As Richard Bacon's guest on 5 Live, former BBC1 controller Peter Fincham seemed to shed a revealing light on corporation funding
There was a time when BBC radio was sparing in its coverage of television, fearing the younger upstart would supplant it. More recently, though, the two have become collegiate, with Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe trailed as often on Radio 4 as the network's own shows. And interviews with TV controllers and commissioners have become a regular feature on wireless discussion shows.
In which context Peter Fincham, ITV's director of programmes, recently turned up as a guest on Richard Bacon's 5 Live afternoon show and made a startling contribution, which has gone surprisingly unremarked, to the debate on the funding of the BBC.
Fincham was controller of BBC1 from 2005 to 2007, until forced to take the fall for an advert falsely suggesting that the Queen had thrown a strop during a documentary. On his first day in the job, he told Bacon, he was being taken through the channel's budget by his financial manager. Feeling bewildered by the different figures being cited for drama, comedy, documentary and so on, he asked: "All I really need to know is, is it enough?" To which, he says, his money man replied: "Peter, you'll struggle to spend it."
This one man's recollection at a distance needs a little sandbagging. Fincham, though not a vengeful man, is currently running a commercial network during a terrible recession, an experience that may induce a certain fiscal nostalgia and envy. And it seems unlikely that he would have told the story while still at the BBC. In one sense, though, the finance guy was clearly right: in order to use up the BBC1 budget, they had to give an eye-watering proportion of it to Jonathan Ross.
It's not hard to imagine the reaction to Fincham's story among those sections of the BBC that, even in 2005, were struggling to find money. And who knows what politicians, rival media tycoons and incoming chairs of the BBC Trust may make of the fact that there was a time, recently, when people in the corporation apparently believed its main TV service to be overfunded? The result of that interview can be summarised as Radio 5 one-BBC1 nil.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/24/peter-fincham-on-5-live
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