Wink wink

Do the organisers of the Edinburgh International TV Festival know something we don't ?

A regular feature of the event is the strand called "Meet the Controller"; since Jay Hunt was appointed Chief Creative Officer of C4 in 2011, she's represented the network as 'Controller'.

This year's website has started fleshing out the programme for August - and suggests there might be a fresh face coming, presumably either following Jay's promotion to CEO - or her exit if she fails to get the job.

External comms

Incoming Today Editor Sarah Sands has taken to intermittent tweeting about the programme's contents.

Appeal to Today listeners for local words and phrases that evoke nature. Robert Macfarlane and Annalena McAfee our guides. @BBCr4today

— sarah sands (@sarahsands100) May 30, 2017

Admirably hands-on, and demonstrating at least that she's around this half-term, unlike many other BBC executives. But she might want to think whether or not it's the best use of her time, and the correct social media strategy.

Here's a league table of Twitter followings...

@bbcnickrobinson 760k
@BBCr4today 597k
@MishalHusainBBC 208k
@JustinOnWeb 32.9k
@sarahsands100 13.5k

Mr Humphrys doesn't Tweet.

Stuffing

Squire Paxman's disdainful interviewing of May and Corbyn attracted 2.79m viewers to Channel 4 last night (including those watching on +1). You can probably add a few thousand more on Sky News, C4's strange bedfellow for the event.

Snapper

As day follows night, Hay follows Cannes for BBC editor and presenter Alan Yentob...this time, apparently, on the other side of the camera.

The @jabberworks fan club @hayfestival
as photographed by Alan Yentob @bbbcarts ( yes, honestly!) pic.twitter.com/rJxAQMrE3X

— rosie goldsmith (@GoldRosie) May 29, 2017

Development

As Johnston Press shares continue to drift, a new non-executive has arrived, with connections to one of the group's major investors.

Jamie Buchan, with a background in marketing, made a name for himself turning around the fortunes of the exhibition venue Excel, then owned by Malaysian/Tamil entrepreneur, Ananda Krishnan. He went on to be chief executive of struggling care home giant Southern Cross, but couldn't help save it from collapse in 2011, and left without severance pay.

Ananda Krishnan's company, PanOcean Management, owns just over 10% of JP (sadly worth a smidge over £1.4m currently). Jamie Buchan is chief executive of Craigewan, a property development company, based in Great Portland Street. One of their projects is the £1.5bn St John's Wood Barracks scheme, funded by Ananda Krishnan.

Sources

With the case between Sir Cliff Richard and South Yorkshire Police settled, we now await Sir Cliff v The BBC. Sir Cliff's lawyers must feel they have the upper hand. Mr Justice Mann has agreed that the BBC, desperate to protect sources, must answer one question - whether or not its information that Sir Cliff Richard was under investigation by the South Yorkshire Police came from Operation Yewtree.

The BBC contended that it shouldn't have to, because of a risk of identifying an individual source; the judge has decided that the risk is low.

The evidence in dispute is whether or not reporter Dan Johnson knew, effectively, as much as South Yorkshire Police about the investigation, and thus forced their hands into releasing details of the planned raid, by threatening to go public with what he knew. The BBC contends that Johnson merely approached SYP with a belief that Sir Cliff was the subject of enquiry, and the SYP volunteered their co-operation on the raid on his Sunningdale flat. It denies that Johnson ever told SYP that he had been given information from a source within Operation Yewtree, or that he suggested he was in a position to broadcast a story, and might do so with or without SYP’s cooperation.

The magic of the Cup

The Arsenal v Chelsea Cup Final attracted an average of 7.88m (46.9% of the available audience) to BBC1 yesterday, according to the overnight ratings. That compares with 7.04m (42.4%) for last year's clash between Crystal Palace and Manchester United, and 8.0m for Arsenal v Aston Villa in 2015.

Arsenal and Chelsea will be back at Wembley in just nine weeks' time, on Sunday 6th August, for the FA Community Shield. Who will lead the teams out ?

Pedigree

Dame Patricia Hodgson is stepping down as Chair of Ofcom at the end of the year, rather than March 2018. The early departure, she says, is "a necessary fit with other Board renewals and replacements which all fall due next Spring".

For the time being, it reduces the number of Ofcom grandees who have the BBC on their CV by one.

The main board of Ofcom also features Nick Pollard, in his position as Chair of the Content Board. And the Content Board also includes former Horizon producer Andrew Chitty, former BBC Wales news boss, Aled Eirug, former BBC Northern Ireland news boss Andrew Colman; former R4 Analysis editor David Levy; former BBC Newshour presenter Mary Ann Sieghart; former BBC2 Late Show producer Janey Walker; James Thickett; and former BBC Controller of Broadcast Strategy; former BBC News Channel boss Kevin Bakhurst. Eight out of thirteen.

Former BBC technology boss John Varney is chair of the Ofcom England committee, where he is joined by former BBC News reporter Barney Choudhury. Former BBC Wales political editor Glyn Mathias chairs the Ofcom Wales Committee, joined by former BBC Wales producer Karen Lewis, former BBC Wales video editor Hywel Williams, and former BBC Wales Head of Marketing and Public Policy Huw Roberts.

* Ofcom reportedly has wants the BBC to publish the raw number of complaints it receives,by programme. Ofcom's own May bulletin totals some 55 complaints against BBC programmes over the month which, by the rules, have to go through the BBC's editorial processes first. There were just two against King Charles III, and one against something Ofcom describes as The Victoria Devonshire Show.

Stick or twist ?

For completeness, there's no hint of 'settling' in this quote from a BBC spokeswoman about the claim for damages from Sir Cliff Richard...

"We've said throughout that the BBC's responsibility is to report news stories that are in the public interest."

"Against the extensive disclosure of historic child sexual abuse by figures of high public prominence, we consider that the report into the investigation into Sir Cliff for such an offence, and the decision by police to search his premises was such a news story and that the BBC had a duty to report it.

"The police decision to settle the claim against them by Sir Cliff because of how they handled the investigation doesn't change the fundamental principle that journalistic organisations should be able to report on the police and police investigations into individuals.

"A search happened, and because it did, the BBC reported it - just as any other media organisation would have and did."

Decoding BBC expenses

An FOI enquirer has tried to find out what records the BBC holds on expenses claims from employees working in HR. They were first told it would take too long to calculate; they asked for an internal review, as the Act allows, and a BBC information rights expert has backed the 'too long to calculate' response. But in giving the response, it seems not even the BBC can work out if a department as a whole is a little hard on the expenses pedal.

"In considering this request, the BBC has made a reasonable estimation of the time it would take to conduct the search. The requested information is held in a BBC Business Warehouse, one of the data repositories used by BBC Finance systems. The expenses information in this system does not contain any information on the team a particular staff member belongs too, nor does it contain their job title. This information would have to be sourced by matching each staff number to Human Resources (HR) data for each individual. This means that the BBC would need to manually enter each employee’s name to confirm or deny whether they had made an expense claim. "

"As indicated in the original response, there are approximately 800 employees in the BBC People. As a modest estimate, given the number of people employed in BBC People, I believe that it would approximately 5 minutes per employee to collate the requested, which does not account for complex matters. In a large organisation like the BBC, correlating this data set across the Finance and HR departments would be a significant search. Therefore, I am satisfied that the BBC would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours."

The internal reviewer says he/she can't think of a way the enquirer might narrow the request, to get at least some sort of partial answer. I wonder if entering the cost codes 'owned' by HR, which form part of each expense claim, might help. But then, what do I know of SAP Enterprise Data Business Warehouses ?

