The BBC’s Mark Thompson

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Every day there seems to be a new way to access entertainment, sports
and news content—on our computers, iPods, mobile phones—and who
knows how many more devices and platforms there will be in one year, let alone
five or ten. Perhaps no one is more acutely aware of how rapidly consumers are
changing their viewing habits than Mark Thompson. As the director-general of
the BBC, he oversees what is arguably the most respected and farthest-reaching
public-service broadcaster in the world. The BBC operates eight wholly-owned TV
channels in the U.K. as well as national and regional radio stations. BBC
Worldwide manages a portfolio of 18 wholly-owned and joint-venture channels
that reach more than 288 million homes around the world. The BBC’s website
records more than 260 million page impressions per week, and the BBC World
Service continues to be the world’s leading broadcaster, transmitting radio
programming in English and more than 30 other languages to 163 million
listeners weekly.

Thompson is also aware that the BBC is not merely a broadcasting
corporation—it’s a British institution. It provides entertainment and
news, as well as educational programming and services, to a wide cross section
of people living in the U.K.

He started his career at the BBC in 1979, after graduating from
Oxford. He began as a production trainee, and then quickly moved up through the
corporation: editor of BBC Nine O’Clock News in 1988; editor of the highly
acclaimed news and public-affairs program Panorama; head of factual programming
in 1994; controller of BBC Two from 1996 to 1998; and then director of
television with oversight of all BBC channels. He left the corporation in 2001
to become the chief executive of Channel 4, but came back in the spring of 2004
when he was appointed director-general. He returned at a very difficult time in
the BBC’s history. The Hutton Inquiry, an investigation into BBC News reports
that the British government had “sexed up” the dossier about Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction—which was used as the basis of going to
war—resulted in the resignation of the BBC’s chairman Gavyn Davies and
director-general Greg Dyke.

Not only did Thompson have to help rebuild government and public trust
in the BBC’s news division, he had to implement difficult budget and personnel
cuts in order to keep the broadcaster on track for the future. He also had to
guide the BBC through the Charter Review process, during which the organization
had to prove its validity as a public broadcaster in order to get another ten
years’ worth of funding from the British government. And all the while, as he
was juggling all these challenges, the entire media business has been moving
into what he calls the “second wave” of the digital revolution. On top of
Thompson’s mind is maintaining a nimble and innovative BBC that can continue to
be useful, relevant and entertaining to viewers young and old. He talks to
World Screen about his vision for the public broadcaster over the next decade.

WS: How do you
respond to criticism that the BBC should not produce popular programs because
only the commercial broadcasters should be allowed to do that?

THOMPSON: If
you think that public-service broadcasting can be good, you want to reach as
many people as possible. If you have really outstanding news that takes the
great issues of the day seriously, the more people who are in touch with that
the better. Where I think the BBC’s commercial rivals have got a point is that
there is no need for the BBC to do exactly the same style of entertainment programming
as every other channel. In other words, if all the BBC were to do would be
replicate very mainstream and generic entertainment, I think you could rightly
ask the question whether that is good use of public money. But over the last
few years we have tried very much to aim away from that. We have not taken
part, to the extent to which the commercial broadcasters in the U.K. and the
U.S. networks have, in the wave of reality programming. There are one or two
BBC programs that have used reality techniques, I’m not denying that, but we
haven’t followed the fashion in the way that most of the other broadcasters
have. In entertainment we try to be pretty selective about what we do. The BBC
is trying to be distinctive, but at the same time, we were created as a
mass-audience broadcaster and we are one of the public-service broadcasters
around the world who still believe that there is a real place for mass-audience
public service as well as niche public service.

WS: How would
you summarize the Building Public Value manifesto that was part of the Charter
Review process?

THOMPSON: What
Building Public Value tries to lay out [is the role of] public-service
broadcasting in this multichannel digital world. It’s what you’d get over and
above what you’d have in a purely commercial marketplace. For example, not just
minimal or routine coverage of political events in the country, but a really
thorough-going commitment to covering and exploring the democratic process,
from gavel-to-gavel coverage of events inside parliaments and other democratic
institutions, to [stimulating] public debate. Public broadcasters do a great
deal and they do a lot of it very well, but there are certain kinds of values
around civic and cultural and social goals. These goals include having a really
well-informed, democratically engaged public, having a population who really
has access to knowledge and skills, having a commitment to British and global
culture, which taken together build something which is of genuine value to this
country, and beyond this country, and which is not done simply insofar as it
makes a profit, but done for its own sake.

The BBC finds itself in a
relatively lucky situation. Because our scale in the U.K. and our brand around
the world have got clout, we are, to some extent, able to set out a public
agenda in a way which is very hard for PBS in the States or for public-service
broadcasters in many other countries. We’ve now got a new charter for the BBC
for the next ten years, so the future of the BBC as a very large-scale,
ambitious public broadcaster is now fixed until 2016. So we are in a relatively
strong position. I don’t want to take that for granted. If the BBC wants to be
strong 10, 20 years from now, it depends on the commitment we’ve got to the
values that we set out now. We’re going to find the next 10, 20 years as
challenging as any [in the past, but we] have a clear strategy and a lot more
public and political support than many public-service broadcasters have in
other countries.

