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In defence of Twitter

Top debunker Andrew Orlowski put the boot into Twitter and to poor old Rory Cellan-Jones in a very entertaining way in the tech Private Eye The Register the other day. Orlowski’s kind of militant scepticism is useful. Everything new and especially fancy should be tested against an Orlowski figure (if you’ve got one handy).

And where an actual Orlowski isn’t available you should try to maintain a tiny internal Orlowski against which to test your more self-obsessed ideas (I have a tiny internal Julie Burchill who regularly comes to my aid if I drift off into hyperbole or solipsism. She’s been there since about 1979 and she usually tells me “that’s a load of wank isn’t it Steve?”).

But in this case Orlowski is actually wrong (my Burchill is quite often wrong too). Twitter is self-evidently home to a million Pooters: eager nobodies telling the world about their lovely sandwiches or their new sandals or their slight colds but they’re not important.

Twitter’s important because it at least suggests a genuinely new mode of communication and it has characteristics that are going to be important for all the other forms of communication so we should make sure we study it carefully before we trash it:

It’s cyberspace. Honestly, it is. I’ve written about this before but switching on Twitter in the morning is the closest to jacking in that I’ve yet seen. As you come online you become present to tens or hundreds of people (thousands if you’re super-popular) and the people you follow likewise become present to you. The minute-to-minute experiences, feelings, knowledge and opinions of all those people become available to you for the duration of your session but all those other people don’t press in on you or aggravate you (it’s not like The Matrix, there’s no actual risk to life). In fact, unless you’re paying attention you won’t know they’re there at all (and it’s a lot less painful than getting a jack-plug fitted).
It’s access to human knowledge. Regular Twitterers will confirm that Google is the best place to find out the name of Salman Rushdie’s new book but that Twitter is the best place to find out if it’s any good. Likewise, if you need to decide which laptop or what kind of birthday cake to buy or even what to do when your business can’t get a loan or your dog throws up, Twitter is the place. Fast access to willing minds. Every Twitterer will provide a dozen examples of last minute advice sought and got, tech tips and recipes dispensed. It’s an awesome repository of group knowledge.
It’s asynchronous (but not very). On the spectrum that’s got writing a letter at one end and sending an IM at the other, Twitter is close to IM but not right next to it. Responses are quick but not so quick as to make it a pain in the neck. Lots of users are now substituting Twitter (and especially Twitter direct messages which are seen only by the recipient) for email.
It’s low pressure. I’ve never got on with IM. Too much pressure: a message comes in and you’ve got to bloody reply to it right there and then. Twitter’s totally different. Messages flow by, addressed only approximately (to a group of followers) and replying is 100% optional. In fact, I’d say that Twitter is close to the optimal contemporary comms platform, shaped to fit modern life perfectly.
It’s entertaining. I follow two kinds of Twitterers: funny ones and interesting ones. I laugh out loud half a dozen times per day. I select Twitterers who amuse me and drop the ones who don’t. And people make an effort: being funny is a critical faculty.

Rory wrote his own blog entry about this here.

Brand and Ross are innocent

The Russell Brand show was outstanding radio and didn’t deserve censure.

I’m just going to come out and say this because I have a feeling you might not agree with me (at least not if you’re over about 35). The Russell Brand show—the one with Andrew Sachs’ answerphone—was absolutely brilliant. Offensive and childish (clever Howard Jacobson in The Independent calls it ‘front bottom babyishness’) but also genuinely exciting. I imagine you’ll think me shallow now, or worse, collusive in cruelty to elderly actors, but I’ve listened to the whole show and it’s very funny—in that hands-over-your-ears, can’t-bear-to-listen kind of way that edgy comedy ought to be.

Brand is a charismatic radio performer. Jacobson says “when he winks at you, you stay winked.” His schtick is an adrenaline-rush of allusion and filth: some clever, some bewildering and some just plain dumb but all of it genuinely electrifying. I don’t want to overdo this but I won’t be the first to say that he’s got a lot of the Lenny Bruce or the young Mick Jagger about him, a lot of that edge-of-your-seat, anything-could-happen amphetamine tension that raises the heartrate and makes your palms sweat. It’s thrill-a-minute stuff.

