Richard Sharp celebrated the BBC’s centennial year not by enjoying newly discovered episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, but by developing a man crush on Tony Adams. The former Arsenal defender was the early star of Strictly Come Dancing and Sharp loved his moves. “Tony legitimised dad dancing for the rest of us.”
Sharp and I are talking at Broadcasting House, his first interview since being appointed the BBC’s chairman a year and a half ago. His office reveals that he is addicted to much more than Strictly. He has a dozen channels on at once, not just BBC, but Bloomberg, Al Jazeera and MSNBC.
Sharp looks exactly like a former Goldman Sachs banker worth an estimated £200 million, who gives his £160,000-a-year salary to charity. He’s wearing what looks like a zip top from Uniqlo, then you realise it’s Zegna. He wears Allbirds sneakers “to try not to look like a banker to the media crowd”. He’s not fooling anyone. His style is totally Wall Street.
So, it turns out, is his plan for the corporation, which he “loves but which is in peril”. Political opposition and a funding squeeze threaten its existence, he says. A noisy campaign group, called Defund the BBC, backed by politicians and rival media groups, is calling for the abolition of the £159 licence fee, the charge every household with a TV pays to fund the corporation, and its replacement with an opt-in subscription. A freeze in the licence fee in recent years means the corporation’s income is 30 per cent lower than a decade ago in real terms.
Sharp’s solution is to do what has worked for Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, where he started his career. He is determined to inject rigour and accountability, sweat the BBC’s assets — and remind us and the rest of the world how important the corporation is. It’s a radical departure from the light-touch approach of former chairmen, who have tended to be patrician establishment figures. Marmaduke Hussey or Chris Patten he ain’t.
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For Sharp, rigour means impartiality in news, which remains the BBC’s global calling card. Because the BBC “is values-driven, not profit-driven”, it can report without fear or favour. “We can expose the brutal repression of the Uighurs in China without having to worry that our business in China will suffer. At a time when some commercial news networks avoid some issues, air conspiracy theories and fake news or misrepresent history, we must continue to lead the world in trusted news.”
Emily Maitlis was ‘wrong’
Impartiality starts at home. Emily Maitlis was “wrong” to begin a Newsnight bulletin in May 2020 by saying “the country” could see that Dominic Cummings had broken lockdown rules when he drove to Barnard Castle “and is shocked the government cannot”. He is adamant that “we’re not a campaigning institution. Our approach is to present the facts and not to lead with a broadcaster’s opinion.”
Maitlis and the BBC as a whole have been criticised for having a soft-left bias by many on the right — Sharp’s natural home. He has donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party and voted for Brexit. He agrees that “the BBC does have a liberal bias”, but insists “the institution is fighting against it”. He and Tim Davie, the director-general, have introduced a ten-point plan on impartiality, anti-bias training and reviews of news output to counter it.
Part of the problem is that the BBC has been too Londoncentric, “which can create groupthink”. Take Brexit. “It came as a big surprise to the BBC. The BBC didn’t understand the ‘mind’ of the country.” Transferring departments from London to the north of England, Scotland and Wales, as Davie is doing, will help to avoid the same mistake when contentious debates rage. He points to “economic issues in the debate about Scottish independence”.
Economic and business news coverage needs a large dollop of rigour. “I’ve got Bloomberg TV on in here for a reason,” he says, pointing to the screen. “It’s excellent. We have to raise our game.” The BBC’s correspondents and editors are “first rate”, but across the institution business and finance “are not as well understood as they should be. We need to do a better job of explaining them, especially when inflation is forcing the government and the opposition to make very difficult choices.” He and Davie have launched a review of coverage, starting by examining how the corporation covers taxation and public spending.
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Moving to Manchester
Will the review reconsider the decision to move the BBC’s business department to Manchester? Critics say that being 200 miles from the Bank of England, the Treasury, the City of London and other key business and financial institutions has weakened coverage, especially on BBC Radio 4’s flagship programme Today. “It’s more challenging for a business team in Manchester, given that so much business is here in London. But there’s another dynamic — the spin-off effect of a positive cultural sector growing in Salford. We are an institution for the whole of Britain. We are required to run ourselves inefficiently,” he says. Davie and Deborah Turness, the BBC News chief executive who is tipped to be the next DG, “have got to square the circle. They’ve got to go across the UK and do business news and make sure we do it bloody well.”
