Making A Noise: Getting
It Right, Getting It
Wrong in Life, the Arts
and Broadcasting
John Tusa
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25
review by Brian Morton
John TUSA was born “in
a planned town, an ideological town, an authoritarian town,
a town with but a single purpose and activity … mighty strange, fascinating and in the end constricting”.
He went on to make his name and
a very substantial career in a town that was none of these things, except possibly fascinating. This was the result, perhaps, of having other genes and backgrounds to draw on.
Tusa was born in Zlin, in what was then Czechoslovakia, a town devoted almost entirely to making shoes for the Bata company. Its collectivist mentality was offset by his mother’s very different cultural heritage; also, perhaps, from growing up near the battlefield of Austerlitz (Tusa’s own Waterloo was to come) and near Bystrice pod Hostynem where, in 1241, the Virgin Mary put the Tartars to smoking flight.
Throughout his own life, Tusa has never missed a chance to face down the vandal hordes.
He arrived in London thanks to his father’s posting to a Bata factory in Essex, and thus missed the raising of
the Iron Curtain. London proved to be sympathetically unplanned, non- or
anti-ideological, more libertarian than not, a city with a bewildering diversity of things to do, and Tusa thrived there, joining the BBC in 1960 as a trainee with External Services at Bush House, but also wearing out shoe leather by pacing restlessly through the British media at their time of maximum growth.
Between 1986 and 1992 he was managing director of what evolved under his aegis into the World Service.
His Waterloo came after that, a miserable sojourn as President of Wolfson College in Cambridge, followed by a happier tenure as managing director of the Barbican Centre.
Under his directorship, the controversial and often unloved arts complex consolidated its place as one
of London’s most vital (in both senses) cultural assets and also one of its most confidently cosmopolitan.
This is to hurry the story along somewhat, for Tusa is probably still best known to the British public as a main presenter – with Peter Snow – of Newsnight, back in the days when the programme specialised in proper line-and-length fastball interviewing rather than the grouchy egotism and narrow political hinterland of Jeremy Paxman.
Interestingly, Paxman is absent from both text and index; Tusa’s silences are often as eloquent as his sometimes eye-watering summations of former colleagues and contemporaries.
He made his own mark on the new format with a commentary on the events of the day; presenter-written and prepared under the pressure of events, ~it became known as a “Tusorial”.
Meantime, he, Snow and director/editor George Carey assembled a band of cross-grained but highly creative journalists to shape a programme that was, in Tusa’s words, a salon des refuses.
Robert Harris, David Sells, Ian Smith and David Lomax declined to follow either the backward-looking values of the corporation or its addiction to infighting. It was the broadcasting equivalent of a “band of brothers”.
Perhaps the other representative figure among them was Vincent Hanna, whose by-election coverage is described by
Tusa as “intense, egotistical … part expose, part cabaret, part human comedy sculpted by a stiletto”.
Sadly, after 1986 it was egotism that prevailed unchecked. A later editor,
the brilliant Tim Gardam described the BBC as “usually a horrible, ungenerous, ego-filled place where people got rewarded for behaving badly” (he didn’t mention Paxman either), against which the early Newsnight stood out as witty, alert, marked by “ironic dispassion
at the heart of our impartiality”, not
a programme devoted to “idols in
the studio”.
Tusa’s five-plus years there stand out as a kind of Golden Age. If the Falkland War was
a gift to Margaret Thatcher, it was Christmas and birthday in one to Newsnight, whose coverage of the conflict – brilliantly counterpointing MoD spokesman Ian McDonald’s dictation-speed bulletins – was
both accurate, objective and deeply subversive.
Needless to say, the MoD hated it, and hated Tusa, too. His Czech birthplace was darkly adduced as proof of that notorious Thatcher-era conviction that the BBC was run by reds and pinkos. Tusa, of course, had some direct family experience of what life under a totalitarian regime might be like.
He emerges here not so much as apolitical, but with a profound distrust of ideology masking self-interest, or personal grandstanding masking an axe to grind. In reality, the BBC was being run by self-serving mandarins who wilfully forgot a cardinal principle of management, which is that you cannot reform an organisation – and no one doubts the BBC needed reform – if you do not love and respect it.
Tusa’s narrative of John Birt’s appointment as director-general revives memories of an act of cultural vandalism that makes the Taliban look like the National Trust. This isn’t always
a gentle book.
Tusa is unflinching, but somehow also generous even to those who slighted him and dismissed him as a Johnny Foreigner with ideas above his station.
He has written previously about
many of the core issues discussed here, notably in Conversations With The World and Engaged With The Arts, but the autobiographical focus puts the
story in a wider and more engaging context. Making A Noise isn’t just an extended award-ceremony acceptance speech or opportunity to namedrop; it’s a real contribution to British cultural
history.
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