BBC: You’ll miss me when I’m gone
November 10, 2025
Who will be the new DG of the BBC? It is hardly the most attractive job just now – there’s little upside reputationally or financially. However, they will not be short of candidates; the prospect of being a high-profile saviour – the $64 million question being what does it need saving from? – will bring sufficient quantity to the list. Quality is a different question.
What of Tim Davie? He’s been a BBC person for a long time now, so it is easy to forget he started as very much not that. Brought in on the commercial side, it was controversial when he moved to editorial, or content as we now say. Ironically, he was seen as a move in the direction of those critical of the cooky-cutter, classist, metropolitan elitism of endless BBC lifer leaders from the public school, Oxbridge conveyor belt. Davie’s alma mater was Pepsico.
As a corporate man he has proved deft at managing the BBC’s inevitable decline in a global streamer world. The BBC has had to reshape its ambitions and decide on what is really important for it to do. Everyone can disagree about how that process is going – which just shows how important the debate is – but the fact the organisation and the brand remains as big as it is, when the truth is its relative size and reach is much reduced, is an achievement in itself.
His critics on one side will say he went native and became an apologist for the alleged baked in liberalism of the BBC. On the other side they say he was too bloodless a defender of its ethics and its independence. As usual, if you have incoming fire from both sides of a major argument you are in roughly the right place.
It is true that he can come over as a bit of a management speak robot. But the fact he’s gone when no one expected, or wanted, him to shows the infighting and pressure had got under his skin. And who can blame him?
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