Archives for March 2011

Today is my last day as editor of About the BBC. I am handing over to Steve Bowbrick who many of you already know from the radio blogs and Emily Commander who has been an occasional contributor to this blog.

I’ve really enjoyed my time as editor and am looking forward to watching the blog and the website develop from afar.

Bridget Middleton was the editor of About the BBC

As the team who work daily to place BBC staff as volunteers with charity partners, we know all too well that the "V" word can sometimes be misunderstood. Occasionally seen as a dusty, worthy word, it can conjure images of coffee mornings and bric-a-brac stalls. So its not always as easy as you might think to get people to embrace their inner-volunteer. That’s why the Connect & Create team try hard to make our opportunities as vibrant and exciting as possible, and today's post is to tell you about one such project.

One day last summer Paul Corcoran of Connect & Create team beamed as he put forward his idea for a new project with our charity partner, Fairbridge. All we knew was that it involved a ship! As Paul outlined his idea, he explained that the charity, who work to give life skills to disadvantaged young people across the UK, had an exciting way of teaching the young people about team-work by placing them as crew for a week on a 92 foot tall ship, The Spirit of Fairbridge" moored off the coast of Oban.

Its not unusual for some the young people who qualify for this experience to turn it down, as the idea of crewing a tall ship is so far outside their realm of their experience and fear of the unknown can put them off. So Paul's idea was to make them a film for all at Fairbridge to see, tracking the experience of some of the young people aboard a 7-day sail in October.

We had no trouble finding the inner-volunteer among BBC staff for this one. Inundated with offers, Paul selected four staff who would benefit by bringing the learnings of the experience back into their day job. Ed Horne, who applied to gain skills to enhance his video edit career, said “The rain, cold and wind could not have been worse to film onboard. It was a brilliant opportunity to prepare us for what we may have to deal with on future programmes”.

"The Spirit" is the jewel in the crown of Fairbridge, bringing together hundreds of disadvantaged young people each year to learn to sail. The challenge for the BBC volunteers was to shoot and edit a film that told the story of young people living onboard and sailing for the first time, in the hope that the film might help persuade other young people to take the challenge.

The final film is now being sent to all Fairbridge centres across the UK where it will be seen by over 5000 young people in the first year. The skipper of The Spirit, Mike Strang, was delighted with the film "This is such a valuable resource for staff and centres to use. We have never had anything like this that captures everything positive about the whole experience of life on board Spirit. It will help to inspire so many young people to challenge themselves in new and exciting ways".

Hopefully it may also help others to see that volunteering can be one of the most thrilling and meaningful ways of connecting with other people.

Glynn Ryland is the Manager of BBC Connect & Create

I took some News trainees round Broadcasting House in central London the other day. I was trying to get them to imagine how new and utterly undefined broadcasting was in the early days. How did you know how to build a new broadcasting centre, when hardly anyone else had ever done it? Colonel Val Myer (the architect of Broadcasting House) did of course look across the Atlantic to the US model when he made his first stab at the so-called ‘Top Hat’ design for the building, but otherwise, he was moving largely into unknown territory.

After that, broadcasting went in leaps and bounds. What created the biggest impact? the trainees asked me. War I answered. WW2 utterly changed the face of the BBC, defining its objective journalistic role with sharp clarity and turning it to face the wider world with a very different focus. When war broke out in September 1940, there were eight BBC foreign language services; at the end of the war, there were 48. It’s also hard to believe in our times of 24-hour, global news that on one day in 1924, I think, the BBC was able to report that there was no news to announce today!

And so to other milestone moments. This year sees the 75th anniversary of BBC’s first hi-definition TV service in November. Before that date, there had been experimental attempts, the struggle from a low-definition snowstorm on a screen towards something more watchable, and all this activity against the backdrop of an international race to be the first across the viable TV line. Preparations are now underway for different ways of bringing that big anniversary TV story to life, working especially with our wider UK partners such as the National Media Museum and BFI.

