Back in focus
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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Hide AdThis 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.