Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1280
- 1299)
THURSDAY 6 DECEMBER 2007
Mr Mark Thompson and Ms Caroline Thomson
Q1280 Chairman:
Could I follow up that question on Newsnight? We are a bit in
danger of talking in generalities and not in specifics. Far be
it from a politician like me to defend Jeremy Paxman but what
Jeremy Paxman actually said was "On Newsnight over the last
three years we have been required to make budget cuts of 15%.
We have lost producers, researchers and reporters nor can we make
the films we once made." They are not prospective cuts, those
cuts have already taken place. I would imagine that you would
accept that is the case. What he is then adding is we have already
done this, now we are going to be asked to make further economies
and it seems to him that he cannot see how the programme can survive
in anything like in its current form if the cuts are implemented.
Mr Thompson: All I would say is I was watching
Newsnight last night and I believe Newsnight right now, in December
2007, is on outstanding form. In terms of its audience performance,
when we asked the public whether they enjoy Newsnight, whether
they believe it is high quality, the programme performs extremely
well. I would say, as with all our output, do have a look at Newsnight.
Q1281 Chairman:
Most of us do actually. Newsnight is one of the best viewed programmes.
Mr Thompson: Have you felt over of the last
three years some precipice of quality has been gone over?
Q1282 Chairman:
That is probably an unfair question to ask of us because we are
not working inside the organisation but if inside the organisation
someone as closely involved to it says that he has lost producers
and they cannot make the films they once made, I think that is
evidence you need to address. I also think there is not much point
in telling us to look at Newsnight last night when we are thinking
about the future and the cuts there.
Mr Thompson: It is quite important to say that
I believe it is true we have gone through a process of achieving
efficiencies for every year I can remember in the BBC. It is a
process that began in the late 1980s. I do not believe that Newsnight
is of lower quality today than it was three years ago despite
the fact that some budget reductions have taken place over that
time. As I said earlier, over the long throw of history Newsnight
actually today has more resources than twenty years ago if not
ten years ago. Of course, as we go forward we will systematically
monitor quality on Newsnight and the rest of our news output.
I do put it to you that the attitude of the public to the programme
is relevant. If the public continue to believe that we are delivering
a high quality programme, if I believe as the BBC's editor-in-chief
and all of the objective ways we measure these things suggest
it is a high quality programme, I would be a little bit careful
about assuming that the most objective and impartial people on
the topic of Newsnight's budget are the people currently working
on that programme. Human nature being what it is, everyone in
every organisation probably believes their particular part of
the organisation should get a bigger budget.
Chairman: They probably have a pride
in the programme.
Q1283 Baroness Thornton:
I wondered how were you dealing with the fact that people like
Jeremy Paxman and other of your senior presenters and journalists
were voicing these concerns? Are you talking to them internally?
Do they get into trouble? Please tell me what you do.
Mr Thompson: My very strong view about the BBC
is the BBC should be an open organisation and if people inside
the organisation have views about what is happening, if you look
at our staff paper Ariel, there is free and frank exchange of
views about every single topic. I think it is a strong organisation
because we are confident enough to have a debate about these issues.
There is no question of anyone getting into trouble for entering
into the debate about the future. What I would say to you is,
to state the obvious, particularly in the run up to an announcement
about a fairly large deployment of resources in the BBC over six
years it is not surprising that you do get people chipping up
and talking not, it seems to me, necessarily entirely objectively
across the totality of the BBC's operations about where the money
should go. All I would say is it is pretty rare for someone to
stand up and say "My part of the BBC has a bit too much money,
why do you not give it to someone else." The flow of argument
understandably tends to be one way.
Q1284 Baroness Thornton:
The fact that some of your presenters, like Jeremy Paxman, are
so vocal and might be mounting picket lines and so on, what will
that do? Will that affect the decisions you are making?
Mr Thompson: What we have to try and do is bear
the interests of the public in mind, first and foremost, and the
BBC's public purposes. My view is a broad debate about what the
BBC should do, and we are lucky enough to have that almost continuously,
does help clarify minds. I welcome the fact that people are interested
in discussing almost every aspect of what the BBC does. What we
have to try to do is I have to, with my colleagues, come to a
conclusion about where our priorities should lie. I then submit
that to the BBC Trust and it is the BBC Trust's job ultimately,
on behalf of the public, to decide where the balance of the argument
should lie.
