£180

The latest licence fee increase is a gentle reminder to all those policy wonks in Government and the BBC looking for a sustainable and fully protected way of funding the BBC.  There isn't one - if it is to remain a universal service, then the Government, and particularly the Chancellor, will define broadly how much the BBC gets every year - because the OBR has defined that as a tax.  You can wave all the ten-year charters you want when the next Government comes to the revolving doors of BH and says that's your lot; you can set up Grand Commissions to define and determine investment in public service broadcasting, but if the economy moves forward tits up, their recommendations will be tossed overboard. 

The BBC has been immensely prissy about not being funded from general taxation, yet that's the most progressive, enforceable and cheapest way to do it.  The current Government is prissy about lumping it in with Council Tax; it could so easily be part of a major revaluation process that Labour have put in the 'too difficult' tray.  Lisa Nandy seems frit of the Big Streamers, but a levy on them, or a broadband levy is a sensible mirror of the days when we had limited transmission spectrums. 

Anyway, the BBC, I hope, will come forward with a response to the Green Paper with renewed ambition, new ways of measuring success, new ways of changing and adapting at speed, and some honest looks at how it will determine what to do less of, over the next ten years, in order to fund some groovy new stuff. With a generous risk pot in there, too. 

Still yanking

A new weekly tech podcast for BBC Studios/bbc.com, The Interface, launches this month. It will feature the decidedly American accents of Thomas Germain and Karen Hao, with Nicky Woolf, based in the USA since 2012.

Hearty breakfasts

A couple of good breakfast figures for the BBC in the latest radio figures covering the three months to December 2025. 

Sam Jackson's pick of the flat, Stoke-tinged vowels of Tom McKinney to replace the rounded plum of Petroc Trelawny at breakfast on Radio 3 seems to be settling. Whilst the station overall reaches 1.91m a week (it has been above 2m under Jackson), the breakfast show is up 2% year on year, and has picked up 22% quarter on quarter - McKinney started in April. 

Radio 5 Live's breakfast team will be pleased with a 5% rise, year on year. TalkSport's breakfast is catching them up - with a 15% rise. Today is down 5%.  At Virgin Radio, the mighty Chris Evans is down 18% year on year.  At Heart, Amanda Holden and Jamie Theakston are up 5%. 

As BBC interim DG Rhodri Talfan Davies gets his feet under the table this week,  BBC Local Radio in England is down 10% year on year, to 4.6m - that compares with 6.7m in 2021, when Rhodri became Direcor of Nations. 

Effective

 BBC Board Minutes are a staple of this blog - but I've failed to spot a change that reduces my supply of fodder. 

Back in March last year, the Board voted to slash its regular meetings from 11 a year to six. I'm now advised that it sits in January, March, April, June, October, and December.  There's also to be one 'awayday' a year. Two of the six meetings must be held 'outside London'  and some of them should be 'non-executive only meetings'. 

So the mass-resignation meeting of October will have had its minutes signed off in December, and the Board allows itself two months to shape them for publication. So they're due this month. 

"Doing less for more" could be a W1A principle. The reduction in meetings, not obviously accompanied by a reduction in non-executive pay, resulted from a "Board Effectiveness Review" by Christopher Saul, formerly top dog at Slaughter & May, brought into the BBC by Lord Hall of Birkenhead. 

Saul, 69 (Tiffin School and St Catherine's College Oxford) is a fan of Clean Bandit, Crosby Stills and Nash, Vampire Weekend, holidays and cars.

Thorn moves

En passant, we note that the registered address of Nigel Farage's one-man company, Thorn In The Side, has just moved from 57a Broadway, Leigh-on-Sea (above Focus Opticians and next to the Picante Cocktail Bar) to 49, Upper Brook Street, London W1.  49 is also the home of Candy Capital, the "private family office established by British entrepreneur and businessman, Nick Candy". 

Jamie's back

Mildly surprised to see former BBC World Service boss Jamie Angus re-surfacing as a trustee of the right-wing think-tank, the Henry Jackson Society, in the UK.  He's clearly fine about the organisation's funding; the latest charitable accounts show £1.2m income in 'donations and legacies', half of which is a donation from the Jackson mothership, the Henry Jackson Society Inc, in the USA.  Those details are all the public gets. 