The show in question, of course, also features Jonathan Ross and right from the beginning it’s clear that Ross is in the driving seat. Practically everything lewd and insulting comes from his mouth and the whole tone of the show is set by Ross. He’s a big presence at the BBC and a big presence in the show too, an overbearing figure in fact: forcing the pace and driving Brand to go further and further. Listen to some of Brand’s other shows and you’ll get plenty of ‘dick sacks’ and orgasms and libidinous chit-chat but nothing as aggressive or insulting as you do on this occasion. If there’s a villain in this affair, it’s definitely Ross.

But the thing is, there’s no villain. There’s nothing wrong with the show. It’s really hardcore, really edgy stuff but not a sacking offence and definitely not cause for the tearing down of the licence fee or the demolition of the BBC or even the initiation of a ‘national debate’ or a ‘period of introspection’ as the Corporation’s enemies would have you believe. The show went out after the watershed on a Saturday night with a prominent warning about strong language. Brand’s been on the air for a long time too, plenty of time for any potential listener to understand where he’s coming from. This, of course, explains why the show got two complaints on transmission: an entirely proportionate number for a show of this kind.

And there’s more. Andrew Sachs, the innocent victim, had been booked to come on the show to promote a TV programme he’s presenting appearing in. ITV’s press office His publicist or his manager presumably hustled to get him on the show in the first place. Calls were made, producers cajoled, lunches promised. Sachs knew what to expect. I think this explains Sachs’ diffidence about the furore: he knew he was no victim. He was doing his marketing duty and he’d cocked it up by being out when Brand called. Earlier in the show, Dennis Norden—even more elderly, even more revered—navigated the Ross/Brand experience with aplomb. He too was on the air to promote something. If he’d got an earful of filth it might not have been nice but it would have been the price of entry and probably just as funny.

What went wrong here, of course, was all in the management of the fall-out from the Mail on Sunday’s hatchet job, in Radio 2’s disastrous executive inertia and in the naivety of allowing Ross and Brand’s implacable enemies at The Mail to control the story for days. But I’ve written about all that over at Common Platform. Have I got this wrong? Should the BBC really have caved in so cravenly? Could Thompson not have come back from his holiday with a robust defense in his briefcase and told The Mail where to get off? Listen to the show yourself, and tell me what you think.

Freeing content at the BBC

I had a bit of a whinge over at Speechification earlier on about the BBC’s content archiving policy. I find it frustrating to say the least that Heather Couper’s epic history of astronomy, Cosmic Quest, which has been running on Radio 4 since May, will now be withdrawn from the public domain all together.

The BBC’s standard line here—and it’s not an unreasonable one—is that the Corporation can only afford to buy ‘first run’ or otherwise limited rights to shows like Cosmic Quest and that if it was obliged to pay for ‘in perpetuity’ rights the additional cost would block the purchase of other good stuff and thus ultimately limit the choice provided to licence-fee payers.

This is undoubtedly true but also defeatist and essentially an inadequate response to the changing imperatives of the network era. The BBC needs to be braver and more committed to change. Here are a few things that could and should be done to unlock more good content for public use:

The BBC should free access to content that has limited (or zero) secondary value. That’s not to say content that’s no good: just stuff that can’t easily be sold on or exploited after it’s been transmitted. Lionel Kellaway’s brilliant Radio 4 programme about Rooks (a favourite of mine) is an asset of great beauty and immeasurable value to its listeners but, let’s face it, hardly any value in an open marketplace for audio content.

The BBC should be a rights innovator: hybrid methods of preserving public access to assets and commercial value to creators and license-holders should be developed and tested on real content. Not easy and not possible without compromise on both sides but the Corporation is uniquely placed to drive innovation that’s beneficial to UK licence fee-payers.

The BBC should be a copyright activist. Legislators should be lobbied to help redesign copyright law to preserve access to orphaned assets: content that’s not being exploited but can’t be freed because it still has a nominal owner. The Corporation should fund work to design use-it-or-lose-it laws and other innovative devices that emphasise access and public benefit over predatory and unfair protection.

The BBC should set targets for freeing content. By defining and prioritising categories of assets that should be freed, the BBC could drive the accumulation of a big pool of useful material held in the public domain permanently. Announcing in advance that certain content categories—perhaps whole channels or strands—are in future going to be purchased for permanent public access would encourage creators to get on with it and adjust their pricing and commercial terms for the new climate.

The goal should be to define and then grow the pool of free-to-use, public domain content archived at bbc.co.uk and not to apologise for the inflexibility and intransigence of rights-holders and exploiters. The potential gain for UK Plc and UK citizens could be enormous. The “there’s nothing we can do about it , guv” response must be made a thing of the past.

