Broadcasting and media

So it looks as if Richard Desmond really is going to buy Channel Five. Much of the coverage has been about what he might use to fill its schedules – OK! TV, perhaps, and other celebrity froth – and about the inflated price that he is apparently willing to pay.

But there remain some very cold and intractable financial questions about Desmond’s – or indeed anybody else’s – ability to make Channel Five into a viable business at all. Broadly speaking, two kinds of TV businesses have rosy growth possibilities at the moment: content producers, who get paid for their stuff no matter who watches it, and pay-TV platforms, whose revenues have proved remarkably recession-proof (hence News Corp’s bid to buy… Read More

After much hoopla and carrying on, we finally have an answer: digital radio switchover is not going to happen after all. Well, not this decade at least.

Brilliant politics today from Ed Vaizey, the new culture minister, who paid lip service to the radio industry about what a great idea FM switchoff is – but also buried in some small print a get-out clause saying it never has to happen.

In Stephen Carter’s Digital Britain report last year, Labour set out two criteria that need to be fulfilled before a switchover date can be set: first, that more than 50% of radio listening in the UK should be digital (it’s currently 24%), and second, that digital radio coverage matches that of FM.

The… Read More

All the headlines in this morning’s papers about Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman, requiring fresh disclosure of top talent pay at the BBC, have an interesting back story.

First, at the end of last year, then-shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said that the BBC Trust – which Sir Michael leads – should be abolished, and that, in office, he might “rip up” the charter to do so. Earlier this year – still in opposition, but now fully apprised of the difficulties of changing the BBC charter midway through its ten-year duration – Hunt rowed back from this. He said that he wanted to make changes to the BBC Trust that could be done within the framework of the current… Read More

You’d think, having just been censured for the third time in 15 months for breaching the BBC’s rules on promoting commercial products, that the folks at Radio 1 might feel it’s time to show a bit of humility. Maybe even contrition.

You’d think that Radio 1 might be chastened by a ruling from the BBC Trust about a “Harry Potter Day” of programmes on the station last July – the very day that the new Harry Potter film was released in the UK – which included no fewer than 63 Harry Potter references over 12 hours of programmes.

You’d think, with the Harry Potter decision coming hot on the heels of similar censures for overpromoting U2 and Coldplay, that Radio 1… Read More

Channel 4 published their annual report for 2009 today, and you’ll see much bashing of them in the papers tomorrow for paying outgoing chief executive Andy Duncan £1.4m last year – including over £700,000 in severance pay.

All of that happened before the arrival of the new chairman, Lord Terry Burns, and of course before the new chief executive, David Abraham. Today’s event was Burns and Abraham’s first major press conference together and – while it didn’t have the frisson of last year’s event, at which the abolition of Big Brother was announced – it was at least a competent outing.

There has, apparently, been an outbreak of living in the real world at Channel 4. In the latter Duncan years – since… Read More

So Christine Bleakley, having been ‘torn’ for a number of weeks about whether to stay on The One Show (which she loves!) or follow Adrian Chiles (whom she loves!) to ITV, has finally plumped for ITV.

But she didn’t do said plumping until the BBC had made it very easy for her yesterday afternoon – by firing her. Well, they withdrew their offer to renew her contract when it comes up for renewal in September, which amounts to the same thing.

ITV pretend to be chuffed, having finally got their girl. But, writing the story yesterday for this morning’s paper, it was clear to me that the BBC – in a rare display of steely cunning – had caught both ITV… Read More

Interior. Daytime. In the Chairman’s soundproofed office at BBC Trust HQ, in Great Portland Street.

Earlier this week, the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, irked US authorities by pointing out that even the world’s economic superpower has a major fiscal problem -“even the United States, the world’s largest economy, has a very large fiscal deficit” were his words. They were rather vague, but by happy coincidence the International Monetary Fund has chosen to flesh out the issue today. Unfortunately this is a rather long post with a few chunky tables, but it is worth spending a bit of time with – the IMF analysis is fascinating.

Its cross-country Fiscal Monitor is not easy reading and is a VERY big pdf (17mb), so I’ve collected a few of the key points. The idea behind… Read More

So Jeremy Hunt has not only been appointed Culture Secretary, but takes on the Olympics brief that hitherto was semi-detached and looked after by Tessa Jowell. (Speaking of whom: what was she thinking on election night with that zip-front purple dress and those thick black tights?)

Hunt is a highly competent and persuasive politician, who knows this brief inside out, having shadowed it during the latter Labour years. David Cameron rates him, and Hunt could have hoped for a bigger job – perhaps home secretary – had the Tories won an overall majority.

He will now have to work with the Lib Dems on shaping media policy, and there are at least three chunky areas of disagreement.

First, and perhaps most sensitive, BBC… Read More

At the height of Cleggmania, a senior TV executive said to me with a smile: “You know, newspapers can write reams and reams, but it is television that is having a real impact on this campaign.”

I bristled.

I bristled not least because at that point, it seemed he was right. The debates were exploding the opinion polls. Bigotgate was yet to come, when TV – and televised radio, when Gordon Brown had his head in his hands while appearing on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show – would provide some of the most remarkable images of the campaign.

Yet if you look at the opinion polls at the start of the campaign, and the final results, they are very similar. Tories in front,… Read More