Eventually it was longtime Google exec and one-time Olympic rower Matt Brittin who was both experienced and brave enough to take the role that has seen so many of its incumbents come a cropper.
Six and a half weeks in, on a baking hot summer day, the newly-installed BBC boss faced his first grilling this morning in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Made up of MPs from across the political spectrum, the committee is currently deliberating on the BBC’s future as it fights for the renewal of its Royal Charter and, more importantly, funding, which comes by way of a “license fee” payable by anyone who watches live television, on any platform or device, and/or uses the BBC’s streaming service iPlayer.
Temperatures breached 80 degrees in the stuffy, wood-panelled room in the Palace of Westminster, with the only relief coming from a fan turned to face the wall (apparently it interferes with the committee’s microphones if facing the right way). As Brittin remarked at the conclusion of the meeting, “They told me it was going to be a hot seat. I didn’t realize it was literal.”
Over the course of two long hours, Brittin, who was joined by BBC chair Samir Shah, was questioned about everything from the BBC’s relevance to how he is preparing to handle the next scandal, whatever it may be. On the whole, he delivered an impressive performance, remaining cool even as temperatures rose both literally and figuratively, with one MP berating him after he declined to share confidential board meeting documents with her (“No company nor organization can reveal all of its board papers,” he replied evenly. “I think that’s reasonable practice.”)
The new boss is understood to have spent months before starting the job touring the BBC’s offices across the country in a bid to get to grips with its sprawling output — which includes television, radio, digital, film, news, culture, broadcast and production, among other areas — and he came across as someone prepared to tackle the many challenges it faces. As well as persuading the government to grant it more money when the country is already experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, Brittin is also dealing with internal restructure, low morale and an ongoing lawsuit from President Trump, which proved to be the final straw for Davie’s tenure.
Read on for highlights from his performance today.
CUTS
On what to do about funding content with “real public service value” but dwindling viewer numbers…
Brittin said: “The principles I’ve asked our teams to look at are first and foremost to preserve and maximize audience value, to reduce duplication where there is duplication and to simplify the BBC, so it can move faster.”
He added: “We’re going to have to stop making some programs that are very popular with people, because there are more popular programs.”
LICENSE FEE
On reforming the requirements for the license fee…
Brittin said: “The BBC is sort of locked into yesterday’s model of consumption, so the license fee being payable on linear television and iPlayer, when the world’s moved on… so we need to look again at the mechanism for funding the BBC.”
Brittin suggested that other European countries fund their PSBs through a household levy (essentially a tax), which in some places is automatically added to utility bills. Brittin argued this would give “universality,” “scale” and “reduce the collection costs, which are currently about 190 million pounds a year for us.”
He also said that if 100% of households were effectively taxed via an automatic levy, potentially the fee, currently £180 ($240), could be lowered, with government able to “make calls” on whether to charge lower-income households and younger viewers. Brittin described the prospect as “quite appealing” although reportedly the government, at least under current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has ruled it out.
Brittin said another “compelling” option would be to extend the license to any kind of video content, including streaming, which would “reflect the reality of today’s audiences.”
ADVERTISING
On whether the BBC could be funded via advertising…
Brittin said: “Traditional advertising is in structural decline. … the impact of the BBC taking advertising would be to take it away from others. And I think that would be a devastating impact on the on the economy.”
He added that some of the BBC’s public service content, such as investment in local journalism, “would be very, very hard to fund under a commercial funding model for the BBC, even if there were enough funding to go around.”
YOUTUBE
Unsurprisingly, given the dominance of YouTube as well as Brittin’s own background at Google, there was much discussion of the video-sharing platform.
He was asked whether the BBC could or should make money from the content it shares on YouTube. Brittin explained the only revenue models available on the platform would be advertising or subscription, neither of which the BBC is allowed to do under its Royal Charter. When pressed whether YouTube was effectively profiting from BBC content, Brittin explained that YouTube is such a behemoth “we’re not creating additional sort of audience value for YouTube.” The reason the BBC puts content on the platform is because it offers “a low-cost way to reach audiences that we’re not currently reaching.”
