Context

A new poll from Electoral Calculus included the following question: Who runs your council?

With local elections coming up on 7 May, we wanted to see how much people were aware of politics in their local area. We asked them "As far as you know, which political party currently leads your local council or local authority?"

Nearly a third of voters (30pc) admitted that they don't know which party currently leads their local council. Of those who gave an answer, 46pc correctly identified the leading party while 24pc were wrong.

Delicatessen tools

Interim BBC DG Rhodri Talfan Davies tells us there'll be no salami slicing in achieving the next £500m of savings - but that's already what's happening. Cf Football Focus, Radio Scotland's presenter line-up (with yet another voice imported from Forth 1, Victoria Easton Riley's old patch), changing Strictly It Takes Two into a 'vodcast',  linear BBC3 in the shedding ring (Have you seen the current schedules ?), it goes on... 

Matt Brittin needs to overlay his own strategy and direction of travel asap.  The remainder of Deborah Turness' management team at News are scaring the staff with the scale of cuts to come, without solutions. Their instinct remains to bolster 'newsgathering' at the expense of output teams. It needs a new Director of News to review the scale of the investment in Verify and the USA, and fast. 

The re-merger of "Product" and "Technology" into Mediatech will produce savings. Ernst & Young's review of current BBC spending noted that, at 12% of revenue, the BBC spends more in these areas than Spotify or Netflix. But there remains a piecemeal approach to content for other platforms; each departmental hippo has a flock of oxpeckers tied to terminals making 45" clips of linear output for re-use on TikTok, Facebook Reels, Instagram and YouTube Shorts.  Online has a small factory making weekend clips of The One Show for the front page of News Online. Radio 2 has just advertised for yet another "Social Media Exec, Radio 2 Publishing".   Entertainingly, the tools they use are largely 'off the shelf', like Emplify, Adobe Creative and Social Flow. Put all the people engaged in this stuff together, and it's one hell of a cottage industry.  Is is marketing ? Is it content ?  Is it of value ?

 

Barm-y

When Sara Cox arrives at Radio 2 Breakfast in the summer, the network will offer listeners 5 and half consecutive hours of Bolton accents each weekday. Sarah was brought up in Little Lever, to the south east, and Vernon Kay in Horwich, to the north west - less than eight miles apart.  Then comes posh boy Jeremy Vine... 

Still, makes up a bit for EastEnders.... 

Gaelic short of bread

Over the years, this blog has chased viewing figures for BBC Alba, without much success. 

MG ALBA is the operating name of Seirbheis nam Meadhanan Gàidhlig, or Gaelic Media Service, which was formed under the Communications Act 2003. MG ALBA delivers the BBC ALBA platforms in partnership with the BBC, from its HQ in Stornoway. I offer these paragraphs from MG Alba's submission on the Green Paper on the future of the BBC.  

BBC ALBA has no funding mechanism. BBC ALBA is dependent on the annual, separate, funding decisions of Scottish Ministers in relation to MG ALBA’s contribution and the budget decisions of BBC management in relation to the BBC’s contribution.

This funding was frozen for 10 years which resulted in a real terms reduction of nearly 50% for Gaelic television broadcasting during that period and there is no transparent mechanism to address the funding deficit. This deficit equates to a shortfall of £10M, which has led to a reduction of almost 30% in the number of hours of new programming since 2015. The reduction in new programmes has had a huge impact on audience figures, particularly among younger viewers.

Exercise Matt

There's a range of unhelpful advice about how to cut the BBC down to size in the Sunday papers. Matt Brittin will have already formed a hypothesis, set about challenging it, and boiled things down to three BIG ISSUES. He may have idly applied GE-McKinsey nine-box matrix, ranking the BBC's activities by 'attractiveness' versus 'business unit strengths'. 

But Lisa Nandy has set different parameters: keeping aiming at universal reach, on funding levels that might match current licence fee rates without 'avoidance'.  She may be coming round to a precept from direct taxation, supervised by a Commission of some sort. 

Matt's decisions will be 'data-driven', looking to balance the audience the BBC currently holds, with the opportunities to reach more in different ways. Let's hope he makes sure that the stats for online and smartphone eyeballs match BARB and RAJAR for length and depth of engagement, and for credit back to the BBC. Too many people seem too be hiding the brand in the hunt for yoof; certainly too many people think pushing out dashcam footage is a public service.  

Matt doesn't need to make less content; he needs to make sure it's all produced at price not distorted by history ("Sit coms are too expensive" "High end drama won't work at low rates".  Podcasts started as fast, cheap and cheerful responses to current trends and events, often denied broadcast space by stuck-in-the-mud commissioners preferring a low-risk comfy life with staples that have filled their schedules for 30-plus years. Now BBC podcasts have a superstructure of a size similar to linear radio. I expect the recent move into documentaries for YouTube will suffer in the same way. 

