Jana Bennett

April 2008

John Reith, the founder of the BBC, believed that broadcasting should be a public service that enriched the intellectual and cultural life of the people of the U.K. He established the famous trinity of aims the broadcaster should incorporate in its programs: to inform, educate and entertain. Today, Jana Bennett is the director of BBC Vision, the unit responsible for the BBC’s channels in the U.K., content on the UKTV channels and on BBC America, and commissioning in the four BBC genres—fiction, knowledge, children’s and entertainment. She has a clear mission: to take that original goal and apply it equally to content on the linear channels and on the company’s websites.

WS: You worked both in the U.S. and the U.K. What are the pros and cons of each system?

BENNETT: The U.S. is a very healthy, all-out competition, and [as a consequence] television executives actually bring a lot of focus [to the job], and that’s no bad thing. They are very, very astute in marketing and very ingenious when it comes to trying to design business models. Because in America people really do need to follow the money in a very aggressive way, it’s actually led to a lot of creativity, both on the business level and the [programming] level. I am a great fan of the interesting things that have happened because of this—for example, Heroes, which we are really pleased to be running on BBC Two and BBC Three, and also the web creativity around Heroes or Lost. A lot of that’s happened partly because they have to follow the money, and that can unlock creativity as well. The other thing is the drama revolution of the last five years in the U.S. has also influenced Britain in a healthy, competitive way. Just as the kind of great creativity in reality and factual formats in Britain has very much influenced American television and flowed across the Atlantic that way.

In Britain we have more character-driven drama, which is influencing American drama. We have more comedy being generated, particularly at the BBC. There is much more openness and curiosity about what other countries are doing, which is a really healthy thing.

Britain is marked by a lot more debate about public-service broadcasting. The press sometimes contributes a lot to it. At other times they don’t necessarily recognize or celebrate the strengths of British broadcasting; instead, they spend an awful lot of time on slightly negative activities, that sort of interrogating—they’re navel-gazing, really. America looks more at how do you end up being world class, Britain worries more about how we regulate.

WS: It’s an interesting time to be in television.

BENNETT: It’s really exciting creatively, and it’s great to be able to move with the audience. We’re not necessarily moving ahead of them, either. They’re moving pretty fast. Because of the BBC’s license-fee funding, we’re also very fortunate creatively because we’re not pressured into trying to construct business models. That is a benefit we should really recognize to the BBC. But it also means we should make sure we are using the space creatively, because we can truly experiment, and I’m trying to push that as well.

WS: 2007 was a tough year for British television with the issue of viewer trust.

BENNETT: It was a very tough year emotionally for many of us in the sector. Yet, at the same time, it was an odd year because it was one of the best years we’ve had on the air in terms of quality and ambitious projects. So one half of one’s brain was in agony and the other half was trying to celebrate really good programs for the audience.

What we did was look at the fact that there were issues around fair dealing with audiences, and we diagnosed those and there was an absolutely transparent debate about standards in the industry. Obviously, we had some issues that were very specific to the BBC. The rest of the industry had other issues to do with the profit around telephony, which, because we don’t make a profit, we weren’t sharing in that agony.

We had to make sure we have an open, forthright debate about standards with our own production community, with the independent community, indeed, with the whole industry, because program-making is often about ethics and standards of fair dealings and so on. In the end, I believe we will emerge stronger from that. We put in place a set of mandatory workshops called “Safeguarding Trust,” which are about the actual foundation stones of program-making. In other words, you have to make decisions all the time in a program team about what’s right, what’s wrong, what might be okay, what is the right way of depicting events, how do you have fair dealings with audiences and contributors. We’ve seen people welcoming a reenergizing of this debate—both in-house producers and external producers. We will be building some very, very good resources for the industry.

We’ve come out of it having had a rough, tough year, and, at the same time, I am very optimistic that having forged a more explicit focus and emphasis on these standards issues, and on compliance, that actually this is of benefit for the long term.

WS: How would you describe BBC Vision’s mission?

BENNETT: Our mission is to link our content on the web with our linear channels, so if people’s time is spent differently we’re there in a convenient way. This year we launched the iPlayer, and that is a very important extra tool for people to be able to get TV in an ever more convenient form. BBC Three, for example, fares very well on the web because it’s got a younger audience; they are on the web a lot and they’ve taken instantly to the iPlayer. But equally it’s becoming a scaled-up way of looking at television really rapidly, above our expectations. So, my job is about getting all the benefits of conversion while concentrating on delivering really great programs, as well as new forms of content, but using all these tools and thinking about how we deliver to different audiences.

WS: One of your goals is to think multiplatform when coming up with content.

