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 Ruth Pitt, a key architect behind the BBC’s move to increase production outside London has quit the corporation, saying she has become frustrated by “resistance” to the plans. The creative director for the BBC's “Out of London” development, Pitt is reported to have told Broadcast magazine that she was not prepared to “tread water” until attitudes inside the BBC changed.
Pitt, has been at the BBC for seven years and has been working on the project for 18 months. She is reputed to have become particularly frustrated at the attitude of commissioners and programme-makers in London to developing network production beyond Manchester.
She said: “It would be fair to say that Mark Thompson is totally committed to 'Out of London', but I think there is a lot of resistance to it in the organisation and people don’t understand why it has to happen. One can’t help but be frustrated by that. I have realised that the plans are going to take a lot longer than I thought and I am impatient. The BBC is not quite ready for the change to happen. Manchester is a fantastic development, but we do have audiences in other parts of the UK and we need to move fast if we are going to serve them better.”
The idea of moving children’s, sport, BBC Radio Five Live, new media and technology to Manchester comes under the 'Out of London' plans. A key part of that project is also to locate key commissioners in cities such as Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester.
An associate of Pitt is reported to have said she has been discouraged by a view held by some BBC staff in London that there was a lack of talent in the regions. She is believed also to have felt that there was little appetite to fully embrace the 'Out of London' project beyond the move to Manchester and also, no enthusiasm for network production from other regions.
RUTH PITT BIO
Ruth Pitt is an award-winning programme maker. The Out of London project she was working on is a major BBC initiative to move 1,000 jobs out of London as part of its commitment to serving UK audiences better.
Prior to this Pitt was Creative Director of Documentaries in BBC Religion & Ethics and Editor of the Everyman documentary strand. Her broadcasting career began in local radio, including BBC Radio Cleveland and Radio Tees, before she joined Yorkshire Television in 1982 as a reporter/presenter in Current Affairs.
In 1988, Pitt founded the company Real Life Productions and produced numerous documentaries and series for BBC, ITV and Channel 4, including First Tuesday and 40 Minutes strand.
In 1996, after leaving Real Life Productions in the hands of her partner, Pitt took up the post of Head of Documentaries at Granada Television. Whilst at Granada her key films included the acclaimed 7UP Trilogy, The Boy Business, Forgotten Mothers, The Busby Babes, Owning Auschwitz, Streets of Fire, What the Papers Say and the 1995 location film drama Macbeth.
In 1998 Ruth Pitt chaired the Edinburgh International Television Festival and in 1999 joined the BBC
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When I did my production training I was ridiculed by some of my fellow trainees for making a radio programme (supposedly for Radio 4) which used a great deal of northern speech.
They were then chastened by the course tutor John Turtle who reminded them that Radio 4 is the BBC\'s national speech radio service and the reason that it had almost no listeners north of Watford was probably because it radiated very few speech programmes like mine.
In fact, it was soon after commissioned by Radio 4 and I was able to make it \"for real.\"
I mention this because anti-regional attitudes are deeply entrenched in the BBC and are very hard to break. The Out of London initiative made a good start. I am sad to see Ruth Pitt departing like this.