WS: You’ve
said that we are in the second wave of the digital revolution. How do you view
the second wave, and what challenges does it present?

THOMPSON: The
first wave, as I define it, presented media organizations around the world with
the opportunity to do what they had always done, but by other means, and do it
in multiple ways. If you were a TV channel, you could launch new channels. They
might all be digital channels, but in terms of the viewing experience, they
were quite like a traditional channel, there were just more of them. It enabled
a newspaper to publish a text-based website, which you saw on a computer screen
rather than on a piece of paper, but it required the same skills and the same
approach as a traditional [newspaper].

What we’re seeing in this
second wave is very different audience behavior—much, much greater demand
by consumers to access and control media in any way they want, assembling and
packaging and making editorial choices themselves from multiple media
providers. I think the extent to which we are genuinely seeing convergence
between the audiovisual media and the web is striking. News-generated content
is striking. At the BBC we have a wonderful first-wave website. It’s rich in
detail and it’s done to a very high standard. But you can see the way people
are using the web now: they want to participate and post their own video. They
want to be able to communicate with each other about what they are seeing and
hearing and reading. They want very rich audiovisual content on demand all the
time. They want to be able to move media between the PC and the iPod or other
portable devices, between the PC and the TV and vice versa. We are seeing many
of those developments happening first in the U.S., and for every media
organization that means a fundamental rethink of what you are about and how you
organize yourself. We are now in the process of trying to reshape the BBC
around the new audience priorities and the new technological requirements
rather than the old ones.

WS: The young
demographic, roughly 16 to 30, is a very elusive group for TV networks.

THOMPSON:
Elusive and because of their appeal to advertisers, fantastically attractive.
Therefore there are two problems: one, they are hard to get, and two, everyone
is trying to get them.

WS: How does
the BBC approach these problems?

THOMPSON: Well,
the third problem is that they are also the most sophisticated media users and
they are very cunning at finding exactly what they want. So you can’t get them
with a sloppy, or badly targeted or second-rate offering. What you do for them
has to be superbly executed as well. They are very challenging.

We have some services in
the U.K. that are already working very well with these audiences. Radio One,
our popular music radio station, is not only very strong,but has actually been
gaining strength over the last 18 months with this demographic. BBC Three, the
younger-skewing digital channel we launched a few years ago, is building share
in these audience groups. My view is that the BBC needs to take different
approaches—and offer a different kind of voice for the different audiences
[within this age group]. The thing you mustn’t do is attempt to go young in
some generic sense—where you put a hip-hop soundtrack behind your
current-affairs programs in an effort to convince 17-year-olds to watch them.
You need to conceive of programming with this audience in mind. You need to
look very closely at how they use media. And you need to try to see the world
through their spectacles.

We do many things on the
web and on TV for teens. We are going to pull a new team together to think hard
about how we reach teens. We want to recruit a lot of teenagers to actually
create that service. We want to make sure we have lots of people at the BBC who
are members of this demographic and who are looking at the world from their
perspective. One of the biggest dangers for a media organization is to accept a
glib, stereotyped, patronizing perspective on what young people are interested
in, and to underestimate who this audience is. There isn’t one block of young
people. There are people in this demographic who are in very, very different
life stages, with very different aspirations. There are some people in their
late teens and early twenties who are parents of two, three or four children,
and others who are still in full-time education, with very different
socio-economic and cultural perspectives.

There are some things they
have in common. They are much more likely than other audiences to already be
plugged in to global culture, [not only in] entertainment, but they also have a
more global perspective on issues. Their interest in news is different from
other audiences’. Their attitude toward politics may be issue-based rather than
focused on traditional political institutions. Although we have to take a
sophisticated view of these audiences, our fundamental mission toward them is
very classical, actually. It’s about trying to engage them with outstanding
reporting of the great issues of the day and to connect with them. We want to
mine this population group for outstanding new talent—whether in drama or
comedy or documentary filmmaking, or in news or current affairs.

WS: The BBC
makes a very big investment in comedy and drama. Is it harder to make a hit
comedy than a hit drama show?

THOMPSON: Yes,
it is. In drama you can be engaged in a narrative very, very quickly indeed.
Hollywood movies have been fantastically good in engaging the audience in the
narrative—[often in as little as] 90 seconds or two minutes—before
they run the title. Almost all great situation comedies are comedies of
character, and they start becoming really funny when you get to know the
character. It may take three, four, five episodes before viewers feel familiar
with the characters. And the challenge now is that audiences are very impatient
with programs that don’t work for them quickly.

