If anyone’s earned the right to tell the BBC what to do, it’s probably the person who used to run its biggest channel.
Peter Bazalgette, former BBC One controller, has laid out a blunt ten-point survival plan for the corporation, and it makes for uncomfortable reading if you work in Broadcasting House. The BBC, he argues, isn’t just facing budget pressure. It’s facing an identity crisis.
The licence fee, still set at £169.50 a year, is looking increasingly wobbly as a funding model. Younger audiences simply don’t watch live television. The average age of a BBC One viewer is now well into the fifties, and that number creeps up every single year.
So what does Bazalgette actually want?
Among his ten recommendations, the most striking is a call to radically restructure the BBC’s digital offering. iPlayer needs to stop being treated as a catch-up service and become a genuine streaming-first platform, competitive with Netflix and Disney+, not playing catch-up to them.
He also argues the BBC needs to be far more ruthless about commissioning. Stop spreading budgets thin across dozens of middling shows and back fewer, bolder ideas properly. “Ambition costs money,” he’s said previously, “but timidity costs audiences.”
The report also takes aim at BBC local news, suggesting the corporation should double down on regional content rather than retreating from it. At a time when local newspapers are collapsing across the country, there’s a genuine public service gap that the BBC is uniquely positioned to fill.
Perhaps most controversially, Bazalgette doesn’t rule out a hybrid funding model that combines a reformed licence fee with some form of subscription tier. That’ll send traditionalists into a spin, but the alternative, he implies, is slow irrelevance.
There’s also a pointed section on talent. The BBC has historically been a training ground for Britain’s best broadcasters and programme-makers, many of whom eventually get poached by commercial rivals. Retaining that creative talent, rather than simply producing it for others, is flagged as urgent.
Not everyone will agree with every point. Some will argue the BBC’s problems are political as much as structural, that years of government hostility have done more damage than any streaming competitor could.
But with the next licence fee settlement looming and a mid-term charter review on the horizon, the question isn’t really whether the BBC needs to change. It’s whether it can move fast enough to matter.
