The worst ever Director General of the BBC?

Lord Tony Hall’s impending departure as the BBC’s Director-General could not have come at a worse time. On Sunday evening, it was announced that a second well-known female BBC presenter, The World at One’s Sarah Montague, had won her claim of sexual discrimination against the BBC, just a few days after Newswatch’s Samira Ahmed had won hers. Who knows how many more will follow, or how many white male presenters and personalities will leave the BBC because it will be frightened of paying them the market rate?

Hall’s announcement also came just a few weeks after the historically poor BBC general election coverage. Who at the BBC seriously thought Huw Edwards was the person to replace David Dimbleby? Or that it was a good idea to send Nick Robinson and Andrew Marr off to cover the counts at Uxbridge and Islington North rather than have them in the studio?

It was the perfect symbol for the decline of BBC News and current affairs under Hall. Accusations of bias are off the scale. No one from the BBC has explained why its TV studios have become a home for the cranky Left, including Novara Media, Paul Mason and Owen Jones. Flagship programmes like the Today programme, Question Time and Newsnight are losing audience share and authority.

Then there’s the dramatic decline of cultural programmes. Closing down the best music and arts TV department in the world was a terrible mistake. The BBC’s coverage of the centenary of the start of the First World War in 2014 showed a serious loss of ambition compared to previous great historical series like its own The Great War (1964) and ITV’s The World at War (1973-4). The deaths of Jonathan Miller and Bryan Magee are a reminder of the BBC’s golden age, programmes like Men of Ideas and the Body in Question.

Sports coverage is another disaster. The BBC can’t compete with the likes of Sky, BT or Amazon Prime for sports rights. No test cricket, no Champions League football, live Premier League or Rugby Union World Cup. Even when Sky agreed to share the Cricket World Cup final with free-to-air TV it was Channel 4 that they chose as a partner. The BBC didn’t get a look in.

The lack of money doesn’t just affect sports rights though. It also means BBC TV drama, once the best in the world, has fallen way behind Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO and Sky Atlantic, with Apple now in the fray too, and Disney’s streaming service coming to the UK in the near future. Of course, there have been some huge BBC successes: Fleabag, Killing Eve, Sherlock, Gavin and Stacey, Line of Duty, The Night Manager. But if you were Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Russell T Davies or Jed Mercurio, which call would you take first — one from the BBC, or Netflix and Apple?

This is Lord Hall’s legacy. So, who will replace him? Who would want to? It’s a nightmare job. Three of the last five Directors-General lasted five months or less and who can name any of them? Politicians meddle and threaten. There’s no money and the licence fee is under threat. And after years of cuts and sackings, the BBC is completely demoralised. Think of the excitement when Jeremy Isaacs ran Channel 4 or when Michael Grade returned to the BBC as chairman. They were real personalities. We have not seen their like since.

According to the BBC’s own website, the favourites to succeed Hall include James Purnell, the BBC’s director of radio and education, best known for the BBC Sounds fiasco; Fran Unsworth, the lacklustre director of news and current affairs; and Anne Bulford, the BBC’s first female deputy general. If any of these three get the job they may not go as quickly as George Entwistle (54 days), but they’re unlikely to last longer than Mark Byford (5 months).

I would much prefer Roly Keating, one of the stars of music and arts under Alan Yentob (before Yentob was caught up in the Kids Club scandal fallout), and Michael Jackson, former controller of BBC4 and BBC2, director of BBC Archive and since 2012, director of the British Library.

Sadly, it’s unlikely that anyone from the BBC will get the job. It’s not even likely that anyone from British TV will get the job. The biggest issues facing the BBC are political and financial. How will the BBC be funded? Does the licence fee have a future? Who can take on the enormous changes transforming global media today? Will a new Tory government, with a huge majority, scent blood and launch an inquiry into political bias at the BBC? To deal with issues on this scale you need a corporate figure who knows how to rescue organisations in free fall. That’s what the BBC is. It is hard to think of any major cultural institution in Britain that has so badly lost its way. Once people start asking what’s the point of the BBC, you know it’s in real trouble.

A third option is to split the job. Can any one person now run the BBC? Perhaps it’s time to have someone as chief editor and revive BBC News; someone else to manage talent and staff; and a third person to run the commercial part of the BBC, as a global entertainment company. As someone who worked in TV for 20 years, I fear it’s too late.

In 2022 the BBC will celebrate its centenary. Who’d bet on it surviving till 2030?