Advisers in the news

After the devastating Affaire Prescott, the BBC has advertised for two new Editorial Advisers to work for the Board's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, for £15,000 p.a.

One will apparently champion 'complaints', and the other look at 'standards and guidelines'. The BBC seems determined that they are seen as 'independent', with these strictures. 

Candidates will need to be demonstrably independent of the BBC at the point of appointment. The criteria by which independence will be assessed will include whether a candidate:

* Has been an employee of the BBC, or BBC Group within the last five years;

* Has or has had within the last three years a material business relationship with the BBC either directly, or as a partner, shareholder, director or senior employee of a body that has such a relationship with the BBC;

* Has received or receives additional remuneration from the BBC apart from a Director’s fee or an appearance fee for media interviews; or has close family ties with any of the BBC’s advisers, directors or senior employees.

It doesn't say anything about not writing a grumpy farewell report that defenestrates a DG and a Director of News. 

Career development

 I've never been sure the Linkedin bots really understand what I do (or did).

Mates

Tim Davie is Director General of the BBC until April 4; John Shield was Director of Communcations at the BBC until July 2025, when he joined Teneo as one of their many Senior Managing Directors. 

Leading at the highest levels today means making consequential decisions under sustained pressure, public scrutiny and constant change. These realities were the focus of a breakfast discussion we were pleased to host with Tim Davie, outgoing Director General of the @BBC, on… pic.twitter.com/FJQ88wKuZK

— Teneo (@Teneo) February 6, 2026

£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 ?