Could the competition referral save Kangaroo?

Competition regulators could force Project Kangaroo to open its player to all-comers and trigger a renaissance in British video creation: OpenKangaroo?

The Office of Fair Trading (“acting decisively to stop hardcore or flagrant offenders”) has r eferred Project Kangaroo to the Competition Commissioner. Sky and Virgin kicked off the enquiry so they’ll be pleased with the result. But there’s a reasonable chance this referral will be good news all round, even for Kangaroo.

First, and most obvious, the 24-week delay (that’s how long it takes) puts launch back to early 2009. By then the entire market will have shifted again: just remember how different everything looked when Kangaroo was first discussed. Back then (almost exactly a year ago) VoD looked fairly simple: it was going to be a paid-for, walled garden kind of business with TV shows delivered in standalone applications, wrapped in heavy-duty DRM.

Now, led by the BBC’s second-generation streaming iPlayer, VoD looks very different: it’s free, it’s delivered in a browser and DRM is fading fast. The OFT’s decision has handed Kangaroo the opportunity to sit out the next six months of cock-ups and dead ends and time travel to a different context all together. Sure it’s risky (and costly) to sit on your hands for half a year in a fast moving business but the opportunity to watch the other early entrants tripping over their laces and going bust surely can’t be missed.

The second reason why a referral might be a good thing will be more interesting to viewers and independent creators. Nobody’s betting on a drastic outcome for the enquiry. Hardly anyone’s expecting the Commissioner to close Kangaroo or break up the joint venture. The smart money’s on some fairly tough pre-launch modifications to the service and back to business. For instance, Sky and other competitors will want access to the Kangaroo player on equal terms. But granting Sky and any limited list of broadcasters slots on the Kangaroo player would require a competition enquiry of its own: every TV broadcaster, every video director, every creator of anything remotely like a TV programme will want a slot too (and that includes you lot with your Qik phones). And if the Commissioner obliges Kangaroo to open the player to all-comers that’ll be something like a revolution. An open Kangaroo will be a very different creature from the planned one.

It’ll be a platform to begin with. And it’ll probably be a tiered affair, with the investing partners’ shows featured at the top and the stuff from the great unwashed further down or out at the fringes. It’ll need a self-service section, something that works more like YouTube than a buttoned-down TV station. So it’ll need to have tools that let creators and uploaders make money, that give them access to Kangaroo’s presumably awesome ad sales resource. It might have shooting and editing tools, workshops and an advice forum. It might even commission content.

Suddenly, a post-OFT Kangaroo looks like a whole different kind of place: Kangaroo 2.0? OpenKangaroo? Sky’s self-interested intervention might have a most unexpected result. It might turn Kangaroo from—let’s face it—a slightly desperate tactical response to the seething grassroots video revolution into a national asset: a focus for the UK’s creative community. The new Kangaroo might be a genuine British hub for the emerging layer of video creators occupying the space below the telly production indies who got their leg up from Channel 4 25 years ago. In fact, it might be ‘a Channel 4 for the rest to us’. I don’t know about you but I’m suddenly finding the prospect of an OFT referral much more interesting than I’d ever expected it could be. Fingers crossed.

The BBC common platform debate

Last Wednesday’s common platform debate at Broadcasting House was a hit. We talked for nearly three hours plus time in the pub afterwards. Mike covered it (live) over at Techcrunch UK (and I know the event was recorded in some form) and other bloggers have written it up (although at least one was actually watching the football!).

The topic—the BBC’s role in a post-broadcast public service ecology—is clearly going to be a very rich and productive one. Here is my summary of the event’s interesting bits, organised under useful headings. I was chairing the event so I wasn’t able to take proper notes—this is mostly from memory. Please chip in with your own recollections if you were present.

There’s a lot the BBC could be doing.

We’re ten years+ into the network revolution and the BBC’s impact so far has been a raft of quality content on multiple platforms (like this weekend’s quite awesome Glastonbury coverage) and very little else: hardly any of the kind of gutsy innovation the nation and the economy need. We’ve seen cautious incremental change when the circumstances (demographic and economic change at home, rampant growth in our most important competitor economies, environmental change of unknown scope…) demand courageous leaps in the dark.

