How you knew your place in the BBC in the days of Television Centre

If you ever worked in the BBC’s Television Centre, as I did, it’s sad to see the back view of it now from Hammersmith Park. Developers are making it ready for a new life that they promise will 'pay homage' to the past (thanks perhaps to the fact that it’s a listed building). The site will include “office and studio space for the BBC, complementary entertainment and leisure facilities, public open space, offices, housing and a hotel."

Call me old-fashioned, but somehow I don’t think the building’s new incarnation will live up to the days when it was populated by the likes of Frank Muir, author, broadcaster, wit, and, for a while, office-holder at TVC, as BBC folk called the building.

I’m reading Muir’s entertaining autobiography, A Kentish Lad, and have reached the point where he leaves the world of freelance writing to accept the important role of AHLEG(C)TEL, Assistant Head of Light Entertainment Group (Comedy), Television - in other words, comedy commissioner, with an office in the building.

In his BBC capacity, Muir ran a successful department that produced a seemingly-endless parade of classic series including Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part and Call My Bluff, in which he and his writing partner, Denis Norden, also starred.

But it was Muir’s stories about the BBC that I thought of as I saw Television Centre being taken to pieces today. Muir moved into an office that had previously been occupied by his boss, Tom Sloan, who had been relocated to somewhere grander further round the doughnut.

This created a problem, as Muir explains:

“On my first day a very important matter of privilege and seniority arose. Tom was Head of Light Entertainment Group and I was only Assistant Head. The head of a group was entitled to wall-to-wall carpet, an assistant head was not, and my office still had Tom’s wall-to-wall carpet. On my third day in Television Centre, two men in long brown coats came into my office and cut a foot off the carpet.”

Today’s BBC is sadly lacking in status symbols. Heads of department are not just without their own offices or carpets: they sit next to work experience people behind the same desks with the same laptops and phones. In the new world of wall-to-wall carpeting for all, status is expressed subtly but more confusingly – in the time it takes someone to reply to an email or the number of typos they feel it’s OK to send.

Bring back the carpet regulations, I say, so we all know where we stand – and on what.