Jamie left the BBC in 2022. He joined Al Arabiya News as Chief Operating Officer, and left their service in December 2024. 

One of the HJS's current media assets is Maj. (ret.) Andrew Fox, often to be seen on GB News and TalkTV. In August last year, he caused a stir with a long post headed “When does a journalist become a legitimate military target? Maybe not often enough.”

In his post, Fox argued that Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza, was a legitimate target not only because he was “an active member of Hammas' Al-Qassam Brigades” – a claim originating in the Israeli government - but “because he was an Al Jazeera journalist”

Can carrying

I wonder who in the BBC News hierarchy has signed off Wednesday's one-hour BBC2 special, Reform: Ready to Rule ?  Presented by Laura Kuenssberg, it apparently comes from October Films, tied up in the BBC-changing "Trump: A Second Chance".  Is Rachel Jupp, the new Director, News Documentaries and Long Form Journalism, in place ?

Thinking caps

From titbits dropped to the papers. it seems the BBC Board meeting last week had a run round of some future financing options from the burgeoning internal team hunting to add some meaning to 'a reformed licence fee'. 

I hope that chairman Samir Shah introduced the session with some context.  The reality is that, however the money is taken from listeners and viewers, the average total, under Labour, will not be more than at present, perhaps with inflation added, should the economic mood be brighter in 2027. Thus more concessions mean more for the average viewer to pay - and that simply won't run. 

And the BBC side is way behind on all this, when they should be rolling the pitch for a new future. If  'a reformed licence fee' is their Everest, they are still somewhere in the North Terminal, Gatwick, never mind a base camp in Nepal. 

Capital thoughts

The BBC Board certainly got value for money from its Independent Thematic Review of Portrayal and Representation of the UK in BBC Content; 79 pages of cascading thought from Anne Morrison and her scribe Chris Banatvala, plus a ponderous research document.  

Anne, 66 (Richmond Lodge, Belfast and MA English Lit, Churchill College, Cambridge) was with the BBC for 33 years 3 months, joining as a General Trainee in 1981. Anne gets a lot off her chest, and  identifies many problems - the biggest is that despite the Huge Stragetic Davie Shift Out Of London, everyone thinks the BBC is run by and for Londoners - and she agrees.  

Among her recommendations: 

Using existing data, the BBC should keep track of presenters’ ages on an annual basis with the aim of achieving a better gender balance across the age groups over time and, in particular, to ensure older women can have careers as long as their male counterparts.

BBC News should focus on achieving a 1½:1 male-to-female ratio among ‘expert’

contributors (reflecting UK society).

There should be renewed focus across the BBC on achieving gender balance in programmes for contributors, presenters and reporters.

The BBC should pursue a stronger representation of black journalists across its platforms.

The BBC should aim for an organic and authentic approach to diversity rather than it looking forced or tick box.

Consistent with the BBC’s Across the UK project and to connect better with UK audiences, more senior editorial staff, including TV genre commissioners, should be located outside London. We believe that the BBC would represent and portray the whole of the UK more successfully if at least half of the BBC’s senior TV genre commissioners lived and worked closer to those communities across the nations and regions who are currently disengaged with its content, appointing where possible those who are rooted in the location, not commuting to it. The genres which bear most strongly on UK portrayal and representation and have the greatest impacts on audiences would be the most appropriate to move to these locations.

Network Radio not based in Salford should also move elements of its commissioning out of London over time.

Rhodri DG

Regular readers will know this blog has been tweaking the tail of Rhodri Talfan Davies since 2010, and posited his latest advancement on 13th November 2025.  A reminder of some key statistics: in 2011, he became the Bristol-based boss of BBC Wales/Cymru, the third generation of Talfan Davies' to take the top role in the BBC's fortunes in the Principality.

He joined the BBC as a News Trainee in 1993; within 6 years, he was raised to head of regional programmes at BBC West in Bristol - a remarkable promotion at the age of just 28. Mild eyebrows have been raised at Samir Shah's praise of his "deep editorial experience".  

Here's Rhodri on Woman's Hour in 2021.

Here’s the clip. This is Rhodri Talfan Davies in 2021. pic.twitter.com/ng7BsOc3rX

— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) January 29, 2026