For more on the 'approximately 800 employees in the BBC People", see my earlier post. 

Showtime

BBC Studioworks has tied itself to the planned September 1st re-opening of two out of three studios at Television Centre, with first bookings.

12 editions of ITV's Jonathan Ross chat show will be recorded in TC1, having previously come from ITV's London Studios. 60 editions of Strictly spin-off, It Takes Two, move into the wide open spaces of TC2, having been made last season at ITV's soon-to-close Southbank operation.

Paper with moving pictures

Johnston Press needs to make a digital future work - so it's probably good news that one of its weekly papers, The Scarborough News, is working with an app that uses the newspaper to trigger pictures on your mobile phone; elements of the page act like a sort of bar-code to trigger video content on the phone screen. Aurasma was developed by the late, and probably not lamented, Autonomy, now part of HP, back in 2011. Here's a demo of how it works, from way back then.

The art of internal communications

It's a Friday afternoon, running up to a possibly scorching Bank Holiday weekend. It's been a tough week of broadcasting - the Manchester bomb, schedules thrown out, extra reporting deployed across the organisation at no notice, sitting on top of tricky and complex election guidelines, specials and extended programming.

It's probably the ideal time for an all-staff email from BBC HR and union reps to give notice that plans to "modernise" your terms and conditions of service are imminent.

One down...

We told you back in February that it seemed the BBC wasn't really up for a full court case arguing the toss with Sir Cliff Richard's lawyers about privacy - and now, four months later, it appears an out-of court settlement has been reached in the singer's pursuit of damages. But only, so far, with South Yorkshire Police.

Sir Cliff was after unspecified damages on top of £1.5m for loss of earnings. We may never know how much SYP had to stump up - or how much Cliff's lawyers still want from Auntie. According to BBC News, the BBC has declined to comment today.

0730 Saturday update: Sir Cliff's QC Justin Rushbrooke told the court yesterday: "SYP has now recognised its conduct was unlawful and has agreed to pay the claimant a substantial sum by way of general and aggravated damages.

 "He [Sir Cliff] is pleased that he can draw a line under his claim. The story was accompanied by live on-the-ground reporting and nearly-live footage from the helicopter of the police carrying out the search. The claimant’s case [is] the story was sensationally presented, although the BBC denies this." 

The Mirror puts the SYP deal price at "more than £1m". I'm guessing Sir Cliff's legal team are holding out for a similar figure from the BBC, in a mixture of costs and damages.

Classics

The line-up has been announced for the 2017 Proms in the Park, "Britain’s largest outdoor classical music event", according to the BBC press release. This classical extravaganza features Sir Ray Davies, Elaine Paige, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Steps, Texas, the cast of Five Guys Named Moe, and...Sir Bryn Terfel.

It started way back in 1996. The line-up then included the Picadilly Dance Orchestra, the Maesteg Male Voice Choir, Cantabile, James Galway, The Labeque Sisters, and the sopranos Maria Ewing and Felicity Lott, and mezzo Ann Murray.

Three more

A deal with Shanghai Media Group Pictures means the BBC has committed to at least three more series of Dr Who. The forthcoming series, Number 11 since the 2005 relaunch, is in preparation under Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall - we await news of a new Doctor.

Yesterday, BBC Worldwide signed an agreement with SMG Pictures giving the Chinese group access to all the relaunch back-catalogue, Series 11, and a first look at series 12-15.

How much ?

35 Marylebone High Street, formerly home to the Radio Times, The Listener, the BBC Trust, BBC Training, and Radio London/GLR, is finally coming to the marketplace as 19 flats and five townhouses. Prices start at an eye-watering £4.1m.

The project has been in development since 2012, under Royal Opera House architect Dixon Jones. Sir Jeremy Dixon is the partner of Julia Somerville, who, entertainingly, hosts Rip-off Britain.

No structure ?

Here's a useful snapshot of the current BBC workforce, revealed in answer to a Freedom of Information enquiry. It shows the headcount by division, and the full-time equivalent (adding up people who job-share or work part-time into single units) at 30th April 2017.

News has the highest number of part-time workers and job-shares. The emerging Deputy Director General Group, now parcelled under Anne Bulford, represents nearly 29% of the licence-fee funded EFT. You have to remember that BBC Studios, making tv programmes, are not in this list, as a commercial subsidiary. Nonetheless, away from the output divisions, the DDG Group, comprising Finance, Engineering, HR, Workplace, Legal and Business Assurance, and Marketing and Audiences, is a substantial chunk of people, given the BBC drive to reduce 'overheads'.

The same enquirer also asked "Can you provide me a current organisational chart of each group in diagram format?"

The extraordinary answer "We can confirm that the BBC does not hold this information; due to the size and changing nature of the BBC workforce we do not have visual diagrams representing the structure of the BBC. The Act does not require us to create new information in order to satisfy a request."

I think the BBC should have another look.

CSI NYT

There's no doubt that the New York Times got a scoop with its pictures of police evidence photos taken at the site of the Manchester bomb. All written up by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter C.J.Chivers, 52, (six years with the U S Marines 1988-1994),with additional work by Mika Grondahl, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Sergio Pecanha and Derek Watkins.

But editorially, was it right to publish ?

Today, the paper said "The images and information presented were neither graphic nor disrespectful of victims, and consistent with the common line of reporting on weapons used in horrific crimes.

"We have strict guidelines on how and in what ways we cover sensitive stories. Our coverage of Monday’s horrific attack has been both comprehensive and responsible."

So that's the case for the defence on taste and decency, but it doesn't cover messing up a police investigation, does it ?  Wonder if CEO Mark Thompson got a phone call..

Clearance bargain

The BBC has confirmed that the BBC Store archive download and streaming service will cease operating on 1st November.

It was all there in the Terms And Conditions...

"We cannot guarantee that you will be able to stream or re-download Content that’s in your BBC Store account forever. Where our right to make content available has expired, you will no longer be able to stream or download that content from your BBC Store account. We’ll try not to take down expired content without first notifying you that it is due to expire, so that you have the opportunity to download and playback the content through the Store Downloader."

The BBC is being more generous than that: it can apparently afford to refund customers on purchases made (were there that few ?), or offer them Amazon vouchers to the value of 10% more than they've spent.

Only 128 million to go

The BBC's international news and entertainment services are reaching 372m a week, up 7% from 348m last year. A rise of 25m for each subsequent year would see the DG's target of 500m by 2022 achieved.

On the news side of the house - World Service, World News (TV) and news on bbc.com - the figures are up 8%. Within that, the language services are up 9%, and World Service English is up 14% - helped by syndication, streaming and podcasts. We're told that BBC radio listening in the States rose by 12% over the year, taking weekly reach to 14.6m. We never get told a reach figure for BBC World News in the USA.

The top ten markets for the BBC’s international news services are Nigeria (36m), USA (34m), India (28m), Bangladesh (16m), Egypt (15m), Pakistan (13m), Iran (13m), Tanzania (10m), Indonesia (7.6m), and Canada (7.5m).

Accessible

Now that HR has taking over what used to be BBC training - grandly named The Academy - they're recruiting in their own inimitable style. They need a Content Producer, Learning Design.

Responsibilities include to "work closely with Subject Matter Experts, project team and digital content team to design intuitive, responsive learning experiences using a variety of tools and content formats across multiple platforms" and to "design and structure blocks of learning content to optimise learner engagement and retention through creative organisation and sequencing of content that takes into account different learning styles and is accessible to a wide variety of learners".

