Alasdair Milne
Alasdair Milne was Director-General of the BBC from July 1982 until a forced resignation, under intense pressure from the Thatcher government and a Board of BBC Governors dominated by Conservatives, in January 1987. He took over at a difficult time, following the Falklands War when the government had criticised the BBC for referring to British forces as "they", "the British forces," etc rather than "we" and "us", and during his era a number of BBC programmes caused outrage among Conservatives, not least the Panorama documentary "Maggie's Militant Tendency", broadcast in January 1984, which suggested that a number of Conservative MPs had had connections with far-Right groups (drawing analogies in its title with the far-Left group within the Labour Party causing great worries for Neil Kinnock at the time). In a situation which now seems to have prefigured the Hutton Inquiry, the BBC's reporting was criticised in a court case brought against the Corporation by Neil Hamilton, one of the MPs named in the documentary, who would later be publicly disgraced and lose his seat (ironically) to the independent candidate Martin Bell, himself a former BBC reporter.
In August 1985, when the BBC caved in to government pressure and banned a "Real Lives" documentary interviewing the then IRA leader (and later Sinn Fein politician), Martin McGuinness (an amended version was shown later that year), the National Union of Journalists called a one-day strike in support of the principle of BBC independence from government control. Later that month, the left-leaning Observer newspaper revealed the full extent of MI5 vetting of BBC employees, which even earlier that year Milne had been denying (something he later regretted). It was subsequently agreed that MI5 influence should be reduced, which could not have pleased many Conservatives. Nor could the highly-praised 1985 series "Edge of Darkness" have pleased those of a Conservative bent who supported nuclear power and the presence of the US military in the UK. A Panorama programme in 1986 about the US bombing of Libya caused a storm of accusations from the Right, most vociferously from Norman Tebbit, that the BBC had become inherently anti-American.
The Thatcher government had been deliberately appointing Conservatives to the BBC Board of Governors in an attempt to undermine Milne's influence, but Stuart Young (brother of a Conservative Tory cabinet minister), appointed chairman in 1983, had "gone native" and become a defender of the BBC's independence. After his sudden death in 1986, the government appointed Marmaduke Hussey, a former chairman of Times Newspapers before the company's sale to Rupert Murdoch in 1981, as chairman, with the specific agenda of "get Milne". In September 1986, as Hussey took over, there was outrage in the Right-wing press after BBC1 controller Michael Grade passed a press release claiming that Alan Bleasdale's series "The Monocled Mutineer" was historically accurate - in reality it was an account of the First World War seen from a distinctly Left-leaning perspective.
Simultaneously, the first series of "Casualty" was viewed by many Conservatives as Left-Wing propaganda in favour of the NHS, and even the recovery in BBC1's ratings after a low point in 1983-84 did not please the government; conversely Thatcher would have preferred the BBC to become less and less popular because she generally believed the BBC should become as removed from mainstream, populist broadcasting as PBS and NPR were in America, so as to clear the ground for the planned deregulation of commercial TV in the UK. Besides, the BBC's top-rating series, "EastEnders", was also viewed by many Conservatives as immoral, especially when it introduced the first gay character in a British soap.
Pressure on the BBC increased still further after Michael Lush was killed while attempting a stunt for Noel Edmonds' "Late Late Breakfast Show", which revealed inadequate safety procedures, and in late 1986 Dennis Potter's series "The Singing Detective" caused moral outrage on the Right. The opportunity to destroy Milne came in early 1987 after police had raided the headquarters of BBC Scotland in Glasgow, removing research material for a programme in the "Secret Society" series, presented by the Left-wing journalist Duncan Campbell, concerning the secret Zircon reconnaissance satellite. This was condemned strongly by Douglas Hurd, who was emerging as one of the less Thatcherite and more pro-BBC members of the government, but Milne was still effectively sacked (the idea that he resigned was always more spin than anything else).
Most of the "Secret Society" series was eventually transmitted, although an episode concerning Cabinet secrecy in government was banned, and when Channel 4 wanted to show it in 1991 as part of their "Banned" season they were turned down, and had to reconstruct the programme themselves. Alasdair Milne was replaced as Director-General by Michael Checkland, who along with his deputy (and eventual successor) John Birt, set about making the BBC conspicuously less radical and more amenable to the Conservatives, not least in the form of Birt's market-driven reforms of the Corporation's internal structure during the 1990s.
See also