The BBC needs a last-chance strategy – and here’s what Matt Brittin should deliver

You have never made a television programme, or a single episode of radio. You have never been a commissioner. Your only job in newspapers was a three-year stint on the commercial side. You’ve never worked in public service. To anyone in the BBC, you look nothing like ‘one of us’.

Your predecessor, Tim Davie, had this problem and he was far more a TV man than you will ever be. He was the first director-general with no background in journalism, something that many within the corporation thought was disqualifying. News and current affairs account for a tiny fraction of the BBC’s output, but it is a source of an awful lot of its headaches—in the end it was a scandal caused by BBC News that created the vacancy which you have now filled.

Davie, though, was not a bad director-general. The BBC is still by far the most trusted news brand in the UK, and is second only to the NHS in the public’s hearts. BBC commissioning is still cutting-edge. Even if it now has to partner with commercial businesses and find ways to sell its most expensive productions internationally, it is still a player. You are about to take the helm of one hell of an organisation.

The BBC is still surely the best of British media. Director-general is just as surely the worst senior job in the industry. 

The pay is lower than running a private broadcaster or production company even a tenth of its size. There are no stock options and meagre bonuses. 

Public and political scrutiny is relentless and unfair. Almost no one will ever say “thank you”. Many of the UK’s best and brightest TV executives took one look at the role and ruled themselves out.

This probably doesn’t feel like a warm welcome, so far. The truth is, you’re not a safe bet of a candidate. There is a chance that your time as DG is remembered as a catastrophe. But I think there are also reasons to be excited. 

Successive directors-general have done little more than manage decline. The BBC is an amazing institution, but it is one that is struggling to survive, let alone thrive. It needs someone who can do a lot of big things, and quickly. Some of that might involve slaying sacred cows.

The biggest task facing the new DG is securing the BBC’s charter renewal. This is vital to its survival as an organisation, and sets out its mission and scope. For the entirety of the BBC’s history this has been an exercise which has to be repeated once per decade, giving the government of the day the chance to hold the BBC’s very life in its hands. For so long as that continues, the BBC is in jeopardy.

There is a unique opportunity to make this charter renewal the last one: culture secretary Lisa Nandy is open to the idea, and everyone agrees it is the best chance to buttress the BBC against a possible populist future government. But that piles on the pressure for the next DG: if the next charter might last forever, it’s essential to get it right. 

Moreover, everyone knows the licence fee’s days are numbered. A whole new funding model has to be found, as does a political agreement backing it up. 

As a result, it is far more important that the next director-general understands how to work with politicians than they understand how to work with TV talent. Happily, your 16-year career as Google’s top executive in Europe has largely involved doing just that—navigating an often-unpopular tech giant through dozens of countries (and the EU) looking to regulate it. Charter renewal and the licence fee should be almost easy by comparison.

The second challenge for you is making sure that the BBC doesn’t pull through legally and financially, only to find itself obsolete. The British public still have a deep relationship with the national broadcaster, but it is not evenly distributed. 

Older adults faithfully consume masses of BBC output. Younger audiences have a much more casual situationship with it; they are very much seeing other people.

Radio 4’s average listener is 60. The typical Radio 2 listener is 51. Radio 1, which supposedly is intended for under-25s, has an average listening age of 38. All three of those are clearly too old. The BBC’s TV audiences often average even older than that. Of course, BBC iPlayer does better with younger audiences but generally today’s under-30s and under-40s get their content in places that the BBC barely shows up.

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The philosophy behind the BBC’s Waiting for the Out

Nigel Warburton

Most people you are about to work with think Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or Hulu, are the new competition. You know better. 

Globally, people watched 360bn hours of YouTube on TV sets alone last year—almost twice as much as Netflix was viewed anywhere. Brits watched 39 minutes of YouTube a day, on average, versus 22 minutes of Netflix. 

The future of media is much broader even than streamers, which largely work by similar rules to traditional media. The BBC needs to work out what role it can play in that world.

If anyone is going to understand that side of the world, it is surely a senior Google executive. The dream scenario here is that you focus on what you know: on the politics, and on the internet—and you make the difficult decisions required to get those right. 

The existing BBC team around you knows how to look after the TV channels, the radio stations, and the commissioning. Sometimes the hardest thing for a new boss to do is nothing. Day-to-day, though, that’s the right move here, if you’re brave enough to do it.

Most of the BBC is on the top of its game at the moment.  News and current affairs remain the biggest risk to your tenure. You need someone to handle them for you, and someone who can work out how they should move with the times, too. 

Given the recent scandals, and the loss of Deborah Turness, this is probably your most important external hire. Is there someone you can trust with your career? More importantly, can you trust them to run the most important newsroom in the UK? That’s a scary hire. I wish you luck with it.

You have taken on an amazing, awful job at an incredibly important time. It might only rarely feel like it, but millions of people are rooting for your success. 

A rejuvenated, truly online BBC could be the lynchpin of a creative industry revival in the UK, as well as our buttress against populism. You might not be most people’s idea of the man who can deliver that, but I genuinely believe you may be the perfect candidate to do it.

No pressure, and all the best,

James

Extracted from Letters To Matt Brittin, edited by John Mair and Andrew Back, published by Bite Sized Books on April 20