Will the last middle-aged presenter to leave the bbc please turn out the lights? | thearticle

Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey are leaving _Woman’s Hour_, Sue Barker (along with team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson) is leaving _A Question of Sport, _and Carrie Gracey, Norman Smith,

Simon Gompertz and John Pienaar are leaving BBC News. Last September, John Humphrys left Radio 4’s _Today _programme and the year before David Dimbleby left BBC 1’s _Question Time_. What do

they have in common? Three things. They were all superb at their jobs. Professional, impartial, popular. These were not here today, gone tomorrow personalities. They had been around for

years. Jenni Murray started presenting _Woman’s Hour _in 1987, the same year Humphrys started presenting the _Today _programme. Sue Barker has presented _A Question of Sport _for over twenty

years and Dimbleby chaired _Question Time _for almost 25 years. It’s not just the presenters. _A Question of Sport _has had a complete clear out. Both team captains, Matt Dawson and Phil

Tufnell have gone as well. On Sky Sports, three of the four panellists on their Saturday football coverage, Phil Thompson, Charlie Nicholas and Matt le Tissier, have gone. Second, they are

all of a certain age. Dimbleby was 80 when he left _Question Time, _Humphrys was 76 when he left _Today_, Jenni Murray is 70, Jane Garvey is 56, Sue Barker is 64, Carrie Gracey, Norman

Smith, John Pienaar and Simon Gompertz are all either side of 60. Jane Garvey is the youngest. The sports panellists are all between their mid-40s and mid-60s. Finally, apart from Pienaar,

they are all white. Thirteen out of fourteen is unlikely to be a coincidence. There is presumably a move by the BBC to make its presenters and reporters more representative of the nation and

the timing is unlikely to be accidental. The move to more diversity has been painfully slow. But things have started to change in the last couple of years and this has accelerated this

summer. More diversity among presenters of flagship programmes like _Question Time, A Question of Sport_, _Today _and _Woman’s Hour _is long overdue. More women are welcome, more presenters

and reporters of colour can only be a good thing. BBC News presenters like George Alagiah, Reeta Chakrabarti, Lukwesa Burak and Clive Myrie are first-rate, Mishal Husain is one of the best

interviewers on the _Today _programme and Peter White (_You and Yours_) and Gary O’Donoghue (one of the BBC reporters from Washington), both blind, are superb models for future generations

of broadcasters with disabilities. What’s curious, though, is how little diversity there is among BBC executives and the people who wield the power. Every Director-General in the history of

the BBC has been white and male (and gentile). Twenty-four of the 25 Chairmen (sic) of the BBC have been male and 25 were white. Of the 57 key figures in the BBC, one is disabled. As Grant

Feller has argued elsewhere, this is true of the press as well. There is too little diversity at the top, among newspaper owners but also among editors and top journalists. There is another

curious gap in the new diversity at the BBC. What about ageism? For years the BBC has been getting rid of producers in their 50s and 60s. One of the great joys of my time in BBC’s Music and

Arts was working with producers like Mike Dibb, who created _Ways of Seeing _with John Berger more than 20 years before I met him in the 1990s, and the late Julia Cave, who had worked on the

legendary series, _The Great War_, in the early 1960s. There was so much to learn from these experienced figures. It is no coincidence that so many of these reporters and presenters leaving

the BBC over the past few weeks are in their sixties. The new appointment at _Woman’s Hour _is Emma Barnett. At 35, she is half Jenni Murray’s age and more than twenty years younger than

Jane Garvey. Did these experienced presenters and reporters want to leave or were they pushed? If they wanted to leave, why did they? Was there something about the new culture at the BBC

that they couldn’t wait to get away from? In recent weeks “diversity” has become a kind of code for Black. Not Asian, not people over sixty and not disabled. Why is this? I can see why it

might be felt that David Dimbleby (Charterhouse and Christ Church) and John Simpson (St. Paul’s and Magdalene) are a little white and posh for today’s BBC. But diversity should not mean

ageism or continuing to exclude the disabled. If it means anything, diversity must be broader and more inclusive.