Secondary viewing of First Sight

A strong catch-up result for the Panorama investigation The Dark Side of Married at First Sight. Just 0.77m watched it live, 0.7m watched on the same day, and 0.99m caught up with it over the week. That's a respectable total of 2.46m. 

"Things tech will never do better than humans"

BBC Chief People Officer Uzair Qadeer has been to Porto to tell the World HR Summit what's what. 

Presumably after a briefing from newly-arrived AI expert Matt Brittin, he told delegates that AI meant a m move for HR from "stewards of corporate culture to activators of pace and performance". As ever,  personnel officers are vital: "If HR doesn’t play a role, AI transformation will not succeed".

As for executives, they now needed "excellent caveman skills".  "We are going to go back to the skills of the past – perception, emotional intelligence, in-the-moment negotiation and coaching, conflict resolution; all those things that tech will never do better than humans".  

And Uzair had an ominous warning "AI is not going to make bad leaders good, but it will absolutely expose who and where they are".   Which the BBC has previously found difficult... 

Merger benefits

The BBC Board's Remuneration Committee signed off a pay rise, unsurprisingly, for the new Chief Technology and Product Officer Storm Fagan at their meeting in February. The merger of Technology and Product into Media Tech, formally announced in March is meant to save money overall. 

Last week, Will Farrell-Green stepped into Storm's old job, as Chief Product Officer. So presumably the savings are coming from lower down the food chain. 

(En passant, we note that Will is a former professional triathlete, from New Zealand, via product roles in San Francisco for Pandora, Twitch and Amazon)

Reimagining Ros Atkins..

Someone's given BBC Analysis Editor Ros Atkins a glow-up.  First, the February look, with full Verify branding, jacket, and the traditional backdrop of the Temple of Doom Newsroom...

This week's look; t-shirt, no Verify, and groovy podcast-type set. 

Back off

The new Director of News might like to take a look at the number of "Political Editors" the BBC is running, and their work. 

First, Chris Mason, on duty days, is omni-present. Not only reporting on the 'story of the day' but usually bookending with both a live introduction and thumb-sucking back anno on both the Six and Ten on BBC1. It's a throwback to the days of Laura Kuenssberg as Chief Political Correspondent, when David Aaronovitch coined the term "Kuenssbergovision". 

Political Editors of previous centuries - David Holmes, John Cole and Robin Oakley - allowed others to do the running round, and only appeared when they deemed stories to have accumulated sufficient weight to demand their presence on screen. 

Laura Kuenssburg is still required to opine on weekend Newscasts, and a weekly newsletter.  Her Sunday output is 'news', today, Thursday. 

  

Alan Milburn's full report making headlines today - our interview with him from this weekend https://t.co/8Ly8pCROnK

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 28, 2026

And another former Political Editor, Nick Robinson, modestly shared his opinions of his own interview all day yesterday... 

 

On the @BBCNews Channel: former PM Sir Tony Blair says the Labour government has no "coherent plan" for the country. @bbcnickrobinson spoke to us after interviewing him 🧵 pic.twitter.com/qR7Ax4xeO2

— Luxmy Gopal (@luxmy_g) May 27, 2026

Transfer talk

The news that new BBC DG Matt Brittin had decided to base himself on the seventh floor of New Broadcasting House has created some anxiety amongst those functionaries who clustered around Tim Davie on the fourth floor.  Doesn't Matt like us ?  Doesn't he need our advice every day ?  Are any of us going upstairs with him ? What have you heard ?

Equally, the television commissioners of the seventh floor might have to start worrying a bit more about presenteeism.  The Tuesday after the Bank Holiday was particularly poorly attended... 

Equal opportunities

Not long to go before the departure of BBC deputy chairman Sir Damon Buffini, who joined various BBC boards in 2022. The gap leaves an interesting challenge for Samir Shah. For diversity targets, he needs to find another person of colour, ideally with big business experience, so that they can keep an eye on BBC Studios. 

If Matt Brittin accepts his targets too, the new Director of BBC News ought to be a 'diverse' choice....

Comedic

BBC Three Creative Brief:  "At BBC Three we're looking to celebrate what it is to be young and British today, and all our content must appeal to a young, diverse, UK-wide audience."

That must be why this Saturday, and on forthcoming Saturdays, the peak-time schedule was packed with repeats of Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys...

Radio winners

Sometimes it's possible that awards judges are trying to send messages. At last night Audio Aria awards (the Sonys, in old money) the winners in the Best Speech Breakfast category were Radio Bristol, Radio Ulster, and Radio Oxford. 

In Best Factual, gold went to Hits Radio, silver to the Daily Mail, and Radio 4 took bronze. 

In Best News, gold went to Hits Radio, silver to Mishal Hussein on Bloomberg Radio, and bronze to a Newsbeat contribution to 1Xtra. 

The Radio Times Moment of the Year went to Mishal Hussain for provoking Nigel Farage into “Listen love, you're trying ever so hard”

Wrong way

I've got one or two documents I'd like to pop into Matt Brittin's weekend reading bag. 

We all knew that Matt was a gospeller for AI, but extracts from his first address to BBC staff have been heard by Jake Kanter of Deadline... 

"He said the BBC could deploy technology to analyze its news and content to establish patterns in output. Brittin said this could mean assessing how often the BBC uses certain words, or analysing the types of contributors appearing across its programming.

“Stories and data together are the way to understand the world..... not to audit people, but as a kind of sat nav around bias or sat nav around these topics … So that’s where I think I’d try to complement our brilliant expert teams.”

So first in his man-bag, The Asserson Report, of 2024, commissioned and shaped by the head of a Tel Aviv HQ'd law firm, and produced with Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss, who calls himself a "Computational Neuroscientist". 

Second, the Centre for Media Monitoring report of 2025 "We employed Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a state-of-the-art language model that has demonstrated strong performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark designed to evaluate the multitask capabilities of language models across diverse subjects, achieving 88.3% accuracy."

Both have lots of data, but the textual analysis has parameters set by humans, and both use so called sympathy assessments to come to what many would call their preferred conclusions. This is a dangerous and distracting path, Matt.