Of course our storytelling will feature some of those ‘’TV Greats’ moments – the creation of Television Centre, the first ever purpose-built TV building in the world; the advent of colour that caused temerity in some viewers – would it adversely affect their eyes?!; Doctor Who, the longest running sc-fi series in the world, and always in a state of constant reinvention; Morecambe & Wise with its record-breaking Christmas audience of 28 million viewers; Live Aid, the first global pop/charity phenomenon; right up to the present moment and its connecting, global technologies.

When the BBC began broadcasting, it searched for a metaphor for this new airborne magic… the broadcasting powers-that-be raided Shakespeare and the Bible, to give us the statue of Ariel (from The Tempest) on the front of Broadcasting House, and inside the Art Deco foyer, the parable-inspired figure of The Sower, casting his seed democratically into the listening air. What, I wonder, will be the metaphor for the next ‘brave new world’ of broadcasting?

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

• The BBC Story

Going to EastEnders was “the best decision I ever made in my life”. Not me – though I’d happily say it too – but Oscar winning film director Tom Hooper, who between 1999 and 2000 directed a series of brilliant episodes of the BBC’s most consistently popular drama.

As the National Audit Office (NAO) publishes its study into the affairs of Continuing Drama it seems a good idea to reflect on its role in both the industry, and a substantial part of the nation’s life. Why would an Oscar winning director say that? What’s the genre ever done for us?

To which I would answer:

Without EastEnders, Casualty and Holby, there would be no Life On Mars, no Hustle, no Occupation, no Toast, no Eric And Ernie, no King’s Speech – at least not as we know them. There’d be no early breaks for Kate Winslet, Aaron Johnson or Orlando Bloom. The simple fact is that around 30% of the drama industry – writers, directors, producers, designers and commissioners – have learnt their craft on these shows. 

Whether you're the Head of Drama at ITV, a former head of BBC Fiction or an Oscar nominated writer or director for best short film, the one thing you have in common is that you served your apprenticeship on the most demanding form of drama work in Britain. Continuing Drama has – and still does – employ a lot of people, and very economically as the NAO attests. It’s a vaguely scary thought that without Continuing Drama series there simply wouldn’t be either enough jobs in the UK drama industry to sustain it, nor enough trained people to man it. These shows are the Amazon rainforest of drama; without them, the ecosystem would simply collapse.

But it’s not just within the industry that their importance lies. Though little acknowledged these shows simply are, over time, some of the most popular and most loved programmes on television – an astonishing 71% of the UK population watched at least one episode of EastEnders last year.

It is the nature of us all perhaps to create class systems with serious and weighty (art-house) at the top and popular (airport novel) at the bottom. And of course there is some truth that a lovingly nurtured four-part drama on a minority channel might provoke debate and feeling that an hour of Holby at its worst might not. But it is equally true that some of those views are forged by social snobbery, by a desire to be elite and above the common fray.

Difficult, challenging and genre-busting work is vital to the health of our industry, and only a fool would argue against it, but it’s important to understand that’s not how the vast majority of people in this country experience – or want to experience - drama. Melodramatic or simplistic as our large audience shows can occasionally be, they can be equally brave and as profoundly moving in discussing the way we live now.

If you’ve ever questioned the power and efficacy of popular drama then I invite you to read the feedback from both medical professionals and viewers garnered by Casualty’s recent mental health storyline. EastEnders didn’t just win five out of the last six National TV Awards for best Serial Drama, it also won the Mental Health in the Media Award for its portrayal of bipolar disorder. BBC Continuing Drama didn’t just win nine out of the last fifteen Baftas and eight out of twelve Best British Soap Awards – it has a much deeper economic and social function as well. 