The BBC is the nation’s most important machine for the production of consensus: nervous, go-slow adoption of common platform goals just won’t do. Tom Loosemore, who used to work at the BBC and now divides his time between Ofcom and The Cabinet Office, provided a handy seven-item list of things the Corporation ought to be sharing which I will now crudely paraphrase and expand (Tom would want me to point out that I’ve added quite a lot to his list in case any of it is traced back to him, causing him to be thrown from a high window in Downing Street):

1. Research. The Corporation produces (and pays for the production of) huge amounts of proprietary audience research, much of it hardly used. This should be made available to business and community, preferably in a useful, nicely-tabulated form.

2. Code. All code written at the BBC should be published under a suitable Open Source licence (Azeem Azhar was conveniently on hand to rehearse his BBC Public Licence idea from 2002). There’s really no excuse for this. It’s not obvious which licence would apply but if there isn’t one out there, one should be invented.

3. Data. The BBC produces and buys lots of data: from TV listings to electoral data. Sadly, much of it is not owned outright and some has even been stupidly given away (like the TV listings gifted to Red Bee on privatisation). What data the Corporation does own outright, however, should be made available freely.

4. Tools. The BBC should be obliged to give away or at least develop nationally-useful tools. Tom’s examples were geolocation and some kind of UK blog search tool. Others came to us in the pub afterwards but I’ve forgotten them.

5. Incubation and investment. The BBC could ‘do a Channel 4’ and seed a whole layer of productive and profitable new media production and technology businesses. Production quotas should be enlarged and a framework put in place to support startups and small businesses in the sector (analogous, I suppose, to the cost-plus budgeting methods used in TV production).

6. Traffic. This could be huge. The phrase ‘trusted guide’ has been current at the BBC since John Birt discovered the Internet in 1995 but it’s never been given meaning. Institutional caution has stopped the Corporation from linking to more than a handful of external sites, and always via a forest of disclaimers. It was pointed out at the debate that the addition of MusicBrainz to the BBC’s music sites adds something like 3 million external links so that’s a start I guess!

7. The Internet. The BBC shouldn’t attempt to augment, enhance or wall off any part of the Internet. The BBC’s endorsement of net neutrality is vital. The Corporation should build on freely-available net tools and services and avoid duplication at all costs.

Rights are a big deal. And they’re not going away.

Outsiders are impatient with the BBC’s rights regime. They want uncomplicated one-stop access to BBC content (and not necessarily for free) but instead they get a spaghetti of overlapping rights owners and regimes. Only the simplest and most directly-owned content can be shared easily: one example cited was Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time: live speech recorded in a BBC studio with expert contributions paid-for outright and no music. But a tiny proportion of the Corporation’s daily output belongs in the In Our Time category. Even historic and archive material is often encumbered by multiple rights owners (or potential rights owners) and the BBC’s own commercial arm has its own agenda and often has first call on original content.

Two lessons. First: if you’re a tech or media entrepreneur and your business idea needs access to BBC content, think again. Building-in any kind of dependency on the BBC’s rights regime will scare away investors faster than bird flu. Second: the BBC could simplify the regime and persuade (read: force) rights owners to participate, especially for old and potentially neglected material that is unnecessarily encumbered. The key here may lie with legislators who could help by reasserting the BBC’s larger purpose and agreeing to compromise the inalienable rights of content owners and creators a little in return for a more open environment (pay attention Cliff Richard).

BBC new media managers are not the problem

On the evidence of Wednesday evening’s showing, slow progress in building a common platform in Britain is not the fault of the managers building it. Tony Ageh, James Cridland, Jem Stone and other BBC staff present are evidently all passionate drivers of change (and I know many others like them inside the Beeb). In many respects they were the most forward-thinking people in the room: Tony Ageh’s suggestion that he’d like us to be able to right-click on any asset at bbc.co.uk to get a pop-up detailing its ownership and rules for use was particularly inspiring. Presumably many years spent wrestling with a highly-regulated, historically-cautious tax payer-funded monolith has produced a pragmatic approach to achieving change but there’s evidently no absence of enthusiasm for it.

Channel 4 is ready to help

It’s not all about the BBC. Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s new Director of New Media, spoke with what I’d characterise as cautious enthusiasm about the station’s status as a ‘convening brand’ (that’s a technical term. Look it up) and about its potential to provide a £50M springboard for UK tech and media businesses via the fascinating and so far enigmatic 4IP fund. More than one person used the analogy of Channel 4’s seeding of the British independent TV production business 25 years ago. Gisby nodded.

I’d certainly like to see Channel 4 function as a cheeky and innovative counterweight to the BBC in building out the common platform. The potential is clearly there in 4IP.