Away from the rigours of news, Sharp says the BBC “needs more of an accountability culture”. He means better performance management, so everyone is judged on how well they do their job and is paid accordingly. “People have felt disadvantaged here, whether it’s minority groups or women,” he says.
The Newswatch presenter Samira Ahmed and the former China editor Carrie Gracie won financial settlements and, in Gracie’s case, an apology, after uncovering widespread and deep gender pay inequality at the corporation. Hundreds of female staff were awarded pay rises. In 2017 the BBC’s gender pay gap was 9.3 per cent. It’s now 5.9 per cent, the lowest among large media outfits, it claims. The UK average is 15.4 per cent.
The BBC should also be more accountable to its audiences. While it produces great programmes, it does not always deliver them in the way viewers want, Sharp argues. “Audience data analysis has been poor. Instead of expecting audiences to come where we are, we should be alpha-focused on finding out where they are and go there.” He uses Newsnight, a show he rates as “hugely important”, as an example. “In an analogue world half past ten was a very important time slot that people would turn up for. In a digital world people consume Newsnight-type information when they want to, where they want to.” Newsnight analysis should be “repackaged and distributed in different ways in new formats on new platforms”. Expect to see explainer videos on TikTok, a platform Sharp praises for its “amazing user experience” — perhaps because of its Tony Adams dance video mash-ups.
Speed is another bullet point on Sharp’s to-do list. “Sometimes we need to change things tomorrow.” An urgent priority is making more money from BBC drama through BBC Studios, the corporation’s commercial arm.
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He points to the move to make Doctor Who available on the Disney+ streaming service in a deal worth more than £100 million. A separate agreement enabling BBC Studios to borrow up to £750 million on the capital markets, up from £350 million, will help it to develop and sell new shows to the streaming giants. Sharp loves the arts and has chaired the Royal Academy, where he introduced “more aggressive fundraising”.
Cutting the BBC fat
Money and how to raise more of it remains the BBC’s biggest challenge. The licence fee generates £3.7 billion a year — 74 per cent of the BBC’s revenue. The rest comes from commercial activities, mostly selling shows abroad. That might sound a lot, but it’s not. Amazon spent $1 billion on the first two series of the Lord of the Rings prequel — almost as much as BBC1’s annual budget. The BBC is often accused of being wasteful, but Sharp insists there are few savings to be made internally. “I overestimated the fat. Our operating margins and cost base are world class.”
He defends the licence fee as “great value” — 43 pence a day. “We study what it would take to replicate BBC output in the private sector. It’s 450 quid a year.” Perhaps, but surely it is unfair that every household with a TV pays the charge when many people do not consume BBC services. Audience studies by the regulator Ofcom show one in five 16-to-34-year-olds consumes no BBC content in a typical week.
Sharp says: “It’s a household levy, not just a levy on the young in a house.” Plus, young people get older and, as they do, their tastes change. “Maybe they’ll give up Squid Game and spend more time on Radio 4 or Radio 2 or Radio 5 Live.” He knows this from personal experience. He has three grown-up children with his first wife, Victoria Hull, an American whom he met at Goldman Sachs. He has a three-year-old daughter from a second marriage that has also ended.
After the licence fee
Sharp is prepared to consider new forms of funding, among them a levy on all households regardless of whether they have a TV or consume any media; adding a “BBC fee” to the council tax with those with bigger homes paying more than those with smaller homes; or a Netflix-style subscription model. He points out that in Germany a household levy “raises more money for its public service broadcaster than we do here”.
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Another option is to offer a two-tier subscription service with a basic cheap BBC package and a more expensive package with enhanced services, such as the ability to binge-watch hit dramas. “But the question is, should a public-service broadcaster discriminate on the basis of money?” he asks.
The only funding system Sharp opposes is through general taxation because “politicians should not control the BBC’s purse strings”.
Brexit and the World Service
One way the government could help is by meeting the full £350-million-a-year cost of running World Service radio. The corporation took over its funding in 2014. “Having to choose between investing in content for domestic consumers or in foreign language services is a real challenge. I will talk to the government about separately funding the World Service.”
It matters as much for Britain as for the corporation. “Brexit has separated us in geopolitical terms from the European political dynamic. It will be a catastrophe if we fail to capitalise on the opportunity to drive British values to the two billion people around the world in 43 foreign languages who listen to the World Service.”
