Tony Hall’s grand reorganisation of the BBC ‘is playing with fire’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/01/bbc-reorganisation-tony-hall-inform-educate-entertain

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All eyes at the BBC and most press interest are, understandably, focused on the government’s forthcoming charter review white paper. Every twist and turn is pored over (will the BBC be forced to sell this or do that?), briefed on by government “sources” and gleefully covered by an agenda-driven press. But truth be told the BBC privately believes the white paper and, critically, the funding arrangements behind it – only an £800m cut as the BBC is forced to take up the cost of over 75s’ licence fees – is essentially a done deal. So on that front director general Tony Hall’s big test is almost over.

Far more testing and potentially significant for the BBC in the longer term, and what everyone at the BBC is talking about internally, however, are Hall’s plans for a very major reorganisation of the whole structure of the BBC. TV and Radio directorates will disappear to be replaced with three new “content focused” divisions – loosely titled Inform, Educate and Entertain. Content commissioning along with TV and radio channels will be spread out amongst the three divisions, based on which they’re thought to fit best. So news and Radio 5 Live into Inform, BBC1, drama, entertainment, comedy, Radios 1, 2 and BBC3 into Entertain, and documentaries, factual, Radio 4 – or at least those bits of it that haven’t been snaffled by Entertain – into Educate. With the three divisions overseen by an all-powerful director of content. All in the name of preparing the BBC for the fully converged digital world where content, as opposed to delivery platforms, really is king.

In fact this is not in principle a new idea at all. BBC strategists have been developing plans for something like this for literally decades. Greg Dyke adopted some of it, giving more power to genre commissioning heads as opposed to TV channel controllers in the belief that only they would have the “big picture” for content in a converging world. Mark Thompson who followed him – and who was the only DG to have run a major TV channel – backed away from advancing further down Dyke’s path, believing it was way too far ahead of where audiences actually were in their consumption of BBC services, and thus allowed the traditional TV and radio channels to reassert their creative dominance. George Entwistle, however, was completely committed to breaking up TV and Radio and I remember being briefed by him on his plans. Sadly for him he didn’t get a chance to even begin to implement them.

Which brings us to Hall and the closest the BBC’s strategy civil service (as one very senior executive described them) have ever got to the fulfilment of their digital dream. Trouble is, though, that while they might look great in the obligatory power-point presentations, these plans are riddled with profound operational difficulties – many of which bring with them, once people understand what’s at stake, the potential for huge public rows. So much so that the announcement of the scheme has been postponed at least twice and is now not due to take place until after the white paper is published later this month.

For a start dismantling the traditional directorates overseeing TV and Radio is genuinely fraught with risk, once you realise how they work. To the strategist they just look like dinosaurs from a bygone age fixated on all the wrong things. In reality however the BBC’s quality control functions, which guarantee the quality of its output, are absolutely plugged into those channel structures. Who will do that and with what lines of accountability? Secondly, given that all the mainstream TV channels and most of the radio stations run content that might be thought of as coming from all three of the new directorates, where does the overview function currently exercised by the channels and their controllers overseen by the TV and Radio directorates sit? And thirdly where does the audience fit into all this, given that consumption of BBC content is still overwhelmingly via traditional channels? The potential failure to grasp the importance of channel controllers to the BBC’s communication with the viewing/listening public is completely wrong-headed. They need looking after and nurturing, and channels need to be coordinated as well as competitive with each other. All of which is currently done by the TV and Radio directorates which will no longer exist.

These are the sorts of critical operational details that high-level strategists (and their bean-counter chums in finance and HR who just love the idea of breaking up “obstructive” traditional baronies) tend not to see. This is a plan that raises many more questions – big and important ones – than answers and currently looks (from the inside at least) to be very far from fully thought-through. Some talented senior executives have already left and others are preparing to follow them. In fact it is little short of playing with fire and will most likely create far more serious and far-reaching difficulties than the government or its white paper.