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

Who's out of step ?

Some papers have been reporting a survey commissioned by Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy called "The Value of BBC News". It was published on 16th December, but The Times, amongst others, has lighted upon a theme: "Seven in ten Britons think BBC News needs to change to meet the requirements of society". This has been misleadingly transformed into the headline "BBC News is out of step with UK society". 

It's a view of the future, workshopped in 16 online focus groups and in 8 one-hour interviews, and simply makes the case for change as society changes.   Chapter 3, largely unreported, sets out current perceptions and behaviours towards BBC News. Key findings include:

High levels of satisfaction in BBC News (60%), with most people finding it valuable to them personally (72%) and to UK society as a whole (77%).

Those who say it is valuable gave a wide range of reasons, including impartiality, trustworthiness, accuracy, and coverage. Those who say it is not valuable focused more on a perceived lack of impartiality and bias.

Attitudes towards BBC News are related to trust in the wider news landscape. Those who did not trust the news generally were more dissatisfied than satisfied with the quality of BBC News.

The survey found that most people (around 3 in 4) used at least one BBC News service in the last month or so, and about half said BBC News was their most used news source.

Participants described their BBC News usage in ways that range from routine-based habits through to using it for specific purposes such as to fact check a story seen elsewhere. In some cases, participants rarely used BBC News, tending to avoid this content although BBC Sports News was often an exception to this.

IGNITE THE WHY

News just in from the HR Professional AI conference in Athens in November, translated from the Greek by Google. BBC Chief People Officer Uzair Qadeer speaks out. 

INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE

IGNITE THE WHY: REIMAGINING LEADERSHIP FOR AN AI-LED DIGITAL WORKPLACE

Participants had the opportunity to watch a special dialogue, through the stage discussion of Maria Vathylaki, HR Director Eurasia at Moët Hennessy (LVMH Group), with Uzair Qadeer, Chief People Officer of the BBC. “People may go to bed hungry, but when they feel free they go to bed with dreams,” said U. Qadeer. For him, this is also the core of the human factor in the AI ​​era: technology can execute, but it cannot create meaning. At the same time, he argued that the world of work is definitively abandoning the linear career path and moving towards a skills-based model, where development is more like a network of experiences than a ladder. AI, as he emphasized, does not replace humans, but moves their role: from execution to judgment, from control to emotional guidance, from processes to the release of potential. The discussion also touched on the intergenerational tension surrounding technology: millennials are eager to adopt it, Gen Z takes it for granted, while older generations experience uncertainty and fear of substitution. “People are not afraid of technology. They are afraid of the absence of a role within it,” he emphasized. In closing, he reiterated his central argument: the age of AI is a historic opportunity for leadership to rediscover its most authentic role. Artificial intelligence can write poetry, he said characteristically, but it cannot understand why we write it. The concept of “why” remains human—and this is the space where the next day of leadership will be judged.

What does he want ?

Even with his shoulders unhunched ahead of departure, BBC DG Tim Davie reached for his verbal crutch of 'jeopardy' at least five times in his Guardian 'exclusive' interview.   It's a discussion about what the BBC wants from 'licence fee reform', and a critic might say, after nearly five and a half years in the job, Tim has no clear view of the changes he'd want to make. 

Interviewer Michael Savage reports "The BBC is in the process of examining how the licence fee could be made more progressive for some groups."   Surely this sort of intervention is the job of Government ? Remember the 2015 licence fee deal bounced on the BBC by loveable George Osborne ?  He made the BBC cover the cost of free licences for the over-75s as a way of making it look as though he was reducing the wider benefits bill.