Not content with pioneering diverse lead casting (Holby and Casualty were the first to embrace diversity in drama anywhere), EastEnders attracts an extraordinary 39% of the non-white audience in the UK. You will almost certainly be aware of some of the shared experiences that form part of our cultural heritage (Dot or Frank, anyone?), but you may not have heard of the girls who, inspired by EastEnders, gained the courage to confront their sexual abuse, or the parents who recognised the symptoms of life threatening diseases from watching our medical shows (writer Peter Bowker being one of them).

From its pioneering use of new technology to its writer, director and producer training programmes, these shows are major economic drivers. They have led the way in the development of internet and red button spin-offs too. E20, built entirely by first time writers, is now in its third series, and is the most watched red-button drama on the BBC. This year is none other than the 25th anniversary of Casualty – a show that, as the RTS recently acknowledged, has been pivotal to the development of the Bristol television industry. 

But that’s not Continuing Drama series’ main function – its main function is to provide high quality British drama for a massive audience, some of whom are the under-represented, the marginalised and the disempowered, all of whom pay their licence fee and all of whom deserve the right to indulge themselves in stories they really love. 

Anyone doubting that love and passion should follow a live Twitter feed of Holby to see just how extraordinarily important to people these programmes are. It’s genuinely humbling to see just how much these shows mean to such a complete cross-section of society.

The battle of British television is won on the playing fields of Continuing Drama series. Orlando Bloom, Kate Winslet, Brenda Fricker, Tom Hooper, Tony Jordan, Ashley Pharoah, Peter Bowker, Bryan Elsley, Jim Loach, Jane Tranter. Skins, Occupation, Kudos Film and TV, directors of Entourage, Lost, Heroes, CSI and hundreds more all owe something of their success to these shows that nurtured their talent. 

Continuing Drama series sustain an industry and bring joy and entertainment to millions of licence fee payers – last year alone EastEnders’ audience peaked at 20 million viewers and is currently enjoying its best ever AI (appreciation index) scores, Continuing Drama is training the next generation as we speak. In nascent form these shows are full of brilliant writers, directors and actors – some of whom won’t make it, some of whom will make bad episodes, but the vast majority of whom will become the backbone of the drama industry both here and across the world.

All of this, as the NAO have found, managed well and run efficiently. And all for the cost of as little as just over three pence per viewer hour.

John Yorke is BBC Controller of Drama Production and New Talent

School Report is the project from BBC News which sees young students all over the UK developing news reporting skills – using lesson plans and materials from the School Report website. With support from BBC staff and partners, teachers help students develop their journalistic skills to become School Reporters. 

The highlight of all this activity is School Report News Day, which falls in March every year. It's a chance for all participating schools to publish their own news reports simultaneously. Last year, over 25,000 young people from over 700 schools prepared and published reports on a variety of topics, covering local, domestic and international issues.

This year, the ambition is to be bigger still and we’re expecting around 800 schools to take part across the UK. We’ll have 7 hours of live coverage on TV and radio on the School Report website and the red button, as well as lots of coverage on other BBC news programmes.

Over 100 students will be on site for the first ever live TV broadcast from the BBC’s new home in Salford, Media City UK, which will feature content from a range of schools, hourly headlines and interviews from students based in Television Centre in London.

The young people at Media City will work together to produce a live bulletin at 2pm for our red button and web services and the entire School Report TV channel will be directed from the studio gallery there.

School Reporters have also been asked to complete the School Report survey, which aims to provide a snapshot of the UK through the eyes of 11 to 16-year-olds. More than 23,000 students have already completed it, giving us a fascinating glimpse into their lives. If we're lucky enough to have good weather on Thursday, our 100 young people at Media City will become a human percentage figure on the piazza to represent some of the results!

Check the School Report website and the @BBCSchoolReport Twitter feed for updates throughout the day.

You can keep up-to-date with news about outreach projects from across the BBC by signing up for the BBC Outreach newsletter.

