Back in focus

LIKE every new director-general or senior manager at the BBC, Tony Hall starts on the back foot because of the national broadcaster’s inability to steer clear of controversy.

The first priority of Lord Hall, the former head of 
the Royal Opera House, is 
to restore the BBC’s reputation following the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal which was handled abysmally.

Yet the Savile affair, and the lingering fallout from Andrew Gilligan’s report into Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, has seen a disproportionate amount of time spent on issues relating to procedure – and insufficient time on the commissioning of new programmes that will entertain and inform.

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This needs to be Lord Hall’s priority, together with a recognition that licence fee payers should not be discriminated against because of the BBC’s desire to target new programmes at its digital channels.

As such, his tenureship of the BBC should be judged by the TV schedule in a year’s time and whether there is more original content and fewer repeats.

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