Nicked from the MediaGuardian website:
BBC staffer makes ‘Maguire’ exit
Jason Deans, broadcasting editor
Friday October 28, 2005
A BBC employee who left the corporation after he was discovered playing an “inappropriate” email game about his work colleagues signed off with a “Jerry Maguire-style” email to his bosses.
The BBC factual employee left after the emailed “shag, marry, or over a cliff”-style game was discovered by management. Following a disciplinary investigation other staff also received verbal warnings about the incident and the use of internal emails.
The researcher emailed his BBC bosses and the director general, Mark Thompson, to tell them television is “facile” and “full of silly programmes that mean nothing”.
The farewell email also criticised colleagues for having a “derogatory, condescending BBC-knows-all attitude” towards ordinary people who feature in their shows.
In his email, the researcher said TV was full of people who “really do get off on drinking Starbucks, talk about ‘being stressed’ and are happy to call sitting around a brightly coloured room work”.
Entitled, “A Jerry Maguire type of email”, the email also bemoaned the lack of mental stimulation and risk-taking in TV.
“I have had enough of television and not that it matters in this small and irrelevant way of me saying I’m off, but I find it all so facile,” he wrote.
“It costs around £10,000 to make around two minutes of television, which is verging on the vulgar itself, so how is it really that stressful? It really is not that big a deal.
“TV, it seems, is made up of people that really do get off on drinking Starbucks, talk about ‘being stressed’ and are happy to call sitting around a brightly coloured room work.
“We try to represent real life on screen everyday, but work on any production and just listen to the comments about the people we work with. Not in the building but the contributors that make up the content of our programmes. It is a derogatory, condescending BBC-knows-best-attitude that is 50 years out of date.
“Television by default is not real. It is a stage. A small part of our scheduling is real but it is, in reality made up of silly programmes that mean nothing. What happened to mental stimulation? What happened to taking a risk?”
That made me snigger. You have to be a certain kind of person to work for the BBC (or any large corporation or publisher for that matter). When I had a career, I had two interviews for different jobs at the BBC. The first was for a sub-editor on one of the BBC magazines and the preliminary interview involved a long and frightfully dull subbing test lasting over an hour and a half. As I finished my test, someone entered the room who appeared to be something big at the department. They immediately spotted one of the candidates in the room and said something like:
“Hello, Rupert! So glad you decided to apply for the position.”
At that point, I should have just tore up my test and walked out because it was obvious that Rupert was well known and it may have been an internal promotion dressed up as a “proper” interview. Or it might just have been that I was monumentally shit at being a sub and so I never got called back?
My second interview was a much more postive thing. The job was one that I really wanted, working as an editor/developer of the BBC’s interactive TV services. The interview went really well, I wasn’t nervous or fluffed anything up and at one point I thought the job was mine. In fact, I know the job was mine because they started talking money. The lady interviewing me suddenly became very apologetic and explained that to due to budget cuts the actual salary was very low. Again, she reiterated how important the job was and how I was right for it and how the rewards would outweigh the low salary. Unfortunately, I would have had to have taken a pay cut of several thousand pounds to accept the job and, I think you’ll agree, I’d have needed a labotomy to do so. At this time, we were looking to buy a property and we needed cash and I was imaging going home and telling the Missus that I had just taken a massive paycut to work for the BBC. She would have hit me around the head with a blunt object until my senses returned.
So after a few moments of consideration (and the thought of poverty) I retracted my application and effectively rejected the BBC. After that, I gave up ever getting a job at Auntie Beeb. Who knows? If I had taken the job, I might be one of those totally ineffective wankers pissing your licence fee up the wall!