There's another job coming soon - to help HR write plain English.

Mothership of listen

Here's an entertaining reverse ferret, worthy of David Nobbs' fictional creation, Sunshine Desserts.

BBC Radio 1's watchwords under Controller Ben Cooper have been 'listen, watch, share', pointing to growing stats for the station's YouTube and Facebook videos as the radio audience has declined.

He's told Music Week  “We need to work harder at the traditional ‘listen’ part of our strategy. We have spent a lot of time on air pushing our audiences to watch and share and, actually, it’s time for the watch and the share part of our strategy to now push back to the mothership of listen.”

Ben got the top job in October 2011. Since then, Radio 1's weekly reach has fallen by around 2.7m, to 9.1m - a drop of just over 19%. Over the same period, Radio 2 grew from 14.3m to 15.0m, and Radio 4 from 10.5m to 11.1m.

High

I was out by a mile on ITV's plans for their Southbank redevelopment. I guessed at 100 luxury flats over some 22 storeys. They actually want to build to 38 storeys, producing up to 270 flats. The environmental proposal to Lambeth Council is at pains to point out the number of proposed towers in the area, some already approved, so they might get away with it.

Just below the surface

You get the feeling that former BBC executive Helen Boaden is close to telling some gripping tales about her time with Auntie. This week came a gentle probing by Jane Garvey at The Groucho Club, and then Trevor Dann tried a post-interview interview for the Radio Today podcast.

Some insights - she still worries that radio and radio audiences are at risk from a management more focussed on tv and online: "It's my great fear...that they'll do something daft". She confirmed that there had been plans to redistribute network radio into new divisions [see various three-humped Camel diagrams]: "I opposed it, but it wasn't me alone. I think Tim Davie said something similar".

She managed not to mention Director of Radio & Education & Odds & Ends, James Purnell: "I have confidence in Bob [Shennan] and the Controllers".

Meanwhile, Jane Garvey risked a pop at Bob, or at least his former fiefdom, Radio 2: "Radio 2 doesn't look or sound much like the Britain I know".

Summer relief

The summer will bring new tests for Sarah Sands, now tweeting away at the helm of the Today programme on Radio 4.

Despite having a generous home team of presenters - Humphrys, Robinson, Webb, Montague and Husain - and only 12 shifts a week to fill, they'll all want time off once the election is over, and then we'll see who Sarah tries out. Will she stand by Matthew Price, the programme's "Chief Correspondent", or will there be baptisms for new female voices ? And has she unlocked the Big Leather Book of Today Programme Promises - promises made by executives above Today Editor level, to senior News hacks looking for a nice earner when they come off the road ? Anna Ford, Ed Stourton and Justin Webb all arrived as surprises of varying scale to the incumbent Today Editors.

Nick Robinson had his eye on programme presenting from 2002, and he formally got the gig in November 2015. Who's currently on manoeuvres heading in a similar direction ?

Phrygian

Whilst BBC kebab-nauts wait for the new incarnation of the original Efes on Great Titchfield Street, Efes 2, up Great Portland Street, has already been transformed - into Kibele. No longer just Turkish, but Anatolian cuisine (though apparently that still alows the inevitable moussaka and mixed grill) and attracting celebs of the calibre of Michelle Heaton and Jenni Falconer.

Kibele - or Cybele - was the Phrygian mother goddess of the BC period, and her cult spread to Athens and Rome. Phrygia's most famous King ? Midas.

Leader

The 'Andrew Neil Interviews', in which our hunched hero attempts to skewer those who seek to lead the UK, was watched by an average of 2.9m (17.1% share) last night.

His knee-to-knee discussion with Theresa May may have sent One Show regulars scuttling for other channels - after all, they've already seen Mrs May held to account, haven't they ?

Cheerio

Former BBC Director of News, Radio and England, Helen Boaden was guest of the Media Society at the Groucho Club in London last night, lightly grilled by Jane Garvey.

The event was entitled "Goodbye to all that", the title of Robert Graves bitter-sweet autobiography, regret the changing of old orders. From tweets, we gather Helen thought the BBC Trust, led by Lord Patten, should have chosen Caroline Thomson as Director General in succession to Mark Thompson, rather than George Entwistle. And that she'd been offered $4 p.a. to join CNN.  More, and I expect there was more good stuff, as we get it...

Legging it

Check leisure trousers come in blue as well as red. Keeping across the Cannes Film Festival on your behalf, as ever.

Readies it is

Not as close as recent referenda, but Johnston Press management saw some opposition to their proposed change in directors' pay policy at their AGM today.

67.96% of those voting agreed with the move to giving bonuses in cash, rather than shares (currently trading just above 15p each). 32.04% voted against.

Miscue

Sometimes, it seems, the good taste and decency antennae on the best of journalists fail them. Nathan Turvey has a degree in media and journalism (2.1) from the University of Worcester, and has worked in and around BBC local radio for nineteen years. Perhaps it was a misguided producer who constructed the Sunday morning quiz on BBC Radio Leeds, but Nathan, no relation to Rik Mayall's breakthrough investigative journalist Kevin, still conducted it without dissent, as if it mattered.

The BBC has apologised, but it's not a good time for local radio to produce work beyond parody. Clip hosted by Radio Today.

Cold store

The Telegraph believes the BBC is about to close the digital doors of the BBC Store, wherein customers pay to downloard gems from an archive built with their licence fees. It's been running for around 18 months, but was years in gestation. Mark Thompson revealed the project, code-named Barcelona, in the same week he announced he would be leaving as DG, back in March 2012.

The problem is that there's more money to be made stitching the archive into packages to bulk out the streaming services of Netflix, Amazon and their competitors. The Telegraph says the Store "has failed to hit commercial targets". We may learn more from the annual report of BBC Worldwide - note 'may'.

Tom's dad

When Tom Ilube was appointed as a non-executive director of the BBC, we mentioned that his father had worked as a tv engineer for Auntie in the 60s.

Now Tom has revealed in a blog post that he recounted his father's story during the interview process that got him to the new BBC Board.

(Sadly, it's not very revealing about the work of the Board; we've had no minutes from the Executive or the Board since February.)

Finished very long, grown up meeting. Posh sandwiches for lunch. Have now sneaked off to Mickie D's. Would Sir like large fries? Damn right!

— Tom Ilube (@tomilube) April 27, 2017

Arts news

Alan Yentob,70, flew into Cannes yesterday, travelling with BFI chair and Warner Brothers executive Josh Berger. He looked a little tired.

So far this year, the editor and presenter of BBC1's flagship arts programme, Imagine, has brought us one new film in which he features throughout, on Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi. The show's website says "There are no upcoming broadcasts".

No contest

Last night's ITV Vanarama Leaders Debate (no May or Corbyn) was watched by just 1.65m according to the overnight ratings (that includes +1). Still, on the brighter side, some viewers actually switched on for ITV's News at Ten, which recorded 1.71m. The BBC's Ten O'Clock bulletin was watched by an average of 4.18m.

Furlough

If, say, you'd been running the Today programme single-handed for six months, as Deputy Editor, and during that six months, your candidacy for the top job was overlooked in favour of someone with marginal broadcasting experience, you might fancy a break.

The BBC says Victoria Wakely is still Deputy Editor of Today, but is off on a short-term project with World Service. Sarah Sands, former Editor of the Evening Standard, is presumably through her induction period.

