"The power to make money is a gift from God," Rockefeller once said. And just because God does good things doesn't mean he has to be a nice guy.For Rockefeller, money wasn't simply a luxury; it was a lesson in lifestyle management. At his first job as a Cleveland accountant in 1855, Rockefeller earned 50 cents a day, and donated 6 per cent to charity. As his income skyrocketed to 50-plus million per year, Rockefeller's charity increased proportionately.
Purchasing his first Cleveland refinery in 1862, he soon created one of the first multinational corporations, Standard Oil, by never simply rising to the challenge of competitors. Instead, he priced them out of business or bought them.His "secret" pact with the railroads made sure that nobody could distribute product cheaper than he could. "Never trust anyone completely," Big Bill once told his son, "not even me." It was a lesson JD took to heart. Then he went out and taught it to the rest of the world.Rockefeller learned the rules of the post-Civil War industrial boom more quickly than anybody. And when he wasn't keeping meticulous accounts of personal expenditure, he was turning each day into a series of unalterable routines - eating, exercising, and even dispatching charitable contributions at prearranged times like a sort of human clock. John D Rockefeller was the sort of man who never did anything to excess - except, of course, make money.Born in Richford, New York in 1839, Rockefeller's pedigree was quintessentially American. His mother was a hard-working frontier housewife who got along with everybody, including her husband's mistresses.
And his father was none other than Doc Rockefeller, aka Big Bill, a handsome con-man who sold diuretics as cancer cures and taught schoolchildren how to deal from the bottom of the deck for five bucks a pop. A devout Baptist who disdained alcohol, tobacco, and any sign of excessive partying, he spoke almost entirely in religious aphorisms, attended daily prayer vigils and church services, and even dropped out of school in his early teens to help support his family. Why otherwise should they pay for what commercial television provides with creditable skill and efficiency? Or else all we'll be watching is the recycled works of Clarke on secondary channels and be left wondering how such work got made.Michael Wearing is a former Head of BBC Drama Serials. It is a view which patronisingly reduces the audience to the role of passive consumer.It is the job of the BBC to rapidly recover its recent traditions of patronage of our-real windows on our-own writers, directors and producers.
TITAN: THE LIFE OF JOHN D ROCKEFELLER, SR BY RON CHERNOW, LITTLE, BROWN, pounds 25 DURING 90-SOME years of relentless prosperity, John D Rockefeller proved to the world that even notoriously successful robber barons can live really boring lives. It is in maintaining its role as a vehicle of national cultural patronage, that the longer term interests of BBC interests lie in its search for relevance, value and distinctiveness in the eyes of the audience. One can only hope that the efficiency savings will really help fund the new services. As for unflinching content, the broadcast production divide has well and truly put an end to that.
We are all now either "buyers" or "sellers" of ideas to phrase it in the market-place mantras of the management consultancy advice.Why buy the possibility of controversial topicality when you have reorganised the world to nip such trouble in the bud? Not only do we have the Broadcasting Standards Council but with untypical alacrity the BBC broadcast division promptly provided an audience complaints department all of it's own.Here lies the true manifestation of a paternalistic and sanctimonious attitude to the audience afflicting contemporary broadcasting. It was a drama head to whom the power of commission had by some oversight been devolved.What do we really have now as a result of organisational changes ostensibly to modernise the BBC but actually to placate a political loathing of anything in the arena of public service? On the matter of topicality the BBC's decision making on production investment is so slow in the field of drama that all concerned require the power of foresight of Nostradamus to get it right.Visual immediacy is an expense which budgeting limitations have long since made a thing of the past. Gender is anything but the deciding factor as to which side of that particular fence you reside.Inevitably we shall not survive the television festival without some manifestation of that hardy perennial - Beeb lashing. To accuse Clarke and his many contemporaries of a paternalistic view of the audience is laughable to anyone who actually knew him But of course it was not some all seeing Diaghilev of a controller who commissioned him.