The BBC has a history of engineering leadership

All sorts of technical innovations were invented at the BBC and then spread into the wider industry. James Cridland put it like this: “we agree in technology and compete in content”. An organisation accustomed to sharing its production and distribution tech but closely guarding the programmes made with it will inevitably find it hard to shift to a new model. One where technology leadership has been replaced by open source collaborative methods and where content is freely shared.

Tech entrepreneurs don’t care much

On the evidence of our debate there is no real clamour for access to BBC resources from the UK tech startup industry. In fact there’s significant mutual ignorance. Startups don’t know how to access the BBC’s fund of good stuff and the BBC doesn’t know who might want it or in which formats. Entrepreneurs heard at the event said things like: “who do I talk to about access to historic news content?” and “how do I get a commercial agreement for use of programme metadata?” I think for most people—adventurous tech startups included—the BBC is part of the woodwork, practically invisible. The idea that it might function as an enabler for enterprise or community is not widespread. There’s work to be done there.

There were many other fascinating strands to our debate—the BBC’s monopolistic behaviour in some categories, market failure in others, the absence of true APIs and other easy methods of calling on BBC assets, public value tests… to name a few. I’ll try to return to some of them here. Others have covered the debate elsewhere. I’d like to see a follow-up meeting soon. I’m also planning to put up a web site (probably a wiki) for the further discussion of these matters. Do let me know if you’d like to help.

Thanks to Mike Butcher for putting the considerable weight of TechCrunch UK behind this. It was his initial post that got things going in the first place. Thanks to all the panelists, all of whom have important jobs to do and better things to be doing with their Wednesday nights. Thanks in particular to James Cridland who organised the venue, catering and lots of other stuff for us, as well as being a trenchant panelist and defender of the BBC’s honour! Thanks finally to attendees and bloggers who made the thing lively and interesting!

Coming to tonight’s Common Platform debate?

First of all, it’s sold out, so if you’ve not got a confirmed seat I’m afraid you’ll just have to fight your way past three rows of braided Commissionaires (mostly veterans of the Desert Rats) at Broadcasting House to get to the Council Chamber (like that brilliant scene in Extras where Stephen Merchant tries to vault the security screens to get into a BBC building). If you do have a confirmed seat, on the other hand, please show up at Broadcasting House reception (Portland Place) for a prompt start at 19:00.

Second, the confirmed panel is as follows:

Tony Ageh, Controller, BBC Internet
Jem Stone, Portfolio Executive, Social Media for Future Media & Technology, BBC
James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology, BBC Audio & Music
Tom Loosemore, Ofcom and The Cabinet Office
Jon Gisby, Director of New Media, Channel 4
Azeem Azhar

Third, here’s the briefing I sent to panelists yesterday. For those of you who’ve been bugging Mike and myself for tickets, I really am sorry. Next time we’ll book Wembley Arena.

Fourth, if you’ve got a question you think really ought to be asked of this panel, drop me a line and I’ll try to squeeze it in.

Watch this space (and TechCrunch UK) for the outcome of what I expect will be a fascinating debate. I think Mike himself will be live blogging so TechCrunch might be a good place to start.

What’s the difference between the common platform and the web?

James Cherkoff wonders (in a comment) if my common platform isn’t really just… well… the web. It’s a good question because the web, of course, is the mother-and-father of all platforms, a place with such a richness of tools and outlets that it might seem as if it has no need of an additional layer like a common platform. But I think the answer to James’ question really is ‘no’.

The Common Platform (see, it’s already acquired a ‘The’ and Capital Letters like it’s a real thing!) is a designed overlay for the web, an elaboration. The sort of secondary functionality that all platforms sooner-or-later acquire. That’s not to say that it’s separate from or outside the web proper (not a walled garden or a locked-down proprietary thing). In fact it’s strength will lie in the fact that it is profoundly of the web.

Trying to be as ‘web-like’ as possible here I can imagine a common platform, at its simplest, as barely more than a commissioning model plus a tag-cloud. At its largest and most monolithic… It shouldn’t really be large or monolithic.

Expanding on this slightly, the Common Platform should be an organisational device plus some commissioning logic plus some kind of resource discovery gubbins and a wafer of UI to point all the different stakeholders at what they need. Bob’s Your Uncle. Job done. Public service media transformed. Next!