Victoria first worked for Today in the Rod Liddle years, and has since moved through Any Questions, at Jonathan Dimbleby's side; launched the Andrew Marr version of Start The Week; been a senior editorial adviser to the BBC Trust, working on two reviews by Stuart Prebble, on "Breadth of Opinion" and countryside coverage.  Latest quarterly figures show the Today programme's audience has grown by more than five per cent, year on year.

Not too far, please

According to the Guardian, a disparate quarter of London-based executives are still in the race to lead C4 out of the capital.

In pole position to replace David Abraham, they say, is C4's Chief Creative Officer, Jay Hunt, 50 (Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton and St John's College Cambridge). Another insider proceeding to second interview is thought to be Jonathan Allan, 43, Sales Director (a degree in economics from Newcastle University and a pedigree in advertising). From the outside, we have Darren Childs, 51, CEO of UKTV (who made his way from Doncaster Grammar to study computer science at Stanford) and Alex Mahon, 43, CEO of visual effects engineers The Foundry (first degree in Physics from Imperial College, and a PhD awarded jointly by Imperial College's High Energy Physics Group and the Institute of Cancer Research for work on nucleic acid).

Birmingham looking more and more likely....

Eating with the enemy

President Trump is taking lunch with a number of US network news presenters today. CBS’s Scott Pelley will be there, with Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer and Fareed Zakaria from CNN, Greta Van Susteren from MSNBC, and Fox News' Chris Wallace and Bret Baier. NO word yet on who is going from ABC and NBC - nor if Katty Kay from BBC World News is a participant. It's all off the record.

More talk

LBC across the UK now gets close to 1.8m listeners a week, in the latest quarterly audience figures - up nearly 16% year on year. TalkRADIO is finding it harding to make traction - this quarter it stands at 238k listeners, down from 259k in its launch quarter.

BBC Local Radio as a whole is down 6% year on year, to 8.26m. As ever, there are wild swings for individual stations, but Radio Leicester will be pleased with a 37% uptick, and Radio Kent's 33% rise year-on-year takes them to a five-year peak.

In the Nations & Regions, Radio Wales slips from 380k to 373k weekly reach; Radio Cymru welcome an extra 7k, taking them to 119k; Radio Scotland is up 1.8%, to 957k; and Radio Ulster is down 5%, to 518k.

Talk it up

The Breakfast Show of Sharp Elbows, Today, is still pulling them in. Latest quarterly figures show weekly reach up to 7.13m, from 6.75m last year. Ideally, incoming editors prefer not to arrive on a peak. Radio 4 as a whole is up from 10.57m to 11.11m.

Elsewhere in the morning, Nick Grimshaw at Radio 1 is down from 5.43m to 5.15m, and the network slips from 9.91m to 9.10. Big boss Ben Cooper says we should look elsewhere for the brand's penetration - 80 million video views a month on Facebook. (Top video publisher on Facebook in April was Unilad, with 2,960m views; The Daily Mail was in 10th place with 935m)

Radio 3, led by folk-loving Rambling Al Davey, is down from 2.12m to 1.88m; Radio 5Live is down by 400k to 5.34m; I can't remember what sport was driving us to the radio this time last year, but Radio 5 Sports Extra is down from 1.32m to just 830k. TalkSport is down from 3.08m to 2.72m.

In other digital-only stations, Radio 6Music is up to 2.35m weekly reach, from 2.24m last year; The Asian Network is up 10.9% year-on-year to 623k; Radio 4 Extra is up to 2.02m from 1.85m.

Radio 2 is down from 15.51m to 15.02m. Chris Evans is down to 9.38m, from 9.73m (whisper it, a bigger fall in plain numbers than Grimshaw this quarter).

Better off

Is it too crowded on the bridge of the ocean-going liner that is BBC Radio ?

With James Purnell as Commodore and Bob Shennan as Captain, we still have Graham Ellis, as No 2 - Deputy Director of Radio.

Graham's hectic timetable includes duties as Royal Liaison Officer (not a good time to change horses there), and now adviser to The Vatican, as one of a group of media worthies appointed by The Pope last month as 'Consulters of the Secretariat for Communication'.

Earlier this month he was re-elected for a third term as Chairman of the European Broadcasting Union's Radio Committee, at their 23rd Assembly in Pilsen, home of Czech lager. He said it was an honour and a privilege: “We live in tricky times. The more we hang together, the better off we shall be.”

Gap analysis

A footnote to Monday's tv audience figures. ITV's News at Ten scored a very healthy 2.8m in the overnight ratings. The preceding drama, Little Boy Blue was watched by 5.77m, and Tom Bradby appeared almost over the closing credits to announce that the bulletin, the other side of adverts, would be leading with the death of "Moors Murderer" Ian Brady.

The news didn't make the headlines of the BBC Ten O'Clock bulletin. It was confirmed by the Press Association at 2207. Clearly ITN had confidence in their source way ahead of that. Could it/should it have been a BBC lead ? Birtists argue it's news without significance, an immediate event with no policy implications, feeding into and from a tabloid agenda. News at Huw was watched by 3.9m.

1pm update: Last night things returned to the norm. ITV 1.72m (10.6% share) BBC1 4.2m (25.9% share).

Alignment

We noted back in March the vital work of BBC HR operative Adam Hodgkinson, shared at a conference in Barcelona, about dragging Auntie into the world of 'true blended learning'.

Since then, there's been a cascade of Freedom of Information enquiries, seeking to learn more about this emerging thought leader. Mostly have been dead-batted. Now comes one which answers questions about claims on Adam's public Linkedin profile, and it's a hoot. Here's a sample, but do try the whole thing.

5. Analysing, reviewing and re-designing HR development pages and content - please outline the changes made. 

Adam is accountable for all HR Career and Development Pages within gateway. He make’s [sic] changes to make sure the words within there are aligned to current approach and strategy. This is an internal BBC system.

Making a mark

The exit of oaf-ish Kelvin MacKenzie from The Sun has been deftly choreographed.

“Further to our statement on 15 April that Kelvin MacKenzie’s services as a columnist for the Sun were suspended, we can confirm that Mr MacKenzie’s column will not return to the Sun and his contract with News Group Newspapers has been terminated by mutual consent.”

“News UK is no longer a shareholder in A Spokesman Said Ltd (price comparison site set up with Kelvin). The shares have been transferred to Kelvin MacKenzie.”

Who's running HR at News UK ?  Mark Beesley was appointed Group HR Director last December, having joined the company back in 2007, from the BBC, where he worked in New, Documentary & Factual programmes and World Service.

Webmaster ?

Former BBC DG Mark Thompson, a man never knowingly riddled with self-doubt, has been mansplaining a digital future for the New York Times, at a conference organised by TechCrunch.

“We love our print product … We want to produce it as long as it makes economic sense,” he said, which might be "a decade or longer". His goal was to build “a business which will be a successful business without selling a single physical copy of The New York Times.”

And he said the Times paywall was deliberately rather easy to scale:“We think … the geometry of our model, the porosity, is more efficient at generating digital revenue than any other model we know about.”

The NYT was nominated in 12 Webby categories this year - and won awards in six. Mark's total compensation package last year: $4.9m.

Enough

Yes, books on contemporary politics are like bananas.

From Buzz Feed's James Ball, we have "Post-Truth: How bullshit conquered the world".

From Standard columnist, back once again as a Today regular, Matthew D'Ancona, we have "Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back".

From Newsnight host Evan Davis, lagging a little, we'll get "Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It"

Even crime king Michael Connelly has caught the political zeitgeist: the next Harry Bosch thriller, due in October, will be called "Two Kinds of Truth".

