Peston: too big to fire?

It had a fish wholesaler in Brixham. It had Mary Poppins. It had tobogganers on Hampstead Heath. Can you guess what it is yet? OK, these may help. It had a tick-tack man at a racecourse and trams in Basel. Still stumped? Silly you! It was, of course, BBC business editor Robert Peston's much-hyped television documentary last night: "Britain's banks: too big to save?" (You can watch it, if you really must, on BBC i-Player until January 25).

Now, there's nothing wrong in principle with using a wide variety of images and analogies to illustrate a story on TV. But it only really works if the presenter -- in this case the hugely self-regarding Pesto -- understands the underlying material. Sadly, there were plenty of indications here that when the great man moves away from what he's undoubtedly good at -- prying stories out of a wide range of business contacts -- he quickly gets way out of his depth.

A couple of examples will have to suffice. Interviewing Paul Tucker of the Bank of England, Peston asked him to explain the concept of fractional reserve banking. Tucker appeared to respond by giving a letter-perfect definition of maturity mismatching, a quite different thing. It's not clear what the intended effect of this bizarre edit was, but its actual effect was to create the impression that Peston didn't understand the difference between the two concepts -- an impression that the rest of the programme did nothing to dispel. At a later stage Peston and his editors contrived to make a whole group of academics and financial experts look stupid. Each was asked to define a "CDO-squared" (a type of structured bond), but only a couple of seconds of each person's answer was shown, giving the undoubtedly false impression that none of them could say what it was.

It's clear from the title that Peston thinks the banks are too big and should be broken up. This is a view with which I have a lot of sympathy, so it was maddening to see it so poorly represented here. Peston asked his Brixham fish wholesaler how he would reform the banking system. Simple, said the man: he'd require each bank to ask each depositor's permission if it wanted to lend his or her money out; absent that, the money would have to be kept in the vault. Peston didn't ask the man how much he'd be prepared to pay for this safekeeping service, or even point out that under these rules it might be the teensiest bit difficult for banks to pay any interest on deposits, or for that matter to advance working capital loans to Brixham fish wholesalers.

It has to be said, though, that Peston seemed to have gone out of his way to find people who would be happy to put their money into just such a bank. One lady revealed the due diligence she had undertaken before putting all of her life's savings into Northern Rock: "It was northern! And it was a rock!" I really am not making that up.

What we ended up with was an irresponsible scare story -- "the banks could get into trouble again, and this time nobody will be able to fix it!" -- without the least effort on Peston's part to suggest what could be done about it. It will serve Peston right if he finds doors being slammed in his face next time he's prowling around Canary Wharf looking for a lead, but as long as he has access to the bully pulpit at the BBC, I guess the banks won't dare to freeze him out. Still, I have some advice for the BBC: next time you're doing a documentary on a matter of key public interest, why not hire a presenter who's more comfortable with complicated topics? Alan Titchmarsh, maybe, or Graham Norton.