BBC plays safe at a crucial time with director general appointment

In choosing a successor to Tony Hall as director general, the BBC’s board has made what looks like the safest of safe bets by picking someone who has done the job before.

Hall’s anointed successor Tim Davie, the current head of commercial division and production house BBC Studios, took the reins as acting director general in 2012 following the resignation of George Entwistle over the Jimmy Savile scandal. He is widely seen as having steadied the ship effectively, and according to Richard Ayre, who served on the BBC Trust which oversaw the corporation up until 2016, he showed the qualities that made him well suited to the top job.

“Within three days Tim came and talked to the trustees without notes for about 45 minutes, with his assessment with what needed to be done in the short term to save the organisation, and also in the medium term how he saw the challenges for the BBC,” he says.

“I think many of us were seriously impressed. And then continued to be impressed for the two or three months before Tony was appointed.”

While Davie is seen as a BBC man, his background differs from almost all his predecessors. Unlike virtually every director general before him, he does not come from a journalistic or programme-making background.

Davie in fact got a start in ad land, working as a marketer for Proctor and Gamble and then Pepsi before joining the corporation as director of marketing, communications and audiences in 2005. He went on to run the BBC’s audio output including its flagship radio stations, before taking on its commercial division BBC Worldwide, tasked with making money from BBC programming outside the UK that is then funnelled back into the domestic operation.

And while he won a scholarship to a private school and attended Cambridge, his manner is also notably different, including a lack of the received pronunciation accent indelibly associated with the BBC itself.

“He’s not a classic Oxbridge posh boy. That’s in his favour,” says a former senior BBC executive. “It might make him a little bit more open to change.”

There are doubts in some quarters about the appointment. Carrie Gracie, the former BBC News China editor who resigned over pay discrimination tweeted her disappointment that the opportunity to appoint a woman had been missed.

Privately some current and former BBC journalists agree. Davie will have to ensure the other leading internal candidate, Charlotte Moore, who as director of content oversees a £1bn budget for programming, is given a level of responsibility fitting for another frontrunner for his job.

Some who work with the BBC would also have preferred an outsider to shake things up. Will Lewis, former chief executive of The Wall Street Journal-owner Dow Jones, was reportedly one of the final three, along with Moore, considered for the role.

“People were hoping that they may have gone outside the BBC. Tim has obviously the time at Pepsi but he’s been there a long time now,” says a senior industry source.

Davie will have to resist the temptation to apply BBC Worldwide’s world-conquering tendencies to the institution as a whole, the source adds.

“Like all distributors it wants to be the biggest. Like all commercial companies it wants to get bigger. That’s not the BBC’s role. The BBC is not a global commercial brand.”

The biggest challenge Davie will face is protecting the BBC’s funding. Though the licence fee is secure until the next charter renewal in 2027, a mid-term review in 2022 will focus on how much it costs, and the current government has also raised the prospect of decriminalisation of non-payment, which could cost in the region of £200m a year.

There is also the imminent and uncomfortable prospect of ­ending free licence fees for the over-75s. The measure was brought in and paid for by Labour in 2000, but the Conservatives removed funding for it as part of the last renewal of the BBC Charter in 2017.

Charging for the over-75s was meant to come in earlier this year, but was postponed amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Long term though, the question of how to fund the BBC is not going to go away. A licence fee originally conceived of when a TV set was the only way to consume BBC output is clearly anachronistic. Yet the Netflix model so often cited by those who dislike the fee is clearly inadequate for an organisation that does so much more than the global streaming giant, which in any case runs at a huge loss while the BBC must balance its books.

“In the United States less than half of households have Netflix,” points out Gill Hind, director of TV at Enders Analysis. “Netflix doesn’t do news, that costs a huge amount of money. A subscription model is just untenable.

“It’s bound to be a tough battle. It’s supposed to be not politicised. But the last two [funding settlements] were deeply political and forced on the BBC.”

There is a sense that the timing of Hall’s departure and unveiling of his replacement is designed to give Davie enough time to dig in before these big battles really get going. Not only are we several years away from charter renegotiation, but the role the BBC has played during the pandemic appears to have curbed the rhetoric of Boris Johnson’s government, which initially seemed hell bent on cutting the BBC down to size.

“In the last three months, there’s been barely a public criticism of the BBC,” says Ayre. “The big question is how long will that phoney peace last ... The public is overwhelmingly relying on the BBC. Politicians are not blind to that fact.

“But sure as eggs is eggs, some of those guns will be turned on the BBC. There are important people in the Conservative Party who don’t like the idea of a national broadcaster financed by what they view is a tax.”

On that front, Davie’s political leanings may also come in handy. In his Pepsi days he was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party. “It will probably be come as some reassurance to the government that he’s not a soft lefty,” says the former BBC executive.

Davie’s lack of a journalistic or TV-making background may also end up being an asset in navigating the choppy waters ahead. The last director general without either was Michael Checkland, a finance guy who managed to steer the corporation through the equally hostile environment of the Thatcher years and brought in a range of reforms that, while not popular, set the corporation up to weather the storm.

Ayre believes that Davie’s broad experience, in particular that period in charge during one of the BBC’s most precarious moments, shows he is up to the task.

“Everything I saw suggests he has the intelligence, the humanity, the determination and imagination to make some pretty radical changes while keeping the staff of the BBC united.”