Uncertain

Every now and then, former BBC HR boss Lucy Adams provides fans with a checklist of where traditional personnel management is going wrong. This month, it's a long blog post about trying to provide certainty where there can be none (she pooh-poohs five year plans, engagement surveys, etc). Here are the highlights.

 - We implement leadership competency frameworks that attempt to prescribe the ideal criteria for leadership. I have spent countless hours trying to nail the perfect set of competencies to measure leaders against. A fool’s errand. Leaders are not and never can be that perfect. And how can HR possibly predict exactly what is needed when things are moving so fast?

 - We invest heavily in workforce planning and skills gap analysis in our attempts to provide certainty about the shape and size of our organisation when 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist

 - We complete the ubiquitous 9 Box Grid to provide us clarity about the potential of our people and yet as Marcus Buckingham writes in his article for HBR on rater bias “The research record reveals that neither you nor any of your peers are reliable raters of anyone. And as a result, virtually all of our people data is fatally flawed.”

 - We produce detailed succession plans to give us comfort that we have a pipeline of leaders. Yet, as one HR Director told me recently, “When we looked at the data, over a third of current roles hadn’t existed just two years ago. So, what exactly were we planning for?”

 - We deploy psychometric assessment tools to give us certainty in our hiring process. Over 2.5 million Myers Briggs tests are taken every year. Yet, numerous studies such as the one by Annie Murphy Paul in “The Cult of Personality Testing” suggest that “Most personality tests are seriously flawed, and sometimes unequivocally wrong…. They produce descriptions of people that are nothing like human beings as they actually are: complicated, contradictory, changeable across time and place.”

 - Our performance management systems operate almost entirely on the basis of providing certainty where none exists; annual objectives that are often out of date by the first quarter, an end of year rating that attempts to summarise our entire year and our relative worth through a five-box scale and a completion rate for reviews that we can report to the board as evidence of performance being managed effectively.

 - We go through the agonies of our annual engagement surveys to get to an overall engagement score – a number that is aggregated to such a high level that it cannot possibly give us any certainty about how our people think or feel.

 - Our organisation charts, reporting lines and job descriptions attempt to provide clarity about how the company works but our real work is done in cross-functional teams that come together for brief periods and then disperse. The neatness of the org chart can’t keep up with the real world.

Central

Centre House, an unloved concatenation of four small office blocks the other side of the Central Line from Television Centre, has changed hands again.

During its BBC career, blocks A to D of Centre House were variously home to a viewing theatre, where Barry Norman would catch up for his tv show; drama producers; the Television music library; Top Gear production offices; Programme Acquisitions; labs for BBC Research & Development; a small canteen; and a discrete private dining room.

In 2011, two years before the BBC left Television Centre, Centre House was leased out, and was re-branded as the Ugli Campus, sub-letting space to start-ups. It was then part of a package picked up by Imperial College, who redeveloped the Woodlands site. Now housing developers Berkeley’s St James have acquired Centre House, and are expected to seek planning permision next year to put 500 residential units on the site.

Handy

People who should know tell me that the electronic gizmo that features next to Controller Radio 3 Alan Davey's semi-acoustic guitar is a Theremin, the virtual-musical-saw invented by Leo of that ilk, patented in 1928, and probably most famous for its use in the intro to the Beachboys' Good Vibrations. (The theme to Midsomer Murders must be catching up...)

The model appears to be a Moog Etherwave Plus, finished in ash, available for $519 in the States, £505.79 in the U.K.

I wonder if Al dresses up to play.

Inherent beauty

Excellent opening to a blog-post by the Director of the BBC Proms, David Pickard.

"Alan Davey wrote recently of his optimism that ‘the inherent beauty, complexity and mystery of classical music will see it endure and continue to fascinate and delight audiences and artists alike’. It’s a beautifully phrased statement that refutes the warning we so often hear that classical music is on the wane."

Yes, Alan Davey, Contoller of Radio 3 and guitarist, is also David's boss.

David wants to share the fact that 120,000 tickets to the Proms have been sold in the 24 hours since they first went on offer. Last year, it was 118,000.

Slicer

A slightly under-reported speech by BBC Deputy Director General Anne Bulford this week contained many impressive statistics, but one rather chilling target, specifying the cuts each department will have to make every year.

 "We are setting future productivity targets that will stretch realistic efficiency to its boundaries with a rate of 1.5 per cent every year for the next five years."

Whilst lower than the annual 2% of Delivering Quality First, it's a hard ask given how little flesh is left on the BBC bones. As Anne told her audience, "These cannot simply come from overheads".

Her next trick will be to ensure even delivery. A number of naughty departments - did I hear News and HR ? - had a tendency to utter 'manana' during the years of DQF....

Slow hand

I was wrong in my first, fast potted biography of Alan "Wavey" Davey, Controller Radio 3, now reporting to old DCMS chum Jim Purnell as Director of Radio and Education and Arts and Music and Chidren's and Religion and Recipes. I said he wasn't a singer or a player.

Now, it seems he boasts an semi-acoustic guitar and amplifier. I'm not familiar with the electronic device on a stand (to the right). Does it monitor an oxygen supply, or is it a variant of the vocoder ?

'Cat hairs in my guitar' Wesley refuses to move out of my guitar case. pic.twitter.com/5mD1GgxjaX

— Alan Davey (@armslengthal) May 13, 2017

Memories

The Guardian obituary of tv drama producer Michael Wearing, who brought Boys from the Black Stuff, Edge of Darkness and Our Friends in the North to our screens, reminds us of his early theatrical work.

Whilst working as a research assistant at Leeds University, he directed the Theatre Group in a production of Max Frisch's Chinese Wall, starring Alan Yentob; the three-hour show, with a cast of 31, won the 1967 Student Drama Award in Cardiff, sponsored by the Sunday Times, and was given a short run at The Garrick.

For Yentob completists, below (right) is our hero on stage in Cardiff (not Noel Gallagher).

Plurality

Whisper it, but it looks like Radio 5Live has been allowed to do its own thing on Election Night. For many years now, UK elections have meant simulcasting with Radio 4, with the succinct and incisive James Naughtie taking the lead role.

This was presented, internally at least, as a cost saving, and a more sensible use of the outside broadcasts involved. Now, though we haven't seen the full billing, it looks like Stephen Nolan in Salford and Emma Barnett in London will be covering the overnight results for the network, leaving Naughtie and Carolyn Quinn to serve Radio 4 listeners alone.

It's an answer

There might have been something useful to be gleaned from a Freedom of Information enquiry about gender balance in BBC Sport. But BBC People, perhaps rather knowingly, have responded to the question in percentages (as offered) rather than by numbers. And so, we're no further on - but chuckling. Have a read here. 

Triangulation

Yesterday the BBC confirmed what it has been oddly coy about for so long; sign-in details for the BBC iPlayer will be checked against TV licence records.

Andrew Scott, styled as Launch Director, myBBC, wrote "The information you provide us with can help TV Licensing ensure that people are abiding by the law and minimise licence fee evasion. By matching email addresses we may be able to identify someone who has told us they don't need a TV licence while at the same time having signed in and watched iPlayer.

"So we will now use this alongside our existing enforcement techniques to help identify people who are watching licence fee-funded content without a licence."

It's good to know that, in a variant of nominative determinism, the Launch Director has a second degree in aerospace engineering from Bristol University.

Curtains for Aurora

And so, the BBC's radical new approach to technology contracting has ended up with the principal office nuts and bolts supplier being - Atos.