So, Matt, make content production No 1; make sure its got genuine quality, baseline-costed, then organise it and distribute it for the 21st century.  

Failure of the state ?

 "Pass" and "Fail" are rather stark assessments in the murky world of security vetting.  It's a reasonable bet that we'll never see the Mandelson document from UKSV, but I bet it talks about risks, rather than saying "He's a spy", or "He's only in it for the money". One of the key concerns for the interviewers sent out by UKSV is the possibility of blackmail, for past, continuing or potential future indiscretions. 

With any risk assessment, it's possible to mitigate. Or accept that the benefits outweigh the risks. Security vetting doesn't assess benefits. Whatever Sir Olly Robbins read in the UKSV Mandelson report, the 'process' entitled him to endorse a political appointment clearly already made by the Prime Minister.  And you'd sort of expect that to be the case, if the vetting report is nuanced. It might be uncomfortable if the Security Service had ultimate but untransparent control over 'political' roles; Darren Jones is at risk of painting himself into a corner with this morning's 'rule change', announced on The Today Programme. 

There are many people in and out of the Cabinet Office with 'security' in their remit. Patricia Dreghorn is the CEO of UKSV, Vincent Devine is the Government Chief Security Officer and Head of the Government Security Function, Sir Laurie Magnus is the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards. Cui bono, at this stage, if Mandelson's failure to pass vetting is made public ?

PS One presumes Matt Brittin 'passed'. 

Katz flap

Ian Katz and incoming C4 CEO Priya Dogra have had about four weeks to look each other in the eye around Horseferry Road, and, well, Ian Katz is leaving in September. 

Priya marked her start in job with a joint drinks for women in the creative industries and  the launch of A Woman Of Substance at No 11 Downing Street, assuming the royal 'we' for commissioning the show - a decision taken a year before her arrival. 

Ian Katz' departure announcement names almost every programme he's commissioned over nine years, and a statement that he'll be commissioning right up to his last day... 

Apart, presumably, from having the odd chat with Matt Brittin. 

Welcome Matt

A month to go til the formal appearance of new Director General Matt Brittin walking into Broadcasting House, where, even before yesterday's job cut announcement, only 34% of staff had confidence in the Corporation's Executive leadership team. 

Some may remember the headlines from 2022/23 when Rhodri Talfan Davies so adroitly steered BBC Local Radio into the shedding ring, and picked a remaining few to deliver dash-cam footage and detailed investigations like "A red kite took my mother-in-law's sausage roll" to BBC News Online. It was Rhodri who announced the cuts target yesterday - timed so you can spend your summer holidays worrying whether you'll be in the shedding ring in September. Rhodri also announced a recruitment freeze, a ban on travel when a virtual meeting will do, and an eagle eye on consultancy spend. 

The last jobs under the wire for the recruitment freeze include a Senior Journalist, Growth, BBC Local ("You will work on growth projects to increase the reach and impact of BBC Local’s digital output by using levers and strategies to improve discoverability of our content for target audience groups.") and a £60k pa HR Operations Lead. 

Virtual meetings will change Rhodri's life: left, his travel bookings for the last three months of 2025, when he was just running AI. 

On consultants, maybe Matt should show the door to Boston Consulting and Price Waterhouse Cooper, as the BBC merges Technology and Product, having only split them up four years ago.  And remind me of the results of Change Associates involvement in improving BBC Culture ?

Dead posh

If Radio 5Live was really 'Radio Bloke', Track Radio is set to be 'Radio Posh Bloke'. It's a weekday 7am to 7pm DAB Radio stream coming to London from 4th May.  The money is coming from Zac and Ben Goldsmith, and Balthazar Fabricius, founder of Fitzdares Bookmakers and on the board of The Walpole Committee, a non-for-profit outfit promoting British luxury goods. 

The presenter line-up includes always-natty Mark Pougatch at Drive, Vassos Alexander & Charlotte Daly on Breakfast, Sanny Rudravajhala from 10 til 1, and Sonja McLaughlan on Afternoons. John Inverdale is an adviser, the main fixer is Ian McIntosh, driver of the old Totally Football group of podcasts (now sold to The Athletic).  They will play records, but there's no sign yet of a music policy; perhaps that's why Jonathan Arendt of Jazz FM fame has come on board. 

Up and down

All Perspectives (but more of some than others) will be pleased with a March monthly reach of 4.2m (their sole product is GB News). It's up from 3.6m in February, and looks to be their highest figure since this method of reporting started a year ago. 

BBC tv reached 48.4m in March 2026, compared with 49.9m in March last year.