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- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday July 12 2000 01.53 BST
What BBC governors are there to do has not always been clear, beyond making life hell from time to time for incumbent directors-general. The first, John Reith, fought with Ethel Snowden, wife of the turncoat Labour politician, like dog with cat. Charles Hill was drafted in as chairman by Harold Wilson to bring Hugh Carleton Greene's flamboyant Auntie to heel. In the dismissal of Alasdair Milne and the early retirement of Michael Checkland, the governors were ciphers. Sir Christopher Bland moves seamlessly from certifying the house Birt built to sanctioning its demolition by his successor, Greg Dyke - which makes you wonder whether governors have lately ever checked or balanced. Their selection, based on fancy algorithms to do with gender, race and territory, has not always thrown up first-rate advocates of programmes that are original, necessary, different and public-spirited.
Now the culture secretary Chris Smith is about to redraft the regulatory apparatus for what is still, quaintly, called broadcasting. When material can be transmitted from a host of "platforms", including new-generation mobile phones, the overlapping remits of the radio and television and broadcasting standards commissions and the Office of Telecommunications certainly need reworking. But Mr Smith as he plots reform should bear two points in mind. The governors may seem anomalous in the wider scheme of early 21st-century transmissions technology but are no more peculiar than the BBC itself.
They are the public's trustees, ultimate carriers of the "gene" of Reithian public service. Appointments are in Mr Smith's gift. The board is as good or bad today as his predecessors made it. If he wants a better performance, he must choose its members more diligently than they did. Only then can the board sustain on behalf of autonomous licence-funded broadcasting that wonderful, anachronistic ideal for which the BBC still stands.