Alec McGivan is Head of BBC Outreach

This podcast is my current favourite item on the new BBC Academy College of Production site. To me, it’s a good summary of what we are trying to achieve: useful, simple, short, authoritative advice and experience from experts. All the basic objectives are easy to state yet hard to pull off. Getting to this start point has been a lesson in itself. (We are very fortunate to have been shown the way by the pioneering College of Journalism, thank you Kevin).

Launching a new project publicly is always a tense but exciting moment. Launching the College of Production site was more exciting than most. We discussed, debated and demonstrated the content as far and wide as we could, to positive response but the broadcasting industry is notoriously diverse and distributed. Could we be sure that those signals were representative? As a relative newcomer, I have also discovered that the industry both within and outside the BBC, whilst mature, professional and focused, is quite informal. In many ways, ideal for an open, online service as we seek ways to reach staff and partners most efficiently and effectively but quite hard to get your arms around. Whilst it’s early days, we have been very pleased with the response so far.

In planning the site we debated, at some length, the merits of our favourite sites and searched for inspirational projects from which we could plunder (one of the joys of working on the web is the compliment paid by others using your efforts as source material). This was really formative work, helping us explore the tone, depth and focus of our own effort. I hope you can see flashes in the CoP site of Bitesize (clear and simple learning and one of the gems of the BBC Online portfolio), TED (inspiration from experts), Media Talk (expert and authoritative commentary) from the Guardian and Talks@Google (sharing resources and insights). Each of these have different jobs to do for their users and different corporate objectives to fulfill. One factor does unite them, however: a clear focus on content - quality, relevance and ease of access.

To the dismay of adventurous engineers, we decided that the site should not have a whiff of a technology project about it. To be useful to our users, content must be central. Widgets, gadgets and gizmos are for another time. Everything on the web that is good is simple, both to understand and to use. This is the most important lesson I took form working with the Bitesize team: each piece of content needs to do one job for an individual user and that job alone. All this is to say that the College of Production is actually a pretty straightforward affair: well made (I believe) small pieces of content focused on simple points.

In many ways this quite counter-cultural to much of the “eLearning” industry which can go to great lengths to lead users through a ‘learning journey’ (I confess that I dislike that phrase) and closely manage the user experience. This raises the risk over over-thinking and complication. Our experience has pretty clearly indicated that those working in production are not keen on being led in that way. Showing them what’s there and letting them chose is a more comfortable arrangement.

So, I’m quite pleased with where we have got to and entirely conscious that it’s just the start. Top priorities now are new content and traffic growth. To achieve these we are very interested to hear feedback from you. What works? What doesn’t? What’s missing? What next?

And while I have you. Check out another podcast. It’s that simple.

Myles Runham is Head of Online for BBC People

It's been a bitter-sweet time recently.

I don't think anyone with a heart can not have had it broken by the terrible scenes from Japan. Our news outlets continue to report from the region, with Shelagh Fogarty's Radio 5 live reports poignantly capturing the concern and shock. It really brings it home when our own BBC Philharmonic Orchestra was caught up on the fringes of it all in Tokyo. Their tour has now been cancelled and they have returned home, safe and unharmed, to be reunited with their families in the North West.

Closer to home we continue to forge a path towards opening the doors of our new home at Salford Quays. The journey hasn’t been without its challenges but if I look back over the last few weeks, there is so much that we have achieved that we should all be proud of.

It’s a story of future opportunity, new content, two Archbishops and a hat trick.

Just today we announced the launch of a new apprenticeship scheme at BBC North. In the next three to four years, we will offer one hundred apprenticeships across the departments that are moving to Salford Quays. We are fulfilling an important pledge about jobs for the local community. These are deliberately not jobs for graduates, but rather for people in the Greater Manchester area with few or no qualifications or experience, or indeed who might not have thought of the BBC or the media generally as a potential employer. From September this year when we welcome the first wave, they will get on-the-job training, receive coaching and mentoring. Not only do I hope that they will realise that the BBC is as much a place for them as for anyone else but for the BBC it is a significant and important commitment to diversity and difference. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about changing the DNA of the Corporation itself. And that change will start at MediaCityUK.

