Natalie Humphreys, the BBC executive responsible for Countryfile and The One Show , has become the latest corporation boss to leave the nascent BBC Studios project, the ninth senior departure from the BBC in recent months.
Humphreys’s exit, which was announced on Wednesday, comes less than a week after the departure of Mark Freeland, controller of fiction and entertainment in the BBC’s production division and executive producer of James Corden’s The Wrong Mans.
Mark Linsey, the director of BBC Studios, is overseeing a wholesale reorganisation of the production arm, which formally came into being last week and is the first step in director general Tony Hall’s efforts to open up both the corporation’s in-house programme makers and the BBC schedules to more competition.
Humphreys, who has been controller of factual and daytime since 2013, headed up the non-fiction areas of BBC Production, now renamed BBC Studios, including The One Show, as well as documentaries, features, factual entertainment and formats, and the natural history unit responsible for many David Attenborough hits.
Humphreys said her department had made “great strides” to make the BBC’s production department more competitive and said she left the factual production network in a “more coherent, diverse and creative place”.
She said her time at the BBC had been “packed full of highs. It would be hard to beat the feeling in that [outside broadcast] truck when the blue whale turned up for us on Big Blue Live but there’s just as big a buzz from Countryfile hitting 9 million viewers, Louis Theroux coming home to British soil and ... David Attenborough smashing Sunday ratings with the world’s largest-known dinosaur.”
BBC Studios now has four vacancies: controller of factual and daytime, Freeland’s head of scripted comedy and drama role, the head of natural history job vacated by Wendy Darke, and head of digital.
Linsey said: “Natalie is a respected creative leader whose commitment to both specialist factual and popular factual programming is clear to everyone who she has worked with. I am grateful to Natalie for the work she has done in strengthening and simplifying factual and daytime production and providing a firm platform to build further on in BBC Studios. I’d like to thank her for her contribution to BBC Television and to BBC Studios and wish her well in future.”
Other BBC executives who have left in the last eight months include director of television, Danny Cohen, drama chief, Polly Hill, the first BBC Studios boss, Peter Salmon, controller of seasons and special projects, Janice Hadlow, BBC2 controller, Kim Shillinglaw, and creative director, Alan Yentob, although he remains as the presenter of Imagine.
