BBC caps sports and ditches imported hits in shake-up
When Mark Thompson produces his strategic review of the BBC’s entire operations next month, he hopes that it will mark a turning point in the corporation’s 88-year history.
Mr Thompson will say that the corporation will stop chasing ratings and instead focus on ensuring that output across its services is of the highest possible quality. To back up his claim, he will reallocate £600 million of the licence fee, nearly 17 per cent of the £3.6 billion that the public pays each year, into higher quality programming.
The BBC will also re-evaluate its priorities, promising to focus on British comedy and drama, cutting- edge journalism, top quality children’s programmes and distinctive cultural output.
To free cash for the changes, however, there will have to be closures, most notably in its radio and online divisions. Here, we examine the detailed plans set to be unveiled by the Director-General next month.
TELEVISION
The corporation will dramatically reduce the £100 million that it spends buying programmes from abroad, which include the hit American television shows Heroes, Mad Men and The Wire. Executives are understood to have proposed a cut of £25 million, but sources at the BBC Trust say that they will push for a £33 million reduction.
An extra £25 million will be pumped into overseas journalism, daytime television and children’s programmes, but the BBC will pledge to leave its commercial rivals to take the lead role in serving teenagers, and will announce the closure of its teen brands, BBC Switch and Blast!
It will also announce a spending cap of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee — about £300 million — for the rights to show sports events such as Wimbledon and Formula 1.
If it approaches that limit, it will have to wait for the rights packages it holds to expire before bidding for any new events.
BBC One The main channel is expected to be given a clean bill of health, but will be ordered to screen even more high-quality dramas such as Criminal Justice, its Bafta winning serial.
BBC Two Janice Hadlow, the channel’s controller, will be given a £25 million boost to her £450 million budget and ordered to take the channel upmarket. It will become the home of intelligent programming, with more edgy drama about the state of the nation, like last year’s Freefall, which told the story of the credit crunch from a variety of perspectives.
Ms Hadlow will be given free rein to introduce edgy, challenging comedies, such as the award-winning Psychoville, but will be told to scale back sports coverage.
BBC Three Despite being the bête noire of many critics of the corporation, the channel, which is aimed at 16 to 35-year-olds and introduced hits such as Gavin and Stacey, will remain unscathed.
BBC Four Comedy and entertainment will be drastically reduced, in favour of high-end documentaries, and the channel will be marketed as a close partner to BBC Two and given a similarly upmarket feel.
RADIO
Tim Davie, the director of Audio and Music, will face the brunt of the cuts, as the corporation announces the closure of the digital stations 6 Music and the Asian Network by the end of 2011.
The demise of 6 Music, the niche provider of alternative music, combined with changes at Radio 2, enables the BBC to claim that it is leaving the commercial radio sector far more room to provide popular music to 30 to 50-year-olds.
The digital radio industry will be distraught by the plans, as it relies on the BBC’s digital stations as a key driver towards analogue switch-off, which is already running well behind schedule and is unlikely to go ahead by the target date of 2015.
The BBC’s local radio stations will be asked to produce better quality news during the peak hours of breakfast and drivetime.
Radio 1 Andy Parfitt, the station Controller, will be told that the demise of 6 Music will lead Radio 1 to become the corporation’s only major outlet for popular music. He will be ordered to tie the station more closely to 1Xtra, its digital counterpart, with greater cross-promotion.
Radio 2 The BBC Trust reviewed the future of Radio 2, the nation’s most popular station, earlier this month, concluding that it must pick up more listeners over the age of 65 and become “more distinctive”.
The review will order Bob Shennan, the station controller, to air more jazz and comedy at peak times, as well as ensuring that at least half of the station’s daytime output consists of documentaries or speech radio.
Radio 3 No major changes
Radio 4 No major changes
Radio 5 Live/Sports Extra No major changes
6 Music In a review of 6 Music published earlier this month, the BBC Trust said that the station should seek to increase its 695,000 weekly listeners, but ruled out any boost to its £6 million budget. The corporation’s response will be to close the alternative music station entirely, to the chagrin of the 60,000 people who have signed an online petition to keep it alive. The BBC will admit that the average age of a 6 Music listener — 35 — is very desirable for advertisers, and the station unfairly harms its commercial radio rivals.
Radio 7 The BBC’s most popular digital station, with nearly 1 million listeners, will be rebranded as Radio 4 Extra and more closely aligned with its sister station. Some will say that the station should have been closed, as its content is almost entirely repeats of comedies, dramas and children’s programmes that have previously been aired elsewhere.
Asian Network The station will be another major casualty of the review. The BBC will say that the Asian population is too complex to be served by a single network. Listener numbers have slumped over the past year to 360,000 per week, and the station, at 6.9p per listener hour, is ten times more expensive to run than the relative cost of Radio 1. The corporation may suggest exploring the prospect of setting up a handful of part-time, local radio stations in areas with high Asian populations that would carry syndicated content. But BBC Trust sources said that they would oppose this move.
ONLINE
The BBC’s website will be halved in size by 2013, with its £122 million budget and staff numbers cut by a quarter. Parts of the website that have no clear links to programming will be dispensed with entirely. iPlayer will be safe, with the corporation committed to allowing licence fee payers to view its programming free via the internet, and it will develop the online archive of historic programmes. Every page will have to carry a link to an external website, to increase the “click-through” to rival news companies’ online offerings.
LOCAL
Central to its new regional policy, the BBC will promise never to operate at a “more local” level than is currently the case. In 2008 it was rebuffed by its governing body when it tried to set up a network of local websites with video content and now it will go further, stripping its local online presence back to news, sport, weather and public information.
Its promise not to get “more local” would rule it out of participating in any of the city-based television stations that the Conservatives say they will create if they win the general election. The BBC’s 39 local radio stations have lost audience in past years and now attract a total of around 6.7 million listeners each week. Because its local stations are aimed at audiences that it otherwise finds hard to reach, the BBC is anxious to reverse the decline.
Mr Thompson will promise to provide better news on local radio at the peak times of breakfast and drivetime, funded by syndicating content between regional stations during off-peak hours. The corporation will also give a new undertaking to codify its local ambitions in a written undertaking, which it will distribute to local commercial rivals as part of an attempt to become more accountable.
WORLDWIDE
Although it will pass virtually unnoticed by the public, one of the biggest changes to the corporation will be visited upon its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, a constant thorn in the side of the BBC’s competitors.
Worldwide trades in the BBC’s brands, selling shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Top Gear to foreign broadcasters. Its expansionism has led many rivals to complain that it gains an unfair advantage by the backing of the £3.6 billion licence fee.
The review will conclude that the division, which has a turnover of £1 billion, must dispense with its British magazines arm, publisher of publications such as Radio Times and Top Gear magazine.
It is not yet clear whether the corporation wants Worldwide to sell the division, which rustled up sales of £182 million last year, to a rival company, or if it will propose a different path. The Conservatives have pushed for the BBC to license its magazines to different publishers, putting the contract to publish, for example, Good Food magazine, out for tender. This could prove a middle way. The report is also expected to endorse a recent review of Worldwide by the BBC Trust, which concluded the division must devote its energies to outside Britain.
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