The advantage that the BBC’s
got is that because we have radio networks which commission comedy and we have
digital networks which commission comedy, we’ve got [the opportunity] of giving
comedy a chance to grow across a life cycle which may begin with a radio
network and may end on our main television networks. We are finding that a
cold-turkey launch of a new comedy on our main network is a pretty tough call,
unless it’s got a star viewers are already familiar with and really like, or
unless it is astonishingly quick to establish its characters and to be funny.
It is tricky, but looking at what we’ve got in the pipeline, and the way we are
trying to handle talent, I feel a lot more bullish about comedy now than I did
a couple of years ago. It’s very hard to get comedy to work, but when it does
work, it can become some of the most popular programming you do.

WS: Despite
the competitive TV environment, does the BBC still have the luxury of allowing
a show—whether it’s comedy or drama—to stay on the schedule long
enough to find its voice and its audience?

THOMPSON: We
are much more patient than anyone else—there are limits to our patience,
but we are more patient than anyone else. It’s almost unheard of for us to
remove a series in mid-run. If we decide a show should run in a certain slot,
we run it, and even if it doesn’t perform, we will leave it there. If we
believe in the show, we hope that the public will find it. So it’s a very
different picture from commercial TV in the U.K., or in the States, where if a
show doesn’t perform in a few weeks, it’s gone.

WS: Drama is
also exceedingly important for the BBC, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: It’s
more predictable and it’s much more possible to have a strategy for drama. You
can look at a drama script once it’s developed and have a pretty good idea of
whether it’s going to work as long as it’s well executed. And over the last
five or six years, our drama has grown enormously in confidence and success. We
are having the best time in television drama, probably in 20 years or more. I
hope to put more money into drama.

WS: Are you
satisfied with the performance of BBC Three and BBC Four?

THOMPSON: Yes,
I am. As everyone knows, when starting digital channels, you are in for the long
haul, waiting for an audience to find them and make them a regular part of
their viewing habits. So these channels take time. That’s a universal
experience. Look at CNN and most other channels when they launched.

What’s been great about
BBC Three and BBC Four is that they have produced lots of good programs—programs
that we have been able to use on BBC One and BBC Two. Little Britain started on BBC Three [and then] became a major hit
on BBC One. We’ve had some very good comedy and drama, as well as a large of
amount of documentary programming from BBC Four, which has worked well on BBC
Two. These channels came out of a plan I had when I was director of television
six years ago. If you had told me in 2000, when we were coming up with the
plan, that we would be where we are in 2006, I would have been pretty
comfortable with the results.

WS: Are there
plans for more digital channels?

THOMPSON: No,
we have no current plans. I am focusing now on looking at other ways of putting
the content we create in front of the audience. We have lots of linear
television and radio channels, we have commercial channels, we have the joint
venture with UKTV, so we have a big suite of television channels, and rather
than try to launch more, we are focusing on demand and on other ways of getting
content in front of audiences.

WS: What
impact did the Hutton Inquiry have on BBC News?

THOMPSON: What
is encouraging is that the confidence within our news division is very strong
now. We’ve had a good couple of years. We had a very busy summer with the war
between Israel and Lebanon and with the alleged Al Qaeda [airplane] plot here
in the U.K. We tried to learn some of the lessons from Hutton, in terms of
training and editorial guidelines, but we learned the lessons without being cowed
by [the inquiry]. The confidence at BBC News is as high now as it was before
Hutton and we also know public confidence in BBC’s journalism is as high as it
was before Hutton. To be honest, like everyone else, we make mistakes, and
rightly so, we take issues of accuracy and impartiality very seriously. But our
investigative journalism in relation to the British government continues to be
very robust. The BBC has been breaking stories. I believe our investigative
journalism, and our journalism in general, is in very fine fettle.

WS: What role
do you want the BBC to have in the lives of children as they transition from
childhood into their teen years and then into adulthood?

THOMPSON: I
hope children will progress from outstanding BBC children’s programs on TV,
along with fantastic work on our children’s website and children’s radio, into
a new set of content which aims at young teens. [We also provide] a service
called BBC Jam. This is a gigantic educational project we developed with the
government and others. It’s a digital curriculum—a learning resource—that
guides children through the key exams they take in the U.K. up to the age of
16. Our revision service for these exams, which is called BBC Bitesize, is used
by over 70 percent of the young people taking these exams. It’s a big part of
their lives.

We are also very focused
on helping young people learn how to use media. So I hope that our relationship
with children growing up over this next Charter period, up to 2016, is going to
be much more two-way and interactive than when children sat quietly at home
watching TV with their mums. It’s going to be a much more dynamic relationship,
but in a way, still based on rather classic values, offering interesting
[content that allows them to] learn about the world. Engaging them in debate
about the future of this country and the world, and in big issues, like climate
change. If you’ve got a creative spark, we can help you develop that spark, and
help you share it with your friends.

Although I find myself
talking an awful lot about technology, and about the mechanics of the digital
revolution, I do feel very centered about individual users of the BBC and their
lives and their expectations. Our basic mission, which is about enriching
people’s lives and enlightening them, should be as true to this next chapter of
the BBC as it has been for previous ones.