Q1285 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
This is the end on Newsnight. It has an extremely good editor
but it is a fact that there are far less foreign films. The public
see a good product but actually they are being deprived of a product
that they once had. That is my view.
Mr Thompson: Overall I would say what is interesting
is if you look at BBC television as a whole I would argue that
our coverage of the world inside our current affairs division
but also more broadly is actually stronger than it was a few years
ago. There is more foreign reporting. There are programmes, for
example, from Tribe on BBC2 to Michael Palin's recent series about
Middle Europe on BBC1. There is more reporting of the rest of
the world than was true of BBC television five or ten years ago.
I do not have the figures in Newsnight foreign reporting but there
has never been a moment in the BBC's history where we have had
so much resource devoted to reporting the world as a whole. Our
news reporting, the numbers of bureaus, the numbers of specialist
correspondents we have around the world is greater than it has
ever been.
Q1286 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
On the multi-skilling point, can multi-skilling not lead to a
lack of back-up in an area like news where you have to make very
fast decisions which have to be extremely accurate? Is that not
a concern, one person doing do many things?
Mr Thompson: Of course it would be possible
to ask one person to do too much and part of our challenge over
the next few years is to make sure we strike the right balance.
Sometimes these things have relatively simple technical solutions.
Just a couple of years ago we created some software which meant
that one person writing headlines could write headlines which
would supply headlines for Ceefax, digital television text, mobile
phones and for other divisions. Before that we had different people
typing in exactly the same headlines for different platforms so
sometimes there are technical ways in which you can get one person
to do something which can be very readily used for multiple outlets.
I believe some forms of video journalism such as getting a regional
or local journalist to record on camera what is happening as well
as reporting on it is credible. We have done this for many years
in radio where we initially had engineers with tape recorders
and we had reporters. For many years we have had reporters with
tape recorders.
Q1287 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
And they like it.
Mr Thompson: They prefer it; it is more creative
and it is more enjoyable. Some of that will be absolutely possible
for television news as well. There will be occasions and stories
where it is not appropriate and there will be programmes where
we need a high level of production or specialist skills and we
will not take that solution. What we need to do is pragmatically
to assess how we should deploy our recourses in different parts.
Q1288 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I wanted to come to a matter which is not quite as highly contentious
as Newsnight, namely BBC3, which probably has absolutely fewer
views. I do not want to be frivolous about this but in fact one
of your alpha males at the BBC has had a bit of a go at BBC3 as
well. It does go to the question of how you made the choices that
you made in determining what you were going to produce or cut.
What is it about BBC3 in particular, and some of the other digital
radio stations, that might have been targets for cuts, which makes
them fulfil the Charter requirements that you have to meet sufficiently
for you to feel they must be defended?
Ms Thomson: You are right that as we were looking
at the challenges of the licence fee settlement and budgeting
going forward we looked across the board at what we should and
should not be doing and should we be carrying on with the whole
of the range of the portfolio we are doing both in radio and television.
What we discovered was that every service we have has a distinct
audience and serves particular purposes. I can go in detail into
BBC3 and the purposes it serves if that would be of interest to
you. In addition to this, we are just embarking on the process
of switching Britain as a whole to digital and switching off the
analogue signal. To close a particular digital television or radio
station, particularly a television station, at the point when
we are switching the country over would seem slightly perverse.
All the surveys show that one of the things people most enjoy,
if you look at the surveys in Whitehaven which switched completely
a few weeks back, is this increased range of choice that they
get as a result of it. In addition, of course you do not necessarily
save money. The only way you save money if you switch off the
service is because you are making less content. What we have adapted
instead is to keep the services but, as Mark was saying, to make
a bit less content across all the services and make the content
work harder. We believe that is going to mean that we serve audiences
better across the board.
Q1289 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
The thing that occurs to me straight away in relation to that
answer is you did make a specific pitch when you started to talk
about these changes that the weight of programming would move
more towards news and new drama and other things and away from
movies, entertainment, light factual and one or two other things.
BBC3 in particular is very much more inclined to produce work
that fits the bits that you did want to do less of. Secondly,
if you are going to make your content work harder some of us might
think what that means, to some extent, are more repeats. It is
at least open to question, is it not, whether that represents
providing significantly more choice? You might be putting the
same thing out either more times or in more different places and
does that really represent choice?
