DATA taken from Independent Schools Council’s 2023 census records 554,316 pupils currently attending private schools in the UK, around 5.9 per cent of all school attendees in the country.

Privately educated BBC staff now occupy at least a third of Auntie’s highest-paid posts, including ex-Tory council candidate director-general Tim Davie and chief content officer Charlotte Moore.

Davie attended Croydon’s elite Whitgift School, while Moore boarded at Grade II listed Wycombe Abbey, an independent girls’ boarding school in Buckinghamshire.

The argument from the BBC board presumably being they recruit only the best and it’s simply pure chance the pair were privately educated. But neither exactly represent broadcasting excellence, especially among more than a few colleagues.

New face, same suit

Ex-Pepsi salesman Davie has demonstrated a remarkable ability to put his foot in it since he became DG in 2020, his lack of any editorial experience a glaring omission in his resumé. Rob Burley, former head of the corporation’s live political coverage, commented last year that “Tim Davie doesn’t really understand journalism.”

Jimmy Savile-investigating Panorama journalists the late Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones were distinctly unimpressed when they met Davie during his stint as acting DG in 2012.

Jones said: “We were both half-expecting that he might say: ‘We’ve got new hands on the tiller, it’s all going to change. Congratulations for going after that really important story. And — I’m sorry.’ But we got the opposite of that. It was new face, same suit.”

Moore also has her detractors, relating to caving to  the government over Emily Maitlis’s Dominic Cummings Newsnight monologue, screwing up BBC Classical Music (the BBC Singers fiasco), a certain brusqueness in her personal style and reliance on drab management speak.

The recent Edinburgh TV Festival highlighted the disparity of those at the very top of British TV management in general, and a heavy skew towards the privately educated.

Should, or could, there be a limit on the disproportionate representation of executives given a privileged leg up by virtue of their schooling? Say, keeping them to around 10 per cent of the top roles paying £100,000-plus — currently numbering approximately 445 people? 

Extremely unlikely; but maybe if there is a tie-in interview assessments between candidates for these senior roles, perhaps the bias should be in favour of the state-school educated. Again, highly unlikely, but something should really be done.

Last June, popular former BBC2 controller Kim Shillinglaw, who many felt should have been promoted to the position Charlotte Moore now occupies, posted on Linkedin: “I still remember the BBC HR-Apparatchik who shockingly told me (when starting as Controller of BBC2) that I was one of only TWO people in the corporation’s 50 most senior leaders who had been state educated. Two. And the other one went to a grammar school. Hopefully things have gotten better at the Beeb, but don’t underestimate how much work there is still to do in even the most basic kinds of wider representation of the country.”

A decade ago Jane Martinson reported in The Guardian: “If you want to make it big in the British media it pays to go to a fee-paying school, an analysis of the MediaGuardian 100 shows. Some 57 per cent of this year’s top 100 influential people in the media went to fee-paying schools, but this figure belies regional differences. Almost TWICE as many of the Brits in the top 100 went to a fee-paying school as went to a state school — 46 of the 72.” 

Little has changed since then — witness the fact that Bafta has only just started including class within its diversity standards.

“Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them, then that education has been wasted,” – Alan Bennett.

It’s not just the BBC;  the TriForce Creative Network joined Channel 4’s emerging indie fund in 2022 — founder Fraser Ayres commented on Channel 4’s lack of social inclusion: “We were dealing with the most awful, privileged commissioners, Channel 4 have completely moved away from the thing that would actually save them.” 

Also at the Festival, financial journalist/broadcaster Martin Lewis, Carol Vorderman and MacTaggart lecturer, playwright/screenwriter James Graham all put the boot into British television’s privileged elite, particularly at the BBC, which we of course fund, regardless of income.

After all the Edinburgh blather from the likes of C4’s Ian Katz (Hampstead’s University College School) and Jeremy Clarkson acolyte/producer Andy Willam (Repton School in Derbyshire), the need for an alternative voice to these entitled panjandrums has rarely been greater.

Although Selwyn College, Cambridge English graduate DG Tim Davie may use a matey “mockney accent” in public, wouldn’t it be a pleasant surprise to hear the common-sense tones of someone who doesn’t resort to such an apparent affectation?

After all, Mick Lynch doesn’t have a problem in getting his point across, does he?

Perhaps a teachable moment for the likes of Boris Johnson, who when PM, openly mocked the accent of Sky News’ Beth Rigby.