of course,

everybody has learned about

how to run an organisation properly,

but the interesting question...

And I hope it comes out in the book.

..is how do you combine being

efficient with being true to what

the organisation is about?

The values.

And we always believed,

and I think the BBC used to, it

certainly did, the World Service

did, that values and efficiency can

go hand in hand and I think

that organisations...

And I'm not talking

about the BBC now.

..but organisations which lose

touch with their values

do get stuck.

And I think this is a continuing

tussle in Britain today.

Let's just take your story

through to remind people.

You were a journalist for the BBC

for a very long time, and

you were there particularly

on the screen, as many people will

remember, at the very beginning

of Newsnight, which was a

difficult birth, which you described

in great detail there.

And then of course you got

the job you really

wanted and didn't expect to get,

which was running BBC World Service.

Now, where do you think it sits

in the panoply of, you know,

broadcasting in the modern era?

Well, there is absolutely

no question that the

trust that audiences had for the BBC

World Service was higher than for

anybody else, and the voice of

America and all that would tend to

get larger audiences

and that was probably

because they were more

propagandistic, and people

liked that.

That was fine, but audiences knew

what they were doing.

But the trust level

of the BBC World Service

was greater than for any other

broadcaster, and when communism

fell, almost all the world's

broadcasters, certainly the ones in

the Communist block, just collapsed.

And even the Voice of America and

Liberty and Radio Free Europe lost

their purpose because there was no

longer a propaganda war to fight.

But BBC World Service continued,

because what we always

said was, "We are giving information

to audiences," and that was

true then and I think

it is true now.

There's an interesting other side

of the coin that you pointed in

your story that when Government

ministers said, "Well, why can't all

the BBC be like the World Service?"

The source code for the fact that

they didn't like the BBC, because it

was saying things about Government

that they didn't approve of.

This was mortifying,

and also a lot of

Government ministers, BBC governors,

when they were giving the board of

management at the BBC

a particularly hard

time, and then saying,

"But of

course, the World Service

is marvellous," and I hated that.

The World Service

being held up as some

sort of goody-goody bit of the BBC

when frankly a lot of the governors

were attacking the BBC quite,

quite unfairly and unreasonably.

Well, this is something...

You look into this in

excruciating detail, but

there are passages in the book where

you talk about the extent which

there was in your view

a great lack of affection,

almost hatred in some

cases, for the institution

which they were supposed

to be guardians of as

governors of the BBC.

Time and again, governors

of the nonexecutive

body would say things like, "Well,

of course the BBC won't exist in six

or seven years' time."

Now, as and informed

comment or a judgment, you

say, "Well, maybe yes, maybe no."

It has been proven very, very wrong.

They would say that.

But then the other times,

when the remarks they

would make really indicated

they were completely out of sympathy

with what the BBC stood for.

And to have people in

the nonexecutive body, the

Board of Governors,

who really disliked

what the BBC stood for,

and

this is one of the reasons why

the relationships between the Board

of Governors and the executive board

fell apart in those years, 1992,

1993 under the chairman.

You know, you've got

to respect an organisation

if you are responsible for it.

Your subsequent career, of course,

took you into the arts.

You ran the Barbican Centre.

You had a great

commitment to the arts.

You then worked in

academia in the same

university of the arts.

When you moved from

the BBC with all its

difficulties and always bureaucratic

problems, trying to deal with

artists and artist management, and

produce a programme that he plays

like the Barbican with all its

different aspects, what was the

difference?

I always thought there was a lot

in common, because both

artists in their totality...

A lot of hysterical people.

And journalists in their totality.

We all do things

which they believe in.

They are on the whole not

very well paid, and they

are acutely aware of the need

to relate to the audience, to the

public.

So from that point of view,

I felt completely at home with

artists as with journalists.

Putting together the

artistic programme was

something that I didn't do.

I tried to create

the atmosphere within

which an organisation could exist,

and then the artistic field under

Graham Sheffield did that,

but you did need both.

Your own story is a fascinating one.

Born in Czechoslovakia.

Although you save one

of your regrets in the book is

that you never learned

to speak Czech.

You might have been delivered

by Tom Stoppard's father.

You may have been.

Yes.

There were two doctors

on duty that night and one

of them was his father.

That's right.

Did you find when you came

and of course were educated wholly

in this country and so on that

you still had the perspective of an

outsider simply by

the accident of birth?

I think I always have done.

I mean, I am British.

I'm not English.

I can't be English.

I think British intellect

is a wonderful, inclusive

identity.

Part of that Britishness,

which I think many people will feel,

is the ability to use your origin -

in my case, Czechoslovakia -

as a way of looking

at life in a slightly,

slightly different way.

And, you know, bits of Czechness

crop up, appear here and there.

I feel a huge identity with,

for example, the great national

hero, the good soldier,

Svejk.

Svejk survives dictatorship

and autocracy by

pretending to be an idiot,

and saying, "I am an idiot."

And there's something

about that defensive

strategy which I find

very, very attractive.

You say you're British,

do you feel European?

I feel intensely European.

One of the reasons that I'm now

applying for my Czech

passport, which of course I never

have, but I never abandoned Czech

citizenship, Is that

I do not want to be cut

out from Europe if,

I

would say, the worst

comes to the worst,

and Britain leaves the EU.

I am intensely European.

I travel there a great deal.

European culture

in all its aspects...

And it's not just my culture.

It's Britain's culture,

for heaven's sake.

You know, Britain is part of Europe.

And I don't want to be cut off

from that in any way at all.

It's a glory and a privilege.

And yet, the picture

of the country that

you portray here is,

for all its difficulties,

for example here at the BBC

or in funding for the arts,

which you are intensely passionate

about, it's nonetheless a rich,

diverse and culturally alive place,

isn't it, which you continue to

celebrate?

You are not someone

who is depressed.

No, I refuse to be depressed.

And I don't think...

I think there are

many reasons for not

being depressed, and the sheer

intense variety of the culture of

this country.

The diversity of this country.

I mean, the way that London has just

accommodated people,

nations, whole wodges

of other nations'

and London is the rich.

You know, in history,

all the evidence is that city

nations which take in outsiders,

strangers, they

are the ones that flourish.

They flourish

economically, creatively

and intellectually.

There is a lesson there for us.

John Tusa, author of

Making A Noise, thank you

very much.

Thank you, Jim.