Yes Atos, who've been running the BBC's previously fully-outsourced deal since 2011, when the French-based company took over the German-based Siemens IT division and their existing contract with the BBC. It was supposed to end in March 2015, but Atos were given an extra two years to allow for the protracted tendering process of Project Aurora, which has been running publicly since February 2014 shining new light on how to make procurement ponderous. A shortlist of three companies was made in October last year.

The announcement of a new Atos contract, to provide laptops, phones, business applications, hosting services and a technology helpdesk, comes two months late. At least there'll be no need for yet another transition team, will there ?

Demanding

Copies of The Sun were in rapid circulation around the BBC's Westminster offices this morning, with their scoop that 'Veteran presenter Nick Robinson is at war with BBC bosses after being left out of the election team.... '

'Former political editor Nick, 53, hosts Radio 4’s Today show and has been part of the BBC’s election coverage since 2001. He has demanded a meeting with Jonathan Munro, the head of newsgathering, and James Harding, the director of news and current affairs.

'A source said: “Nick is really unhappy and downright confused. He wasn’t told in advance and only discovered when the line-up was announced earlier this week. He fired off a furious email to Jonathan to voice his disappointment. Nick also has serious questions about his future at the BBC. It’s very likely bosses wanted to try out younger talent and make their election line-up more diverse. It’s bonkers. Nick is the best political voice we have.”'

Nick tweets away on politics as if he still was the BBC's political editor. As well as presenting Today, he's recently been given a show-within-a-show on Radio 4's late night Sunday Westminster Hour, called Political Thinking, and has been allowed to impart thoughts on political broadcasting with Radio Times readers. Presenting the Today programme in the run-up to a General Election is very influential, requires concentration and bravery; presenting the morning after a General Election usually secures a few interviews that make it into the archives. Maybe Nick's worried about sharing them.

Enhancing their distinctive position

Sometimes you can imagine the drafting of a BBC job ad. Here, I envisage a rather theatrical, youthful, gushing session, with perhaps two or three Hughes D'Aeth protegées improvising over flat whites, dictating into an iPhone 7, with instructions to a hapless assistant to add the basics. Unfortunately the assistant wasn't asked to sub-edit or insert punctuation.

We have an exciting opportunity to join our in-house Resourcing & Talent team as the divisional Resourcing & Talent lead supporting our Content Division. 

Core to the success of the BBC is our ability to re-energise the organisation with fresh and diverse talent and new perspectives. The Resourcing &Talent team are responsible for delivery the end to end process ensuring we attract, support, retain and develop the broadest range of talent and continue to grow the BBC’s reputation as an employer of choice for all. Divisionally aligned and embedded in the businesses they support, the Resourcing & Talent team work closely with BBC Managers and HR colleagues leading talent acquisition across all types of hiring.

Having the right people in place at the right time is key to our continued success as Head of Resourcing & Talent for your division your role is critical in making this happen. You will lead on all aspects of resourcing, manage a highly skilled team and work closely with divisional HR teams on workforce planning to support the wider people agenda. In addition an important aspect of your role is the accountability to manage senior hiring, identifying and leading on talent identification for key roles. 

Supporting the BBC Content division you will be working you will be with the teams who manage a portfolio of BBC television channels, BBC iPlayer and genres to drive creativity and ensure the channels work in a complimentary way while enhancing their distinctive position.

Merak-ulous

BBC gastronauts don't have long to wait for the return of the kebab. The former Efes in Great Titchfield Street, W1, is being transformed into a new dining experience by fund manager-turned serial restaurateur Arjun Waney.

Staff are being recruited via ads in The Caterer, which explain the concept thus...

"Meraki is a modern Greek restaurant with a cosmopolitan flare [sic] and quality ingredients. It exudes style, warmth and meticulous attention to detail.

"Meraki describes the action to fulfil a vision with unwavering devotion and zeal, and represents a part of ourselves in every step of the creative process. This ties in with the ethos of our brand, the principle of Greek hospitality (Xenia) of compassionately extending the same hospitality to a humble stranger as you would to a celebrity. The human element and social responsibility is deeply ingrained in the family’s value system and practices."

Eating away ?

There's been a certain amount of chest-beating stuff from ITV on the topic of Good Morning Britain recently, about growing the audience, apparently up 17% in a year.

Last week an "ITV insider" told the Daily Mail: “Whilst BBC Breakfast is still drawing great numbers, obviously GMB’s turnaround is a sore point; the fact Susanna is literally eating away at the breakfast ratings of her erstwhile show is pretty galling.”

Here's the overnight ratings for both shows for the last seven weekdays, in thousands...

Not adding up

It's a struggle with the apples and pears of BBC stats. A new BBC response to an FOI request refuses to share expenses details for BBC People staff, because, as there are 758 in the department, it would take longer than the specified time to collate.

Hang on. We just had a National Audit Office report on BBC staff numbers, in which the HR department said efficiency, at a ratio of 1 HR member of staff for every 72 operatives, was just around the corner, to be delivered in 2017/8.

The current BBC headcount used by the NAO was 18,920. That makes the current HR ratio close to 1:25. The 2017/8 target of 1:72 would require an HR department of just 262, and the shedding of 496 jobs in a year.

Shirley

The new head judge in Strictly Come Dancing, Shirley Ballas, began life as Shirley Annette Rich in Wallasey, in September 1960. Father left home when she was two. At seven, Shirley was attending Brownies, spotted a ballroom dance class in an adjacent room, and persuaded mother she should start straightaway.

She got her first medals aged eight, with girl partner Irene Hamilton. At eleven, Ormskirk based- ballroom teacher Margaret Redmond paired her with David Fleet. The couple travelled to competitions around the north west by bus and train. Shirley was at St George's Secondary Modern in Leasowe, and, at 15 began a partnership with British Ballroom champion Nigel Tiffany, in North Yorkshire. At 16 she got a job as an office junior in a solicitors' office, and also the same year got engaged to Nigel. A year later they moved to London - but there was trouble on the dance floor -Nigel was traditional Ballroom, Shirley's urges were Latin....

So when another renowned teacher, Nina Hunt, suggested a try-out with established Latin professional Sammy Stopford. Nina said "Do you want to get married or dance?” Nigel got the hump; and Shirley won her first major title with Sammy, The United Kingdom Closed Championship, at the age of 18.

And it was with Sammy that Shirley made it to tv. Here's a billing for Come Dancing, BBC1, Sunday 2 November 1980, at the dead end of the schedule - 2250.

Come Dancing
Wales is the host for this week's programme where Scotland crosses the border to compete against the Home Counties North in this inter-regional dancing competition. Professional demonstration by Sammy Stopford and Shirley Rich
Introduced by Peter Marshall
Commentary by Bruce Hammal
Director Simon Betts
Producer Rick Gardner

Listicle

Ofcom's May bulletin is the first to cover complaints against the BBC for failings of "due accuracy" or "due impartiality/bias".

To the mild irritation of the BBC, it publishes them in terms of numbers of "raw" complaints - and these should go through the BBC's own complaints procedure first, before Ofcom can take them up.

So we have a list of around 40 complaints in the due accuracy/impartiality list, with no idea if they're frivolous or well-founded, which isn't helpful. And whilst most are against network tv bulletins, they run the range of Reporting Scotland, Panorama, Question Time, Today, PM, The Stephen Nolan Show and FA Cup Match of The Day.

For balance, in the complaints lodged on due accuracy/impartiality but unassessed by Ofcom, we also have 10 against various Sky News programmes, two against ITV News, two against STV News, three against LBC, and one against Sky Sports' Gillette Soccer Saturday.

