[Media-watch] BBC DG's background

[David Miller {FMS}]

Check out the Hoon connection!

David


June 13, 1979, and Devonshire Hall president Mark Byford has plenty to
celebrate. He's 21 today, he's just passed his law finals, he's soon to
marry his girlfriend Hilary and he's going up to Gray's Inn to become a
barrister. 

But the son of Lincolnshire's then chief constable Lawrence Byford has a
niggling doubt about his career plans. His father, too, had studied law at
Leeds (although Byford senior did it the hard way - A levels at night
school, then night shifts as a policeman while he studied during the day; an
achievement of which his son is enormously proud). Young Mark feels he's
flowing in the parental slipstream; that it's time he changed direction -
for the summer, at least.

'I'd thought the media was quite appealing, a bit of an attraction, but I'd
never even worked on Leeds Student, I'd never written an article,' he says. 

'One of the local TV presenters came to dinner at Devonshire to talk about
his work and I thought, that would be quite interesting, I wouldn't mind
having a go.'

Then, as now, the BBC was recruiting a handful of bright graduates as news
trainees, but Mark didn't think he had a hope. So he strode across Woodhouse
Lane to the BBC and pestered the news editor into giving him a temporary job
as holiday relief assistant. 'I'd do anything that would please anyone -
from making the tea to researching programmes.' 

Within two decades, Mark Byford would be running the largest and most
influential radio broadcasting organization in the world. Its 41-year-old
boss describes the World Service as, without doubt, the 'jewel in the crown
of the BBC'. 

Barely had Mark Byford time to settle into his new office at Bush House,
when he was shortlisted for the greatest honour in British broadcasting, BBC
Director-General. The Governors chose Greg Dyke. 

>From teaboy to top-of-the-world - the stuff not of fairy tales, but of
northern grit, tenacity, hard work - and right place, right man, right time
luck. Born in Castleford, where he spent his early childhood before moving
to Lincolnshire, Mark had developed a 'deep affiliation' with Leeds United,
Yorkshire cricket and 'the patch'. 



Mark and Hilary as students.They met in the Union bar and married a year
after Mark's graduation.

The A level student came to look round the University and was 'knocked out
by its size and its multicultural environment' - and its proximity to his
beloved teams. He came up to find a 'dark and murky union with a deeply
scruffy MJ café and a damn good record shop' - and a huge number of
interesting people.

He was also delighted to find charismatic lecturing - quite unlike school -
which reminded him of the brilliant law professor in an early 1970s American
film called The Paper Chase, who also threw out random questions to students
in lectures. 'Brian Hogan was fantastic - he brought criminal law cases
alive, and he was fun. He made you realise the difficulties, the
intellectual drive behind legal decisions.'

He mooted in the law society, became a member of film and ents committees,
played football, cricket and tennis, watched sport, went to the theatre and
became president of Devonshire Hall. In his holidays, he travelled and
walked the coast-to-coast and Pennine ways. 

Three years later, the sporty, carefree and somewhat opinionated
undergraduate had lost none of his energy but had become a rather better
informed, more thoughtful individual. 

'The biggest thing I got out of university without a doubt were the people
around me. I remember staying up until four or five in the morning, talking,
putting everything to rights. 

'I began to think about the world, and my place in it, to listen to other
people's opinions, thoughts, that shaped my thoughts. University life made
me a better person than I'd been before, definitely. I was a little bit more
humble. I'd also learned how to work in teams.' 

As president of Devonshire Hall, he'd also picked up some invaluable
experience of leadership and the beginnings of a management style which his
broadcasting colleagues describe as firm, but inspirational. 'At Devonshire
it was very formal, gowns at dinnertime, that sort of thing. I wanted to
keep some of the traditions but modernise it as well, within the environment
of the University, of course. 

'That was the first time I ever chaired meetings with an agenda and six or
seven people around me. And the style I use today is shaped by that, I
promise you. Absolutely shaped by that. Leeds University, in all its
aspects, shaped the Mark Byford of today.'

It also, of course, provided Mark Byford with 'my best friend for life, my
wife'. He was introduced to English student Hilary Bleiker in the union bar
by a mutual friend, law student John Ireland, who is now company secretary
at Tottenham Hotspur. 

'We just said hello and thought nothing of it. Three months later I bumped
into her as she was coming out of a lecture theatre in the Roger Stevens
building and I knocked all her books over. Accidentally.'

Over the Christmas holiday he decided he was definitely interested; at the
Law Society St Valentine's disco, he found the courage to ask her to dance
(to Brickhouse by the Commodores he recalls). It was snowing, and a young
Devonshire Hall warden and law lecturer called Geoff Hoon agreed to loan
Mark his car to drive Hilary home and, with luck, impress her. 'She became
my wife straight after university and we now have five wonderful kids.'

The helpful law lecturer is still playing an important role in the life of
Mark Byford. The Foreign Office funds the World Service, and Geoff Hoon is
its Minister of State. 'We meet professionally now, and he still jokes that
I owe him three quid for the car loan.'

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/alumni/html/news/review/issue6/markbyf.htm