BENNETT: We see conversion not as a threat, but as a benefit to both the creative space now available to program-makers and also to the public, with whom we genuinely have more of a two-way relationship. One of the BBC’s hallmarks is the range and diversity of output, and that’s across all the channel genres: documentary, art, science, drama, comedy, children’s and entertainment. We see the web as an extension of that range. Also, we haven’t gone for very narrow channels, partly because of the way we are funded. We want to be able to reach different audience groups, but we also want to avoid having a monotonous diet. Our audience asks for new, fresh and really great programs.

Our mission is to make sure that our web content is also fresh. We know there is a desire for informative, knowledge-based programming. One of the big areas I am focusing on for the future is to create a deep reservoir of content that can meet the needs of our viewers’ lives. That involves scientific literacy, or being able to look at art not just as a set of programs but as a whole world you can explore, and to roll that through the web in the coming years. We think it’s a very important area of public need.

WS: You gave a speech on knowledge and how you are trying to broaden coverage of science, natural history, religion and other genres because of their relevance to the viewers.

BENNETT: That’s right. No matter what audience group we’re talking about, they all put the educating mission very high up in the BBC’s mission. The audience knows that much of the media is about being entertained, but they also want to make sure that we don’t forget that people also want to be informed. That gets us back to the great trilogy of “inform, educate and entertain,” which helped found the BBC. We use that to connect to audiences because new technology allows us to absolutely do that.

WS: You also talked about the theme “fewer, bigger and better.” How does that apply to your commissioning and production strategy?

BENNETT: We all have to make choices about which things to highlight, saying, Please, please don’t miss this, or, This is really important. Part of breaking through in a very busy, noisy media landscape is [adding] more focus. On the one hand, range and diversity are important to us, but we must also add focus across a very broad number of genres, and added to that is the impact of on-demand. Because of the iPlayer, we now have some 400 hours per week available to any viewer who wants to go on the web and catch up on the last seven days of programming. Suddenly, rather than having a linear schedule available at any one time, we have a large portion of our content available on the web. The logical thing to do is to do a bit less. We have reduced the amount of volume by about 10 percent on our linear channels in order to make sure we make our content more special, more distinctive. We want to make sure we have a focus on quality because once you’re on demand you have more available to you automatically. So, “fewer, bigger and better” is partly to do with the on-demand universe, it’s partly about cutting costs, and partly about making an impact and cutting through.

WS: Are you finding that the iPlayer is complementary to your channel viewing, that it’s not having a cannibalizing effect?

BENNETT: We don’t see the iPlayer as an enemy. We see it as an ally to linear television because it is adding to the convenience of viewing, and if you look at it from a programming perspective, I don’t know of any program-maker who wouldn’t like more people to see what they’ve done. Viewers like the iPlayer. It gives them the opportunity to catch up. We are seeing that people who don’t have the time to watch in just one transmission on linear television can choose at their leisure to go back into what’s been on during the week and catch up. I predicted that science and arts would do better [on the iPlayer] than they do on linear television. We are also finding that our younger-skewed programming on BBC Three is [among the most viewed content] on the iPlayer. The comedy Gavin and Stacey is creating a huge amount of excitement, and I predict it will have a very big following on the iPlayer, because that young audience is already on the web. BBC Three is the first of our grown-up channels that has [successfully migrated to the web] by offering previews and the opportunity to catch up. Children are already part of this [multiplatform] world. The controller of BBC Three, Danny Cohen, doesn’t mind how people are getting that channel. He’s happy as long as we can add it all together. In this sense, it’s genuinely a winning thing; it’s not cannibalizing.

There are other experiments we’ve done this year. We did [content for] Long Way Down, a documentary about a 15,000-mile journey through Africa, on the web for a couple of months ahead of it being transmitted on BBC Two. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, [who made the journey on motorcycles], wrote web journals as they traveled. That built up a following before it ever became a TV program, and I think that’s another mark that people aren’t seeing the linear channel and the iPlayer as enemies at all, but just as part of an overall package.

WS: What do you enjoy most about what you do?

BENNETT: Seeing the creation of new things. I’m really proud, particularly when you can combine something that is very ambitious with something of scale. It’s really important in this world to punch through with something as big and significant as Planet Earth or as Doctor Who or something that is small but has a sense of taking off, like Gavin and Stacey. Although it started quietly, it was picked up by the audience really quickly, and they realized that it’s really great. We backed something that we didn’t know whether or not it would work. I think that is very exciting.

WS: Planet Earth in HD is certainly a groundbreaking show.

BENNETT: These projects take a long time. It probably went through a gestation in the minds of the executive producers at the BBC Natural History Unit for about five years. An advantage about the BBC being funded by the license fee is that we can invest for the longer term. And a program like Planet Earth has loads of innovation in it as well. They wouldn’t have developed that style of looking at the planet so differently if it hadn’t been for HD. It was great to see that innovation, driven a bit by technology and also by passion for the subject. And I can’t wait for Frozen Planet, which is the next great project from that team. That’s something I am really excited by because, again, it’s looking at the planet undergoing change in a way that has not been done before. I like breaking new ground, seeing that happen.