Just over a fortnight ago, with my colleagues, I was at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston at the BBC’s biggest training conference organised by BBC North’s Developing Talent team. The theme was “Talent & Technology” and it gave us a chance to express our thoughts and hopes alongside those of the hundreds of students who attended. Better still we were able to tempt Britain’s most Oscar-laden film-maker, Nick Park as well as Victoria Wood, the star with most BAFTA awards, to share a few home truths with us too. Nick told the audience – “I didn't think Preston boys like me went to The National Film-school" and Victoria thanked Rochdale Council for her break into teenage drama. Almost 400 hundred delegates attended workshops on Radio 1 with Andy Parfitt, the booming games sector and CBeebies production hits and I think they dreamed – like the younger Nick and Victoria did – of big careers and some glittering awards. All in all, it was a great day, particularly to hear from the students themselves about what they wanted from the future as well as from the BBC and I got a real sense that they will play an important part in the future of the region.

And lest we forget, the move to MediaCityUK in Salford has never just been about the North West. It's about the whole region thriving in the digital media age with some help from the BBC.

So it is terrific to celebrate a series of new programmes across the region. From BBC Daytime comes yet another new drama that is being filmed in Liverpool and Manchester. The Case tackles the thorny issue of assisted suicide. It’s been written by David Allison and will continue to build on the terrific fiction - like The Indian Doctor, Moving On, Missing and Land Girls – that has become a signature theme of BBC Daytime. Incidentally The Case is made by Merseyside's Lime Pictures who, through their digital media company, Conker Media, is our partner in the Digital Fiction Factory.

Last weekend at the North East RTS Awards, held in the remarkable Gateshead Sage Centre, I announced that CBBC will make a fresh batch of Tracy Beaker Returns locally this summer.

Also, just down the road in Durham, 1960's smoothy Inspector George Gently returns home later this year for four more specials for BBC One.

And this weekend, the big television event of the Spring - Frankenstein's Wedding… Live in Leeds. Coming on top of BBC One’s recent and beautifully-made South Riding, it helps mark a bit of a creative Renaissance for our Yorkshire-based output. And Frank – as we affectionately call him – is a ‘monster’ partnership too: The Phoenix Dance Group, Welcome to Yorkshire, Leeds City Council plus our very own BBC Wales, BBC Learning, BBC Yorkshire and BBC Three have come together with 9,000 wedding guests for a wonderful gothic celebration brokered by us.

And the two Archbishops? Those gentle men of Canterbury and York toured Greater Manchester at the beginning of March and visited MediaCityUK to ask the simple but probing question – Can there be faith in a MediaCity? The resounding answer was ‘yes’ but there was an acknowledgement that there would be challenges, but challenges that could be met and overcome if we all work together.

And that challenge includes moving forward creatively in the uncertain times that we all face.

Though we have made our big public commitment to Out of London production and our state-of-the-art Salford base – in the shape of a 20 year lease – we are not immune from the speculation and indeed the potential impact of Delivering Quality First to budgets and output from 2013. There's been a lot of speculation in the newspapers about Radio 5 live, local radio, daytime programmes and sports rights – and nothing is either firmly on or off the table whatever you may have read.

However, a great deal of planning and thought went into deciding which departments would move to Salford Quays and we have made a long-term commitment to the North of England to build and develop a workforce in Salford that is among the best trained and most flexible in the media. That is our best safeguard in these tough financial times.

Looking back on all this and looking forward to Leeds this weekend, I have to admit to feeling just a little weary. Or perhaps that is the result of the fund-raising football match I played at the weekend. Against the odds, this 50-plus striker scored his first-ever hat trick of goals in a 5-4 win. But that final ball in the net landed me with a slipped disc.

Perhaps I should have stuck to some advice I once received – Stick to making content, Salmon.

Quit playing – while you are even vaguely ahead...