Casting

The part of Alan Yentob in the forthcoming musical at the Donmar will be played by 60-year-old opera singer Omar Ebrahim. Omar is a baritone, which might disappoint fans who hoped that Alan might be interpreted by a tenor or indeed, a counter-tenor.

Born in the Rotherham suburb of Greasbrough, he began singing as a chorister at Coventry Cathedral and went on to study voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

He served his performing apprenticeship at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Glyndebourne. He's made something of a specialism of new music, with roles in pieces by Berio, Birtwistle, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Frank Zappa.

The appliance of science

Hoopla ! I have found the summary minutes of the BBC Executive for February. Once again, James Harding of BBC News is missing from both the list of attendees and those sending apologies. Can that really be three in a row ?  And, in a rare example of lese-majeste, our revered Director of Nations and Regions is referred to as Kenny (could they be fake minutes ?).

The longest entry is about new performance measures to reflect the demands of the new Charter - and it looks like there'll be plenty more counting to do for programme makers, as Auntie seeks metrics to prove that shows are "distinctive".

"The Charter and Agreement requires the BBC to develop measures (and targets for those measures where appropriate) with Ofcom to assess the performance of the UK Public Services in fulfilling the BBC’s mission and promoting the Public Purposes. The BBC and Ofcom must publish at least annually the performance measures and evidence about performance against those measures. 

"Executive Board discussed the proposed approach to this performance framework. Meeting the Charter’s requirements on measuring distinctiveness and delivery of the Public Purposes would require additional metrics. These were still in development but the paper outlined some proposed approaches to them as well. The Board also discussed progress with the development of metrics to measure ‘cross-media’ consumption of BBC content. 

"Formal approval of the whole framework will be required when the BBC Board publishes its first Annual Plan of the new Charter, in mid-2017"

Yanked

The latest attempt to make an American version of Top Gear is underway - and the show will feature segments recorded in front of a live audience, next to their chosen race-track, SpeedVegas, starting next week.

The show's hosts are actor William Fichtner, drag racer Antron Brown, and British car hack Tom "Wookie" Ford, and it's due for transmission this summer on BBC America.

Morale boosting

Lambrinis all round in the BBC HR Centre of Excellence, Birmingham, this past week, with nearly every question in the 2017 staff survey getting, overall, a better response than last year.

The BBC nearly always records some terrific scores compared with other companies in the Ipsos MORI firmament - "I'm proud to work at the BBC" - stable at 93%.  The responses to a number of questions are combined, to create an "Employee Engagement Index" (you can almost see former HR boss Lucy Adams rolling her eyes). That's moved up, from 67 to 69. But it's gone backwards in two divisions - BBC Studios, and Radio and Education. Workers in both are seeing their regular output thrown to the mercy of BBC commissioners, as the Compete and Compare mantra bites.

And some year-on-year comparisons might not be quite straightforward. "In order to maintain the accuracy of trend information, some teams that have experienced significant restructuring (i.e. such as [sic] dramatic headcount changes) will not be trended against."

Where is the BBC under-performing, compared with other companies ?

"I have confidence in decisions made by the BBC Executive Team"

"The BBC, as a whole, behaves as though we are one BBC"

"I'm satisfied with my current role"

"I'm rewarded fairly for what I do, through pay, benefits and flexible options".

Chain free

The Master of St Peter's, Oxford (former Controller of Radio 4 and BBC Trustee) Mark Damazer will chair a General Election panel at the college on May 17, and has called on some high-powered alumni to take part.

Martin Ivens (Modern History), Editor of The Sunday Times, Helen Lewis (English), deputy editor of the New Statesman and Ben Wright (Modern History) BBC Political Correspondent, will form the panel.  The same trio were convened by Mark a year ago to 'cut through the rhetoric' on the EU referendum.

Where will Mark stand ?  He refused to sign a Brexit panic round robin at the end of March because he was still a BBC Trustee; now unshackled, who knows what might happen ?

Deal or no deal

Ah, the entertaining gavottes produced by our civil courts. The BBC, South Yorkshire Police and Sir Cliff Richard's barristers spend close to a week in front of Mr Justice Mann, apparently as far apart on the rights and wrongs of a privacy debate as you can be, and lo, we end on Friday with the news that both sides want a month off to pursue a possible settlement out of court.

Preliminary exchanges have seen Sir Cliff's team trying to pin down the BBC's source for discovering the singer was under investigation by South Yorkshire Police; and the BBC's chosen silk, Gavin Millar questioning the costs already run up on Sir Cliff's side - £894,852 and rising. The BBC would have to cover that should they lose...and it puts the price of a helicopter hovering over a Sunningdale flat into perspective.

Mr Justice Mann told all parties yesterday “I am not minded to make any particular remarks about the level of costs.”  I wonder who blinked first.

Backing

Shares in Johnston Press have drifted down again, this morning to around 14p. The company's AGM comes up on May 22, with one contentious item being CEO Ashley Highfield's bonus. Normally a mix of shares and cash, the new proposal from the company is to make it all cash, albeit a lower total sum than before. The maximum figure for 2017 would be £774k on top of a basic of £549k. If he used to it buy shares at 14p, he'd get around 5.2% of the company.  Go for it, Ash...

Curate wanted

The BBC Board is struggling with its website. Someone's tried to publish the old Executive Board minutes from February, but the link is to January's set.  All the links to board members biographies are dud. The commitment to publish minutes has been restated ('The Board meets most months, and a summary of the minutes is published online once they have been approved at the subsequent meeting.'), but there's no sign of publication. For an organisation that can apparently churn out award- winning websites at a drop of a hat, the Corporate welcome is now a very poor show all round.  What about a bit of that famed "curation" ?

Wild Boy

New BBC tv drama boss Piers Wenger has revealed a slate of new commissions, saying "I want us to make our decisions based on an instinct of ideas. The biggest risks deliver the biggest hits and we’re here to be an antidote to commercial broadcasting with risky commissions.”

Risks include new versions of Little Women, The War of the Worlds, Black Narcissus, a six-parter from Stephen Poliakoff, a three-parter written by Russell T Davies and directed by Stephen Frears, and an Andrew Davies take on Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.

Piers (£240k pa) also announced a new structure to support him in taking all these risks: "My new structure has bolstered the commission team to ensure greater plurality of taste and vision; they are the tastemakers who have the right palate to champion creative risks and diverse ideas".

Lucy Richer (£170k pa) has been appointed Senior Commissioning Editor, England.
Elizabeth Kilgarriff made Senior Commissioning Editor, England and Scotland, taking an expanded role for Scotland as well as England.
Gaynor Holmes becomes Commissioning Executive for Scotland, based in Scotland, reporting to Kilgarriff.
Mona Qureshi, former Co-Head of Development at The Ink Factory, joins the BBC as Commissioning Editor for England.
Christopher Aird appointed Commissioning Editor, Wales and Continuing Drama.
Tommy Bulfin joins the BBC as Commissioning Editor, Northern Ireland from New Pictures
Ben Irving hired in the newly created role of Head of Drama Development. He joins from David Heyman’s Heyday Films, where he was a Development Executive.
Anne Edyvean will become the New Writing Associate, Drama and continues as Head of the BBC Writersroom.

Flattened

The worlds of property development and tv production collided again yesterday, with the news that Princess Productions is closing down, after twenty years. It would be a brave hack who tried to estimate the number of tv operatives who've been through short-term contracts with the company over that period.