Another confirmed speaker for the Common Platform debate

Jon Gisby, who is Director of New Media at Channel 4, is now confirmed as a panelist in our debate next week about the BBC’s public service obligations—and beyond! (echoey sci-fi voice there). Jon is listed in my address book as ‘Managing Director, Freeserve’ which a) shows you how useful my address book is and b) suggests that I may well have tried to sell him another.com (there are very few people of any stature in the UK web industry to whom I did not try to sell another.com—but that’s another story).

A common platform?

What does the future of public service media look like? What comes after the current crop of public service entities, which are all essentially channels? Could it be a kind of platform?

We already have lots of platforms: Playstation, the web, Windows, Ubuntu, Series 60 mobiles. Systems that live low down in the stack, providing a bunch of services and data for applications that run on top. We’re familiar with how they work. They make life easier by eliminating duplication and they make possible all sorts of creative and useful work that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

So what I’m talking about is building a big, generous, accommodating public platform that runs code and community and content – making life easier for creators and communities in Britain. A kind of giant shared computer that exposes useful assets like public data, educational content, archives and library catalogues, health data and democratic and community tools… The whole range of useful and enabling content and services that comes from state providers like the BBC, the Ordnance Survey and the Public Records Office and also the good stuff that comes from the commercial and third sectors.

A national public service platform like this would be a public good, a freely accessible toolset, meeting place and notice-board. People would use it tell stories about all the big issues: the drama about free content and software, health service reform, access to public data, surveillance and health records, copyright, immigration, educational standards, content ratings for kids’ media, community access, capacity building for excluded groups and all the rest.

A platform like this would be open to all: individuals, businesses, clubs and schools. A rich and open toolset that people and groups could use to represent themselves, communicate their values, publish cool and useful content (and make money), but also to make mischief, dissent and pure entertainment—nothing worthy about this platform. Could something like this be a legitimate replacement or supplement for the industrial era public service outlets (the terrestrial TV channels, essentially) we now treasure but recognise are really struggling for relevance?

This is not a new idea. I first wrote about it over ten years ago. Lots of others have done so too. Ofcom even came up with a name for it (before they lost interest): the Public Service Publisher. Tessa Jowell, when she was Minister of Culture, advanced a similar idea with more of an economic edge: she called the BBC ‘venture capital for the UK’ in speeches like this one made all over the place. Jem Stone alerts me to the fact that senior managers at the Beeb seem to have picked the idea up again. Caroline Thompson, the most senior BBC Executive you’ve never heard of, was recently heard testing it on a Manchester audience (James Cherkoff points out that Peter Bazalgette’s Boggle is close to the Common Platform idea too).

I’m going to suggest that we call this new public service vehicle our Common Platform.

Next Wednesday evening I’m chairing a debate about the BBC’s role in the subtly different world after the Trust’s review of bbc.co.uk. The debate’s a response to the fairly robust debate that’s been going on at uk.techcrunch.com since Mike Butcher put the boot into the Beeb after the report came out. We’ve got several important BBC people booked to participate plus Ofcom’s Tom Loosemore. Sadly the event is already a full house but watch this space for more news and a summary of the debate once we’ve had it.

Is the BBC Trust a Trojan Horse?

Looks like it, doesn’t it? The history: a short-term crisis (Hutton and then all that premium-rate stuff and the lies about the Blue Peter cat?) produced an apparently innocent change in the way the BBC is governed (and a new royal charter to go with it) and now, eighteen months later, it’s just sinking in that the BBC Trust is potentially the corporation’s unwitting nemesis.

No one seriously thinks that the Trust has it in the for the Beeb but the kicking doled out to news chiefs in the latest report could be a sign of things to come. The problem is that The Trust is a strange beast: a kind of internalised regulator, a body paradoxically obliged to provide statutory oversight and to defend the corporation’s independence and standards. The Trust must, by law, be tough and impartial and this will necessarily lead to some damaging analyses—and coming not from an arms-length regulator but from right inside the corporation.

The Beeb’s top managers must fear a drip drip drip of negative reports and impossible-to-ignore prescriptions. Legislators hostile to the corporation for various reasons must be rubbing their hands at the prospect of lots of new ammunition for their causes. As the Trust’s reports pile up on the DG’s desk, each demanding an expensive response and quite possibly deep and structural change (like, for instance, spinning off and funding Scottish and Welsh mini-Beebs), it might look increasingly like the corporation is tearing itself apart.

The potential for damage to the BBC from its own governing body, doing no more than its job, might make ‘top slicing’ look trivial. Is that what was intended when the Trust was set up? Obviously not. Can it now be avoided? Probably not.