Strike Puts BBC Viewers, Listeners on a Rerun Diet

Some of the BBC’s best-known news programs were pared back or canceled Monday as thousands of employees staged a 24-hour strike to protest plans by management to eliminate nearly 4,000 jobs.

Instead of live news and interviews, listeners and viewers of such fare as Radio 4’s “Today” program, World Service and television’s “Breakfast” show were offered reruns of old interviews and documentaries, supplemented by brief bulletins read by nonstriking workers and management.

The strike, the largest at the BBC since 1989, was called by the National Union of Journalists and two smaller unions to protest plans by Director General Mark Thompson to eliminate about 15% of the 27,000-member workforce over the next three years.

Management said it was willing to discuss its plans with the unions, but labor representatives said the cutbacks were being imposed without meaningful talks.

“The savage cuts proposed will damage programming as well as the organization and will unravel British broadcasting traditions,” said Mike Smallwood, leader of Amicus, one of the small unions.

Union leaders said about 13,000 workers had observed the job action, which is scheduled to be repeated May 31 and June 1 if there is no settlement.

The BBC estimated that 60% of employees scheduled to work Monday showed up in spite of the strike.

“The service we have been able to offer on live programs, and the number of staff reporting for duty, is slightly better than expected,” a management statement said.

Among the programs hardest hit was “Today,” the flagship morning radio program that often sets the day’s news agenda in Britain.

“Today” hosts include tough-interrogating journalists, such as John Humphrys and James Naughtie, whose stock in trade is grilling the country’s leading politicians before breakfast. The program was canceled when all of its main newscasters, as well as most of the technical staff, failed to appear for work. Jeremy Paxman’s “Newsnight,” on BBC television, also was canceled.

But other personalities agreed to cross the picket line. Terry Wogan, BBC Radio 2’s popular morning show host, told the Evening Standard newspaper that he sympathized with the strikers, “but what can I do?

“I’m a contract artist and I’ve got a job to do.”

The BBC said its World Service, which broadcasts around the globe by satellite and short-wave radio and on the Web, carried no live programming in English except for regular five-minute news bulletins.

Thompson assumed management of the BBC last year in the wake of a scandal over whether the broadcaster had gone too far in a radio report that said that the government “sexed up” intelligence before to the invasion of Iraq.

Although a government commission recently recommended that the BBC be allowed to renew for 10 years the charter under which it is financed by TV-owner license fees, Thompson said the privilege should be repaid by more fiscal discipline. He said the cuts would save nearly $700 million a year, which would be used to finance ventures into new kinds of media, such as digital TV, and pay for more original programs.

The country’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper called the strike unnecessary, even as it mused on the rare pleasure of “not to begin the working day listening to John Humphrys hectoring another politician.”

“The director general ... has not made a compelling case for the scale or speed of the 4,000 job cuts. Nor has he shown how they will lead to better program making,” the newspaper said in an editorial. “Thompson should get back to the negotiating table and the strikers back to work.”

More conservative newspapers, which often accuse the BBC of being bloated and fostering a culture of political correctness, had not yet commented.

*

Times staff writer Sarah Price Brown contributed to this report.