Danny Cohen has promised to fire any commissioners who are rude or slow in responding to producers.
Speaking at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, the BBC’s director of vision said it was unacceptable for commissioners not to reply promptly to emails pitching ideas, nor for them to cancel meetings with independent producers at short notice.
His comments came as a survey of the UK’s top 100 independent producers showed the BBC was the worst broadcaster to work with in many key categories.
The figures showed that, of all the channels, the BBC was slowest to respond to emails from Indies, with almost a third of Indies saying they often had to wait a month or more even for an acknowledgment of their submission.
More than 2/3rds of producers said they had also had meetings with commissioners cancelled or rescheduled at ‘unreasonably short notice’ – worse than any of the main broadcasters.
Worryingly for Cohen, the survey found that almost half the respondents – 44% felt the BBC commissioning had actually got worse since a year ago, compared to 13% who thought it had got better. This, despite Cohen’s own pledge 12 months ago to shake up how his commissioners dealt with Indies.
Speaking at a session entitled We Still Need to Talk About Commissioning – Cohen said the corporation was building a new app – ‘Pitch’ – that would streamline the electronic commissioning process. It would be launched later this year, he said, and would enable programme ideas to be submitted to commissioners via smart phone.
Cohen said the BBC had done a ‘lot of work to improve’ how its commissioning team worked with Indies but admitted that there was still a long way to go.
‘We are reducing the number of treatments [of an idea] that producers need are required to submit before it goes to channel controller.’
He blamed specific genres, and ‘a few individual [commissioners] for letting us down.’
‘I won’t whitewash [the results of this survey],’ he said. ‘In many genres we are doing a lot better [than last year] – drama, entertainment, comedy.
‘But factual is where we are being dragged down. I do think there are repeat offenders [in the commissioning team] who are letting us down.
‘Frankly, I don’t want them on my team.’ He said he had agreed with Emma Swain, the head of knowledge commissioning at the BBC, that producers would have to submit no more than 2 treatments of an idea before it would be forwarded to a channel controller for approval.
Channel 4 also fared badly in the poll with 39% of Indies saying its commissioning had deteriorated in the past 12 months, compared to 27% who said it had improved.
However the channel did score best in terms of financing, with 46% saying it provided ‘appropriate budgets to deliver to expectations’, compared to only 7% who said that Five funded programmes to the right level.
Another disturbing finding was that 63% of Indies said they had been encouraged to start production without an official greenlight from the channels versus 57% the previous year.
As 12 months ago, ITV was regarded as the best broadcaster to work with overall, with Sky second in most categories.
More details of the survey can be found here
Image by GEITF 2014