Peter Salmon is the Director of BBC North

There have been various stories in the press this week speculating about proposals emerging from ‘Delivering Quality First’, which is our wide-ranging consultation with all BBC staff on how the BBC should deliver the highest quality programmes and services under our new licence fee settlement.

I understand that some of these stories may sound drastic so I want to explain the process and where we’ve got to so far.

The Director General has challenged the senior managers overseeing this work to think radically about what the BBC should look like in six years time, what our priorities should be and what we should do less of. And they’ve done that. But at this stage, the outcomes of these discussions are still just ideas.

I can assure you no decisions have been made yet and none of the ideas currently being explored will definitely happen. Equally, I can’t rule anything out and we are still welcoming further suggestions.

We won't be giving a running commentary on every speculative idea - but I want to be clear that our commitment to quality content as well as value for money is running right through this process.

On the subject of local radio, it’s important to remember that representing the UK’s regions and communities is one of the BBC’s six public purposes. With the rest of the local news sector at increasing risk of market failure, the BBC’s contribution to local journalism is more important now than ever. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking at the most effective way of delivering it.

As part of last year’s strategy review, we looked hard at our local services, making our networks more distinctive, increasing the amount of news and speech programming and investing in local journalism. Reach for our local services has risen recently and the question now is, how can we take this further within a flat licence fee settlement?

And regarding sports rights, we need to remember that delivering great sporting moments to the audience unites the nation. This weekend, viewing of the Six Nation’s Calcutta Cup game between England and Scotland peaked at 8 million viewers and the BBC Sport website received 3.9 million visitors on the day of the England v France game.

Looking ahead, the plan is to bring the proposals from all the staff consultations together and test them against out public purposes and priorities. These will then be shared with staff before the final proposals are submitted to the BBC Trust for its approval in July. The BBC Trust will consult the public before any final decisions are made.

I can’t pretend there aren’t difficult choices and some painful decisions to be made but I’m hopeful that by thinking radically and being transparent about the process the decisions we make will be in the best interests of the BBC and our audiences.

Caroline Thomson is the BBC's Chief Operating Officer

Last Thursday, 10 March, saw the launch of the Building digital capacity for the arts project, something I’ve been working on since the end of last year and which has felt a bit like organising a wedding – who should be invited, will they get on, who’s going to make the speeches and how long should they be speaking for, who sits where... You get the idea. In the event, everyone was both well behaved and inspiring – you can catch some quick off-the-cuff comments from some of the participants in the video or you can watch the whole thing here.

And what a marriage (though up on stage, there was a debate between the partners about whether in fact it was more of a civil partnership)! The BBC Academy College of Production has joined forces with Arts Council England to offer a programme of seminars and masterclasses to support arts organisations create and distribute digital content. 

The seminars will aim to tease out some key issues – for example, we know that rights can be a huge challenge and we’ll be focusing on this as well as exploring the opportunities – what’s involved in the much talked about IPTV (or “connected” internet television) and how do you create an app? Are there any business models that work? How likely is it that the discussions around philanthropy (and the recently launched WeDidThis) will deliver anything concrete? In the nature of seminars, they’ll be aimed at relatively small groups – 50 or 60 – so we’ll be filming them and streaming the content through the Arts Council’s website. 

Later in the year we’ll start a programme of masterclasses, which will be more tightly focused around core skills. These could be how to make a short film or a podcast but what’s important is for the programme to reflect the needs of arts organisations and so we’ll keep this open and flexible until we’ve heard the key issues emerging from the seminars around skills and capacity building. 

You’ll be able to follow the progress of the project – which runs for the next 18 months - through the Arts Council’s dedicated page where you can also feedback thoughts and ideas. We hope you’ll be watching!

Kim Peat is Programme Manager, Building digital capacity for the arts

An Arts Council England and BBC Academy Partnership

Danny Cohen, Controller of BBC One blogs about background music and the Vision Audibility project on the TV blog.

