A senior Vice News executive has branded BBC current affairs output “beige” and called on BBC1 flagship Panorama to be more “fearless” and “in your face”.
Kevin Sutcliffe, Vice Media’s head of news programmes for Europe and a former editor of Channel 4’s current affairs documentary strand Dispatches, told a conference in central London on Thursday that BBC journalism felt “institutionalised”.
“There is a particular tone across all of BBC news and current affairs, it’s sort of beige on the way it does its journalism,” he said.
“For BBC current affairs it needs to get the tiger by the tail, it needs to cause some trouble and remind people why it’s there and it’s not done that for quite some time.
“Panorama needs to be ramped up, much more in your face with its journalism. You’ve got to go for big stories and be seen to be fearless about them.”
Fiona Campbell, the BBC’s new head of current affairs, told the City University event she was looking to increase the diversity of voices and was in discussion with TV channel executives about a new analysis show.
A former documentary boss on BBC3, Campbell said “a lot can be achieved journalistically on lower budgets than BBC1 and BBC2 are used to dealing with”.
Campbell, who has been in the job for five weeks, said the BBC was still doing challenging, difficult journalism and “out there taking risks”.
“We need to be clever with money but fight to retain ours,” she said of ongoing BBC cuts. “We need to get in the room and fight for money, which I quite enjoying. I like being a bit stroppy.”
Earlier at the conference, Ian Katz, editor of BBC2’s Newsnight, said: “The truth is that almost certainly BBC News has to do less. The output is vast.”
Former Channel 4 news and current affairs boss David Lloyd said the BBC’s role in current affairs was “synonymous with public service broadcasting and charter renewal”.
“It’s understandable [BBC News chief] James Harding has prioritised news first but at the moment you do feel current affairs has lost out in the lottery,” he said.
Lloyd said there was “quite a job to be done” with more of an air of “retrenchment and regression than anything else”.
He said it was shocking that the BBC had “quietly terminated” BBC2’s The Money Programme at a time of global financial crisis. Lloyd, who once edited the programme, said a successor should be found and put on BBC2 or BBC4.