Sharp will be in the odd position of negotiating the future funding of the corporation with a numbers man he knows well. In fact, he taught him the ways of finance. Sharp was Rishi Sunak’s boss in the 1990s. “I was running the private equity business at Goldman and he was a fresh-out-of-university junior analyst.” The pair worked closely together on an unsuccessful Goldman bid for Selfridges department store.
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They remained close after Sunak left and, when the pandemic hit, Sunak “asked me to come in and help by looking at the lending that was necessary to stop large corporates going bankrupt”. Sharp approved support for the steel industry, but told Richard Branson, who was sheltering on his private Caribbean island, that Virgin Atlantic was not going to get a bailout. Branson pumped in more cash and the airline survived.
‘Rishi’s a workaholic’
What kind of boss is Sunak? “He’s very detail-focused.” A spreadsheet nerd? “He certainly gets involved in the technical side and is a bit of a workaholic” — sometimes, it turns out, to the bemusement of civil servants. “We were on a Zoom call with all the Treasury officials, trying to model financial issues raised by Covid. He volunteered to be the one to do the modelling, which was a shock to officials who usually do it. It was amusing to me because he used to be my modeller at Goldman.”
Sharp worked as economic adviser for Sunak’s predecessor Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London. Is the country safer in Sunak’s hands? “It’s in different hands.” Was he surprised that Johnson flamed out? “I wouldn’t count him out. I don’t think he’s done.” Was Johnson, who called the BBC the Brexit Bashing Corporation, really such an opponent of it? “When I took the job he told me: ‘Make the BBC great.’ He’s a big BBC fan.”
Sharp is comfortable with Tory politicians, even genuine BBC opponents. “I took Nadine Dorries out for a Chinese when she was culture secretary. I liked her.”
Having worked with Sunak must surely make negotiations over the licence fee and World Service easier? “No. It’s challenging for the government because the conflict for financial resources is greater now than it was a few months ago.”
That said, Sharp thinks that the issue of decriminalisation of non-payment of the licence fee “which would have been a real challenge”, costing the corporation £1 billion, is off the agenda.
White, pale, male, stale?
Being a banker will make it easier to talk cash and raise cash, but do ordinary BBC staff agree with his injection of private sector methods and metrics, not to mention his politics and vast wealth? “I was worried how I’d be received. Somebody associated with the Tory party. White, pale, male, stale. But people have been incredibly welcoming. Perhaps it’s because they realise, ‘Christ, we’re up against Netflix, Apple, Amazon. Somebody who believes in the BBC, who has engaged in capitalist activity, could be useful.’” He pauses for effect and adds: “The fact that the preferred candidate before me was Charles Moore probably made it a bit easier.” The former Daily Telegraph editor opposed the licence fee.
As well as cash, another challenge facing the BBC is talent — or rather, the recent loss of rather a lot of it. Maitlis, Dan Walker, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr, Eddie Mair, Jon Sopel, Fi Glover, Jane Garvey and Dominic O’Connell have quit. Mark Damazer, the former controller of Radio 4, asked recently if the corporation had “reached a tipping point” when “the decline in resources means it can no longer establish itself as the nation’s No 1 talent organisation.” Sharp retorts: “Not at all… As outstanding as all these individuals are, it’s good for fresh water to flow through. Things can get sclerotic if people stay around too long. Data shows the average CEO peaks after around 5.7 years in the job.”
Does he apply that stricture to himself? Is he going to do more than one four-year term? “That’s not for me to decide. It’s up to the government. I’m privileged to be here. I’m enjoying it.” He clearly wants a second term, but why, I wonder? Running the BBC is about as thankless a task as being boss of British Airways.
He gets serious. “Institutions matter because while it is people who make changes and establish values, it is institutions that ensure that those changes and values endure. The BBC makes the UK a better place. Yet we face daily attacks.”
Sharp cites the corporation’s “flawless” coverage of the Queen’s funeral, which helped “to create a unifying cultural event for the UK. That’s really precious in a polarised world.” He puts his money man’s hat back on for one last blast. “The BBC is at the heart of the broadcasting ecosystem that is vital to the creative industries, one of the few sectors where Britain is globally competitive. It’s worth £100 billion a year. We train so many people in drama, the arts, news and all the technical skills. Defunding us, attacking us, damages a sector where Britain has an edge. We need to get our message across. We need to shout louder. I will.”