Whiteleys of Bayswater first opened as a department store in 1911; it was revamped in 1989 by BDP; and Princess Productions, founded by Big Breakfast wunderkind Sebastian Scott (who got's his tv start as That's Life researcher) and Henrietta Conrad, set up cheap and cheerful studio space on the third floor in 1996.

The company was taken over by Shine in 2006; the current order book is sustained by two hours every weekday of The Wright Stuff, on Channel 5, which will go out to tender shortly. Meanwhile, Whiteleys is heading for another redevelopment, yes, to include very posh flats in place of the tv studios. So the studios go, and other Princess output will be rebranded with production company names from the extensive Endemol Shine portfolio.

£9,600,000

Some FOI News about staff on pay grade 11 at the BBC, just below the old 'official' senior management bands.

'As at 30 June 2016 there are 61 males and 35 females earning above £100,000.'

A number are on more than £150k per annum, but the BBC is refusing to disclose details at this stage. It will be obliged to in the Annual Report, under the terms of the new Charter.

Buy one, get one...

Don't worry, a BBC spokesman tells The Mail - James Purnell and Bob Shennan are doing different jobs, despite the obvious overlap in their titles. The first is Director of Radio and Education and the second is Director of Radio and Music.

"The roles are quite different – Bob looks after the day-to-day running of network radio, whilst James oversees the BBC’s arts, children’s, music, education and radio output, as well as leading partnership activity."

Hang on, James Purnell oversees 'music' as well ? More of an overlap than we thought...

Seats at all prices

London audiences will have 57 chances to see Committee (The Musical) at the Donmar Warehouse, now booking from 24 June to 12 August. The title has been shortened from the original "The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall's Relationship with Kids Company".

This discussion, with composer and 'writer', is a little serious. Let's hope director Adam Penford sees some comic opportunities.

Webmasters

The Webby Awards tend to favour US sites. But BBC Worldwide has done extraordinarily well in this year's round, especially in the People's Voice category, based on public votes.

BBC Culture, BBC Earth both won PV in their categories; Top Gear, made with the help of Brand 42, won the Car Culture website PV; even BBC Worldwide Careers won the employment website (take note, domestic HR). The Worldwide fairy dust might have helped BBC America.com win the PV for tv website.

The New York Times took both the judges' award and the People's Voice for news website, but BBC News won the PV for delivering video - yes, including those vertical thingies; and the BBC News App, produced with the help of Code & Theory won PV in their category.  Ian Pannell's American Addiction: Heroin, made for BBC World, won the PV in the individual news item category. And Rewind's collaboration with BBC Science, BBC Learning and BBC Digital Storytelling to create a A VR Spacewalk won the Virtual Reality category.  Sherlock Live won PV for live social media event, for BBC Wales.

Unreal

Never mind fake news, I'm still frothing over fake newsrooms. BBC Midlands Today has unveiled a new set, complete with a vast two-deck newsroom and views over somewhere which is entirely created by the imagination of a graphic designer. The combination is left to flicker with imaginary videos on imaginary computer screens courtesy of digital storage.

Said graphic designer may have more insight than many - there's no-one in the newsroom; this may be an entirely reasonable prediction of the future, or because he/she is no good at drawing people.

Job done

Adam Crozier, 54, will leave ITV plc in June, for a portfolio career. He already has one non-exec role, with Whitbread.

He started as ITV CEO in 2010; in the preceding year, the company's EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) excluding exceptional items stood at £202m. This year's figure - £885m.  Non-advertising revenue stands at 53% of the company total, from 31% when he arrived.  In terms of audience share, the BBC portfolio of channels has slipped down from 33.2% to 32% over the Crozier period, whilst the ITV group has moved from 26.9% to 21.4%.

Mr Crozier's earnings at ITV...

2011 £2.1m
2012 £2.9m
2013 £8.4m
2014 £4.8m
2015 £3.9m
2016 £3.4m

In March last year, Adam sold close to £2m of ITV shares at 240.90p. In March this year, he sold £580k's worth. He still holds 1.9m shares - worth £3.95m at this morning's 208p a share.

We're told the hunt for a replacement is underway, with Chairman Sir Peter Bazalgette taking the CEO's role in the interim.

Snaffled

So, just as the BBC bathes in the warm glow of Line of Duty ratings, ITV have moved to take a majority share in the indie that's made all four series so far, World Productions.

One of World Production's early hits was, entertainingly, a pioneer of procedurals based around internal complaints and investigations into police corruption, "Between The Lines", which ran for three series between 1992 and 1994, and won a BAFTA for best drama series.

Big Questions Answered

Fans of Raymond Baxter, James Burke and William Woollard will be disappointed that today's BBC anouncement under the banner of Tomorrow's World does not mark a return for the weekly tv science magazine, but is another initiative altogether.  It's yet another BBC-led partnership - the Science Museum is renaming its contemporary science area 'Tomorrow's World'; the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society and The Open University are also taking part.

New programmes under the banner include The Innovators, a Sarah Montague interview series on Radio 4; a BBC2 series on operations at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, a one-off from Professor Stephen Hawking for BBC2 on why the human race needs to find a new planet within one hundred years; some BBC2 interactivity on Britain's Greatest Invention; and, almost inevitably a new Digital Hub, "curated daily", whatever that means.  Other returning series will get the banner, too.

The season has a Twitter account @TWBBC, which rather definitively promises "Life's big questions answered." James Purnell, wearing his Education beard, is involved, and presumably provides the religious expertise required to those previously insoluble human dilemmas. Why not pose him a few tricky ones now ?

Grand all round

Whilst I was nose-deep in BBC Senior Management expenses disclosures, other readers have spotted some salary changes amongst those who have their remuneration made public.

The BBC Fair Pay Fairy, aided by the Elves of Public Service Benchmarking and the Water Nymphs of Talent Retention, has sprinkled £1,000 p.a. increases on 60 or so managers, published on a Friday ahead of a Bank Holiday weekend.

There may be some empathy for those who have struggled through in Auntie's service without a rise for three or four years. There may be less for those, who, say, have had £1k added to £322,800. Or Dale Haddon, the HR operative who is about to take away substantial benefits from the lower ranks, up £1k to £191k.

In News, where I have many readers, £1k goes to Jonathan Munro, Ian Katz, Keith Blackmore, Gavin Allen, Jon Zilkha, David Holdsworth, David Jordan, and Jim Gray. Fiona Campbell has moved up £15k to £165k for her new role running Mobile/Online.

Elsewhere, we find that Bob Shennan, Director of Radio and Music, has had this new-ish role evaluated at £271k, up from the £244,565 earned as Director of Music, Radio 2, 6Music and the Asian Network. The new figure is a good way south of Helen Boaden's £352,900, paid in her last year as Director of Radio and England - but then, Helen did have a seat on the BBC Executive. Supervising Bob we have James Purnell, i/c Radio, Education, Arts, Religion, Recipes and much more, on £295k. So Purnell and Shennan together cost £214,100 more than Helen on her own, without top Board representation. And "England" now has a new superstructure of its own, under Ken MacQuarrie.

Speaking of Ken (whose "Q" is randomly upper and lower case on the BBC website), his salary seems to have gone backwards. The new Director of Nations and Regions was originally declared at £257,800, Now it's £250k. Is it possible that HR, under the beady Hughes D'Aeth eyeballs, forgot that new posts shouldn't have the old management perks of health and car allowances ?

Still, all bodes well for tomorrow's internal publication of the annual Staff Survey, the armpit thermometer of employee morale.