“It really doesn’t make a huge difference to YouTube whether or not the BBC content is there,” he said.
HOW THE BBC SPENDS LICENSE FEE MONEY
On whether the BBC should be bidding for commercial (and non-U.K.) content such as “Scooby-Doo”…
Brittin suggested that “people come to us for ‘Scooby-Doo’ but they stay for ‘Horrible Histories,’ right? They stay for ‘Newsround,’ they stay for some of the public service content.”
When pushed about whether that was really true in a post-linear world and, as such, whether license fee money should be spent outbidding rival networks, Brittin admitted: “That’s something I’m looking at reviewing as part of the cost savings.”
He was also pressed about the many offerings the BBC has that are not part of its broadcast remit, such as the free online study platform BBC Bitesize.
“One of the challenges is broadcasting right, [is] what does it mean to be a broadcaster?” Brittin argued. “It used to mean radio, then it meant television, then it meant television and streaming. Now, actually, a lot of our audience is coming to us for online services….So I think these words get in the way of understanding what we need to be doing, which is serving the audience with public value.”
FINANCIAL WOES
With the corporation undergoing a sweeping cost-cutting and restructuring program, which began under Brittin’s predecessor Tim Davies, the new director-general was asked his opinion on how the BBC’s financial situation “got so bad.”
Brittin said he thought it was a combination of the freezing of the license fee combined with more households giving up the license fee entirely and the “increasing the work the BBC was asked to do by the government.”
“So that [financial] gap opened up as a result of those changes, and the BBC had chosen to spend its cash reserves and dividends from its commercial business on plugging that gap. We’ve reached the point where that’s no longer possible,” he said, explaining later the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Studios (which produces content such as “Doctor Who”), is also struggling due to inflation and a slow in commissioning from U.S. streamers.
SCANDALS
Davie’s five-year tenure saw him preside over an almost endless parade of scandals, not all of his own making, and the committee was keen to know how Brittin might do things differently. As one MP put it: “What are you going to do to ensure that you’re not always sitting there apologizing for some mistake like the last guy did?”
Brittin said as part of his preparation for the director-general role he spoke to previous “DGs,” “several previous heads of news” and previous deputy director-generals “to understand how things had operated and what I needed to do.”
As part of that he has brought back the deputy director-general role, appointing Rhodri Talfan Davies, whose remit is to ensure “when there are issues, whether it is operational, editorial or corporate, that they are immediately gripped within a rigorous framework.”
He said in the past “there has been not necessarily enough accountability and clarity,” adding that if the BBC does make a mistake “it’s really important to be quick…we should own it, we should apologize for it immediately, and then we should sort of say what we’re going to do to try to understand what went wrong or to address it” rather than be “defensive.”
He said this would be balanced with ensuring the BBC can still “take big risks and be bold in our journalism and creativity, while being held to the right standards that you would expect from the BBC.”
Asked, hypothetically, whether he would pull a show off the air if a situation such as Channel 4’s recent “Married at First Sight” scandal arose, Brittin replied that if there was an issue around safeguarding, “it depends on the seriousness, but ultimately I think no program or presenter is bigger than the corporation, particularly a corporation that is funded by the public.”
HUW EDWARDS
Shah was also grilled over the ongoing Huw Edwards scandal, which had also roiled Davies’ tenure, with the committee chair asking whether the BBC had “abandoned hope” of clawing back the £200,000 repayment it is seeking from Edwards.
He added: “We have not abandoned hope. No. This is a serious amount of money. It belongs to the license [fee] payer. It does not belong to Huw Edwards.”
But when pushed about what the BBC was actually doing to get the money back, Shah replied impassively that “we’ve written to his lawyers….what do I think the chances are? I don’t know. It’s a matter for Huw, really.” %!s()
