Why is this BBC man still uncut?
OrchestrasFour months ago, the BBC created a new post of Head of Orchestras and Choirs.
It was filled by Simon Webb, a sometime player in the London Philharmonic, latterly manager of the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester (where the music director left abruptly last summer).
Webb started work in January.
Yesterday, the BBC abolished the choir in his title and called for 20 redundancies in the orchestras.
But there is no suggestion that Webb should take a pay cut.
On the contrary, he has been credited by the BBC for devising the strategy by which his own responsibilities have been shrunk.
And there is more here than will ever meet the (private) eye.
Webb was detailed to take the flak for the cuts because the BBC’s departing head of classical music Alan Davey is too wimpish to face the heat. It was also necessary to get the business out of the way so that the new head of music, Sam Jackson, is not baptised in a bloodbath.
So big bold Webb stepped up and did the deed and the BBC is duly thankful. He might even get a bonus.
He was running the BBC Philharmonic before this, wasn’t he? Any word on how that went? Hadn’t they just signed a brilliant new chief conductor? How’s that going?
I am a musician in the CBSO where we had the misfortune to have Simon Webb as our orchestral manager for several years. I genuinely believe he gets off on wielding the knife, seeing other musicians suffer while claiming it’s all because of funding and there’s nothing that can be done. Here he formed an unholy salary slashing alliance with the then finance director who was also horrendous, not at all sympathetic to music or the needs of musicians but at least fundamentally honest. Simon on the other hand none of us trusted more than an inch. He pretends to be kind, sympathetic and reasonable but the reality is he’s the most slippery two faced member of management I’ve ever experienced. And that’s saying something. We all feel so bad for BBC colleagues just now.
As a CBSO player myself I wish to disassociate myself with these comments. This person does not speak for all of us.
Fair enough. However, they certainly do speak for a large number of people, in Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere, who have had the misfortune to be managed by Mr Webb.
‘Just the sort of manager the BBC seems to need right now. Pay them enough and they’ll take the heat for every philistine, penny-pinching decision that affects the front line and audience experience, just so the right boxes can be ticked. After all, why pay £X hundred thousand pounds to groups of talented musicians helping to fulfil the Reithian promise, when a fraction can be shaved off and the balance pocketed by said managers.
As a long standing supporter of the CBSO, I completely agree. Webb has now apparently gone stark raving bonkers.
Isn’t there an African saying that goes
“The sheep spend their entire life fearing the wolf….only to be eaten by the shepherd”?
Or is it in the bible?
You couldn’t make it up. You really couldn’t. The BBC seems to have a death-wish.
With the BBC Chairman and DG both avowed supporters of the party currently in power, it’s not the BBC per se that has the death wish; just look a little higher and in the direction of 4 Matthew Parker Street, Westminster.
But if you are part of an organisation 100 years old and dedicated to so much excellence in so many fields, wouldn’t you expect these pitiful top heads to stand up and speak up for maintaining that tradition? Silence is what we get from Davie and Sharpe et al.
It was pretty obvious that when the BBC created the new ‘Head of Orchestras’ senior position that something like this was in the offing.
The sad truth is that the BBC has become like any arms-length institution funded by the tax payer (Albeit through the licence fee).
It has adopted a private sector corporate ethos that looks through a prism of making as much money as possible whilst reducing overheads.
Workforce salaries are always the largest single overhead of any corporation, and modern corporate orthodoxy dictates that these must be reduced by hook or by crook. Skills and resources can be outsourced, buildings, resources and equipment leased, but not owned-all in the interest of minimising costs against income in the business equation.
The BBC has totally lost sight of its public service ethos and has in its senior levels become a corporate monster that incorporates the worst of capitalist brutality and the Byzantine insidiousness of the Westminster civil service.
It’s board and senior management care not one jot about what the BBC’s unique role in British society is and even less about the skilled and dedicated individuals who work for it.
They are part of that cadre in our society who’s interest lies solely in shinning as far up the ‘greasy pole’ as they can; making a packet, perhaps acquiring a gong or two and then buggering off into the sunset (or a vastly lucrative consultancy) as quickly as possible.
Service, leadership & loyalty to anyone (least of all their staff!) is not in their remit. They sneer at such quaint notions as the refuge of the stupid, the weak and the naive.
The BBC have found just the hatchet man they needed for such a role: A former musician an unconsciously smooth and corporately aware orchestra manager and the consummate exponent of shinning up that aforementioned pole. A shrewd politician: As it was said by Lloyd George’s grandson about such types:
“They are like monkeys: the higher they climb the tree the more revolting are the parts they expose”
This is monstrous. It is vandalism and I hope that the musicians and singers of this country take to the streets to stop it- Because once these ensembles are damaged, reduced and gone; that will be that. They will not return and they will never be recreated-and we the people of this country will be the poorer for it.
The likes of Mr Webb and those who promoted him will however glide effortlessly upwards to gilded pensions and the knowledge that their comfortable dotage will have been funded by their comprehensive shafting of the very institutions they were employed to serve-on our behalf….
Norman, while I revile the BBC suits and mourn the fate of the Singers as much as you, “the BBC abolished the choir in his title” disrespects two groups of “unpaid professionals”, the BBC Symphony Chorus and the BBC National Chorus of Wales; I do know it’s not about them, but I also know that members are horrified at what has been announced.
For our further-flung friends, I must explain that normally in the UK we would refer to these groups as amateurs, but in the USA for example the analogous term is “volunteer”, hence my “unpaid”, but performing at a standard that many professional groups would struggle to match – not that there are many that regularly field upwards of 100 as these do. Fortunately, as they are unpaid, there are no pension rights and any pittance of an honorarium that members were paid was abolished long ago in return for some unhonoured quids-pro-quo, so abolishing the SC and the NCW would mean little meaningful savings.
Full disclosure: I used to sing with the BBCSC (I now sing with another large London chorus) and felt immensely privileged to share the stage with the BBC Singers and Symphony Orchestra.
What the suits have now done to these and to the PO and CO is criminal.
BBC music managers would not survive in the cut throat commercial world of the music industry, where the musicians are the shop front of the business, not the managers. The small management teams of independent orchestras and other arts organisations sell their product based on the excellence of their product, not on the ability of managers to cut costs on the very product they are trying to sell to the public. The BBC audience will continue to decline and the vision of Lord Reith of music for all will disappear. The BBC is a huge monolith, top heavy in management and out of touch with its viewers and listeners.
I remember Simon Webb from Cambridge: always a charmer, eager to please.
Please all us how to contact Webb, and how best to protest at his smug defence of his appalling cuts. How much does the BBC waste on the Eurovision song Contest which could have supported the BBC singers?