TV Hell

‘BULLYING may be on the way out in the police and the armed forces, where teddy bears and big huggy cards with lovely rhymes are compulsory for new recruits. But in the harsh world of regional TV news, it’s a different story. The Times reports that Laurie Mayer has told an employment tribunal that he became a marked man after protecting a colleague from a trio of bullying managers at the BBC’s Kent studios in Tunbridge Wells.

Staff were “frequently reduced to tears or made physically ill” – symptoms familiar to viewers of local news programmes, but previously unheard of among those who produce them.

The BBC says that Mayer was pompous, lugubrious and overbearing, and that his style of presentation had resulted in poor viewing figures.

But these qualities don’t appear to have hampered the careers of other BBC news presenters, and we reckon his claim of unfair dismissal is an absolute stonewaller.’

Posted: 16th, September 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink