Only Fools and Horses-style catering at the BBC

The BBC these days probably conjures up the image of a giant bureaucratic entity smothered in health & safety rules. Despite this, its catering policy used to be somewhat more "relaxed".

Although the BBC had an onsite caterer for staff - currently Aramark and before this Compass - there was and has always been a need to cater for outside events such as programme launches.

However, a former manager tells us that it was more Only Fools and Horses than The Restaurant when they joined in the not too distant past.

Seems it was standard practice to recommend your mates for catering gigs, or at least a local restaurant that you'd once peered through the door into, to feed dignitaries and the various other VIPS in attendance.

So casual was this arrangement that our source informs us that two of the restaurants used by one section of the Beeb for event catering had actually appeared in a BBC TV programme. Alas, this was a show exposing filthy eateries.

In another particulary risky case, food was apparently prepared in a domestic kitchen before being driven across London in a car and delivered to a party attended by a South-east Asia ambassador.

Unsurprisingly this risky business was nipped in the bud and an assessment procedure established to draw up a list of approved caterers, which in this case sounds like commonsense rather than bureaucratic nonsense.

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