Can a new Director-General fix the BBC?

Tim Davie, the BBC’s new Director-General, is the ultimate insider. Currently Chief Executive Officer of BBC Studios, he has been a BBC executive for fifteen years, including a period as acting Director-General.

His four predecessors — Mark Byford, Mark Thompson, Entwistle and Hall — all rose through News and Current Affairs. Davie started out in marketing and joined the BBC as Director of Marketing, Communications and Audiences in April 2005. That’s the new BBC for you.

Being BBC Director-General has never been an easy job. Of the last ten, only three — John Birt, Mark Thompson and Lord Hall — have lasted longer than five years. But it has never been as difficult a job as now.

So, what is in Tim Davie’s overflowing in-tray? First, diversity. The immediate response to Davie’s appointment was not another white man. There has never been a DG who wasn’t a white man. No women, no one who was BAME, no Jews. Three out of thirteen members of the current BBC Board are women. Twelve are white. But the real issue for most of us is on-screen talent. The last few years has seen a number of battles between the BBC and women presenters over pay and editorial issues: Carrie Gracie, Samira Ahmed, Naga Munchetty and most recently Emily Maitlis. There has already been a lot of publicity over the axing of The Victoria Derbyshire Show. The women fight and stay, the men walk: Eddie Mair, John Pienaar, Matthew Price, Paxman.

Then there’s the issue of dumbing down. None of Davie’s predecessors managed to sort out BBC Four. Should it be smart, popular or both? It ended up as neither. The recent deaths of Jonathan Miller, Bryan Magee and David Attenborough’s 94^th birthday were reminders of what the BBC used to be. All that’s gone.

Then there are the new kids on the block: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Atlantic, Disney and now Times Radio. The BBC can’t compete financially or culturally. A few years ago, Dr Who was at its height, Sherlock, Gavin and Stacey, Wolf Hall, Fleabag and the first season of Killing Eve, were the best shows on British TV. The BBC seemed to punch above its weight in drama and comedy. Not anymore. It started with sports rights. Now the BBC is in danger of being overwhelmed everywhere. If Times Radio is a big success this summer it could sink the Today programme and World at One, two of Radio 4’s flagship news programmes.

The licence fee is an eternal problem for the BBC but never more than now. It’s become crucially linked to another huge problem: politics. Ever since Brexit, from Andrew Neil empty-chairing Johnson before the Election to the Maitlis affair, the BBC seems to have gone to war with Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. But it’s not just about Westminster politics. Look on social media and you can see the anger from Middle England. They see bias everywhere, especially on Question Time and Newsnight. There may be an element of misogyny here. Fiona Bruce, Emily Maitlis and Laura Kuenssberg come in for more flack than David Dimbleby and Paxman ever did. But the real problem is that the BBC is biased — over Israel, Brexit, Cummings and now the US. Its producers and programme editors seem to think its audience are all Guardian readers.

Davie stood as a councillor for the Conservative Party in Hammersmith in 1993 and 1994 and was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party in the 1990s. The question, though, is whether he sees the problem. This is the litmus test for Davie. If he doesn’t set up an inquiry into BBC bias straightaway then he will lose a big chunk of Middle England and that’s even before the negotiations start over the renewal of the licence fee.

Diversity, dumbing down, competition from cable, bias and, above all, a general sense of decline. Perhaps this is the most worrying item in Davie’s in-tray. Since the Jubilee disaster when the BBC’s coverage was rubbished everywhere, it doesn’t seem to do the things it always did supremely well. The programmes to mark the centenary of the First World War lacked ambition, its coverage of the 2019 Election was mediocre, Civilizations, commissioned to remind viewers of the golden age of Kenneth Clark, was a flop.

The young don’t watch the BBC and the old complain that it’s not what it was. Why should either pay the licence fee? No wonder the BBC brought in a marketing man. I wish him well but he faces a tough fight.