An important new job for the BBC as it tries to reconnect with under 30s: a Commissioning Editor, Popular Music TV. The archives of the 60s, 70s, and 80s remind us that recording great current artistes in performance used to be second nature at the BBC. Now, we spend most of the licence fee on festivals, leaving the studio stuff to the patchy Jools Holland show. Longer performances are tied to old-fashioned album releases, in uncomfortable deals with big record companies.
Lorna Clarke is in charge of choosing the right candidate. I hope she had little to do with the detail of the job advert, in which a computer has hand-blended marketing and HR speak, with a flavour of someone writing in their second language, sprinkled with crumbled freeze-dried bollocks.
You will develop distinctive talent led music discovery with enhanced choice and control that builds relationships with fans, artists and audiences. You will harness your brilliant working relationships with the music industry and our partners to build genuine creative ambition around talent discovery, breadth of artist stories, refreshing ways of using our great archive, and ambitious music on-demand treatments. The vision for Pop Music across the content portfolio is to deliver the best music for audiences and fostering the BBC’s crucial role in developing new talent. This role will need to utilise the might of the BBC drawing on the scale of Radio 1 and Radio 2 and the specialist audiences on 6 Music, 1Xtra and Asian Network to foster some exciting collaborations across the BBC’s Pop portfolio.
Gone are the days of TOTP which produced a wealth of performances for the archive, and sadly gone too is Chris Cowey. During his tenure, after the show, we regularly recorded extra numbers which have aired on TOTP2 and have gone on to be incorporated into other programmes. Happy days those.
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