Mr Thompson: On repeats, first of all, I talked
about peak time factual programmes and that pattern you will see
in other genres as well. We are talking about somewhat reducing
the hours of origination but to be honest still to levels which
will be far greater than they were even five years ago. There
will be a slight reduction in output, a slight increase in repeats,
not on BBC1 peak time but on the other networks, but the repeats
that we use will be so-called narrative repeats, multiple showings
of a programme in a particular week. We have currently Cranford
on BBC1 and that gets a second showing. The programme has been
getting between seven and eight million people on its first showing
and another two and a half to three million are finding it more
convenient to watch it on the second showing. Our experience on
channels like BBC3 and BBC4 is that the public like multiple opportunities
to catch up on programmes. I believe that the use of a few more
repeats on these other networks, if it means the public can find
these programmes is something they will be quite happy with. I
do not accept that BBC3 is, as it were, not, in its own way, absolutely
working to deliver the BBC's public purposes. More than that,
I believe BBC3 is a real emerging creative success story which
the public are recognising, and not just the public; yesterday
we had the Comedy Awards and Gavin and Stacey, one of our comedies,
won three awards.
Q1290 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I should say straight away that agree with you. I like what BBC3
has originated and I have been known to watch it so I do not have
an agenda about it and neither does the Committee. Perhaps you
can tell us what it is doing that cannot be done any other way
within the BBC such that you need to protect it when there was
considerable doubt as to whether it was the right thing to be
protecting.
Mr Thompson: When BBC2 began, for the first
couple of years people said why do you not shut it down and also
when Channel 4 began. When the BBC started television there was
a big question for the first years. The idea that some people
initially find it difficult to accept new services is not a new
concept. If I may say so, the launch of BBC3 is a strategic move
by the BBC which should be judged over a sensible period of time
in ways that again we can measure. Intuitively I believe BBC3
is proving to be a real success. However, it is quite reasonable
to ask in what way BBC3 distinctively furthers the BBC's public
purposes. I think, in my view, BBC3 advances all of the BBC's
public purposes and it does it for an audience which otherwise
might well not find anything which advanced these purposes. Sustaining
citizenship and civil society, we have short news bulletins on
BBC3 which reach people who do not see many of our other news
programmes. We are doing documentaries on interesting and genuinely
important subjects. Honour Kills, the documentary series about
honour killing in Britain, will be a good example of that. Education
and learning, we did a series called the Baby Borrowers looking
at issues of very young parentage. We contacted secondary schools
across the country and one third of the secondary schools in this
country have asked for further teaching materials off the back
of Baby Borrowers. In terms of stimulating creativity and cultural
excellence, purpose number three, I think BBC3, Little Britain,
the Mighty Boosh, Gavin and Stacey, Drop Dead Gorgeous, the track
record is remarkable of programming which has really caught the
eye and winning awards. Many of it is moving on to BBC2 or BBC1.
With these programmes, it is hard to see how you would have started
Little Britain on BBC1.
Q1291 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
You did not, you started Little Britain on radio.
Mr Thompson: What is interesting is Little Britain
is a really good example of a plan. The plan with Little Britain
was to begin it on radio, then to move it to BBC3 and then to
move it ultimately, if it was successful, to BBC2 and BBC1. Comedy
is sufficiently hard to get right now that the BBC believe we
should use television and radio together, and use digital and
main channels together, to gently provide a nursery where you
can nurture these things and make them successes. That is a strength
in the BBC, and BBC3 is right in the middle of that strategy.
Ms Thomson: Can I just add on the hard facts
of what it delivers, nearly a third of 16 to 34 year olds watch
BBC3 some time in a week. It is reaching its target audience very
effectively.
Q1292 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
What is that in terms of numbers of people?
Ms Thomson: I do not have it in terms of numbers
of people but we could come back to you on that.
Q1293 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Picking up on this spoon feeding, Monty Python was famously very
unpopular and almost pulled and yet the BBC was willing to sit
with it on BCC1 or BBC2.
Ms Thomson: That idea of the nursery slope for
developing comedy is a really important part of why the BBC long
term has had a reputation for developing comedy and why we are
having such a fantastic track record of it now. If you talk to
people in commercial television they will say this is an area,
in traditional terms, of market failure because they cannot take
those kind of creative risks.
