The radical who fled the revolution

The radical who fled the revolution

The BBC's former head of documentaries tells James Silver of his frustration at trying to run a department that was 'emasculated' by cuts - and why divisions and factions within the corporation made him quit

Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian

There cannot be too many leading TV executives who know how to build and dismantle a truck, but Alan Hayling, the BBC's head of documentaries until two weeks ago, is one of them. In 1976, Hayling, then a straggle-haired socialist trouble-maker with a double first from Cambridge, was attempting to film a documentary for the Newsreel Collective about what it was like to work in the car industry on the factory-floor. He landed an assembly-line job at the Ford plant in Slough, planning to smuggle in a camera so that he could film undercover. However, that quickly proved impossible thanks to the introduction of stringent bag-searches to combat the widespread theft of spare parts. When, simultaneously, his funding dried up, Hayling faced a dilemma. Should he quit and set up in TV on his own or stay on at Ford? In those days film stock was eye-wateringly expensive and he was broke. So he kept the job and ended up staying for eight years.

Three decades later, Hayling, 58, is poised to launch a Soho-based independent TV production company with his partner, film-maker Alex Cook. Largely "factually-driven", Renegade Pictures will make a wide-range of documentaries, science, history and current affairs programmes, as well as developing documentary and factual entertainment "formats". It is also planning to snap up other independents. Indeed, negotiations to buy one well-known - though as yet unnamed - company are continuing.

He leaves the BBC after just two years in his post - a period he describes as "very frustrating", during which his department was "emasculated" by internal reforms, as part of director general Mark Thompson's swingeing cost-cutting drive.

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