Chart toppers

Verification, if needed, that sports rights and coverage costs are expensive at the BBC.

Nigel Etienne, a BBC finance projects and planning manager, has revealed big figures for sport this year, in response to an FOI request.  Next year, presumably, down by £60m because of sharing F1 with Sky.

"We calculate a pan-BBC genre split. This is the amount budgeted on each genre, such as News or Children’s, across all the services, i.e. television, radio and online. This is a useful proof that divisional strategies are aligned with the editorial priorities in the Statements of Programme Policy. Therefore we can tell you that the pan-BBC genre split as part of the 2011/12 budget process is a spend of £232m on Entertainment, £379m on Sport and £285m on News".