Q1294 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Could we turn now to regional and local news. At the moment the
BBC has a network of 40 local radio stations. Could you tell us
how important they are in providing local and regional expertise
to the BBC reporting and whether they will be affected by rationalisation?
Mr Thompson: Firstly, I believe about our local
radio stations that they are already extraordinarily lean operations.
They have pretty low budgets and they have very flexible multi-skill
teams who work incredibly hard, because they are quite ambitious
our local radio stations, to achieve what they achieve. The scope
for further efficiencies is very modest in its part of the BBC
and therefore, as we did three years ago, we have largely protected
these budgets from reductions because we do not see where the
efficiencies will come from. To state the obvious, the way we
approach the topic of efficiencies is not to say it is going to
be 3% all around but to try and look at every part of the operation,
talk to the people involved and try and work out what is sensible.
Q1295 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Could it be then that you might think it is a good opportunity
to invest a bit more in local news?
Mr Thompson: We intend to do that. To answer
the first part of your first question, our local radio stations
are incredibly important. During the floods this summer there
were many parts of the country where the BBC local radio station
became one of the main sources of up-to-date news about the most
practical things: where water bowsers were, which roads were cut
off, whether it was Tewkesbury, Sheffield or Hull. Indeed, in
many parts of the country our local radio people became part of
the Gold Command emergency operation because the police and the
other emergency services can see how incredibly useful our local
radio is in disseminating vital public information. If you add
that to the way in which they engage issues of local democracy,
local news, local debate, they are very, very important parts
of our public service. We have had plans which have been evolving
for some time and are not yet ready to put to the BBC Trust but
we believe there is an opportunity and a need to develop our local
services. An idea which began as an idea for local television,
and which is now certain to end up as an idea for enhanced local
broadband so enhanced local websites, is there to complement what
we do with local radio and to make sure that the kind of information
that local radio has been so good at giving to local audiences
is also available on the web and on mobile devices.
Q1296 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
As far as public service to local and regional communities is
concerned, do you differentiate at all between radio and television?
Mr Thompson: There is a practical constraint.
It is not currently possible for us to deliver local television
through terrestrial means to the same level of granularity as
we can local radio. I would also say that our conclusion would
be that neither from a cost benefit point of view, and indeed
I think you could argue, which is certainly the argument of the
local and regional newspaper groups which we listen to quite carefully,
also from a market impact point of view, it is not obvious that
the BBC should get into local television. Radio is a relatively
cheap medium to support; the receivers are very cheap. Also local
radio reaches people who do not use other BBC services. Local
radio complemented by the web is probably a complete solution
and we would not need, and I would not seek to propose to the
Trust, that we launch local television services.
Q1297 Baroness Thornton:
Will we still have at the end of this process 40 local radio stations?
Mr Thompson: Yes. You will not have any more
than 40. We had proposed to create a few more local radio stations
to fill in places, Cheshire and Somerset would be examples, where
our service is not, in our view, quite good enough but with the
licence fee settlement we believe it is not feasible economically
to do that so we will keep the same number of radio stations we
have at the moment.
Q1298 Baroness Thornton:
Having been interviewed by BBC Leeds recently it was a complete
DIY effort. I got recorded in Bradford and I opened the door myself,
put the headphones on myself and did not actually meet a human
being. It worked fine but I do not see there is much scope for
cuts there.
Mr Thompson: That is why we are not cutting.
Q1299 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
There was a quite a technical word you used a bit earlier on,
if I heard it correctly, did you say granularity? How does that
apply to radio? I can understand it on a screen.
Mr Thompson: What I mean by granularity is we
have 40 local radio stations. If you imagine offering television
at the same level of locality across the country, you would be
talking about 40 local television stations. The cost of delivering
40 local televisions rather than 13, 14 or 15 regional television
programmes we do at the moment would be very considerable. For
reasons that you will understand, and this is the reason ITV has
got economic anxieties about regional television news, regional
television news is at once one of the lowest cost forms of television
and also one of the most expensive. Although for each individual
regional television programme the cost per hour is low you have
to multiply that by 13, 15 or 20 depending how many regions you
have. If we were to deliver local television in every local radio
region you would probably end up with very low cost television
operations but you would need 40 of them running 365 days a year
across the country.
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