"One of the most common complaints to BBC television in recent years has been that some people find it hard to hear the dialogue in our shows.

They cite many reasons for this, the most common among them being background music being too loud.

As a result of these complaints in 2009, Jay Hunt (my predecessor as controller of BBC One) launched an extensive study into why people were experiencing these difficulties.

BBC Vision's Audibility project was a huge undertaking. It involved using our 20,000-strong panel of TV viewers across the age, geographical and social demographic and a good deal of technical experimentation."

Read Danny's post in full and comment on the TV blog.

Bridget Middleton is the Editor of About the BBC

This week is an eventful one in the calendar of the BBC Diversity team and I wanted to take a moment to share some updates and information with you.

Tonight we hold our official launch event to mark the BBC’s takeover as Chair of the Cultural Diversity Network (CDN), an association of Britain's leading broadcasters and independent production companies who come together to consider all aspects of diversity ethnic minority representation, disability, sexual orientation, age, gender and social background in the broadcasting industry. Tameka Empson, better known as Kim from EastEnders and one of the 3 Non Blondes, will host the evening – attended by representatives from broadcasters and independent companies from across the UK television industry.

Mark Thompson, as the Chair for the next two years, will talk about some of the upcoming priorities. Over the next year the CDN will be focusing on age,and will seek to understand more about what our audiences really want and expect, as well as exploring the potential barriers or opportunities for women and men of differing ages in broadcasting. In addition, as the sharing of information and research to promote diversity is one of the chief aims of the CDN we’re considering other projects relating to varying diversity areas that could be undertaken.

For the BBC, our intention is to build on the great work done by Channel 4 as previous Chair and further the work of the CDN in promoting diversity in television, on and off-screen. For example, we’re very much looking forward to hosting the CDN Awards later in the year. Established in 2009, these awards are a fantastic celebration of the wealth of diversity and creative talent across the industry both on and off-screen. We’ll keep you updated so watch out for details of the awards.

Another of the big projects for the coming year is the Senior Mentoring Scheme which resumes in May. Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and disabled groups are under-represented at senior levels in the UK broadcast industry and this mentoring scheme – now in its third year – provides senior industry figures as mentors for talented people from these groups. Between the participating broadcasters we’ve managed to increase the number of places on the scheme from 30 last year to 50 and there’ll be more news to follow on how the participants progress.

This scheme holds real significance for me as everyone working within the industry has a responsibility for promoting diversity and I firmly believe we can achieve the most by working in partnership with industry colleagues. This is just the start of the BBC’s tenure as Chair and I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress throughout the year ahead.

Finally, I wanted to take this opportunity to mark this week’s International Women’s Day - a day when many around the world hold events to inspire women and celebrate their achievements. In celebration, the BBC’s Diversity Centre produced a gallery of images of women from the 1920s to present day who have played a role in the life and development of the BBC. The gallery is displayed on the ground floor of Television Centre and if you visit any BBC buildings up and down the country you will see a selection of the posters displayed. You can visit the official website for further information on International Women’s Day.

Amanda Rice is Head Of Diversity

In 2005, most predictions suggested up to half of TV viewing would be time-shifted. We thought user-generated-content would be well on its way to becoming a mainstream substitute for traditional media. 

Broadcasters, search companies, mobile phone companies, ISPs– all felt as if they were about to meet in a new converging middle.

Broadcasters were to be assaulted from all angles – the internet, tech start-ups; digital television and citizen journalists.

So far at least things haven’t turned out that way. Time shifting, user generated content and convergence remain fundamental trends, but none have developed along the lines the industry predicted.

Today asynchronous viewing accounts for as little as 10% of total TV viewing. It might grow to little more than 15% by 2016. These are highly significant shifts – but not the bloody revolution and the death of spot advertising many predicted. 

The obstinate fact almost no one foresaw is that television consumption as a whole has grown in this country and, at least for the present, continues to grow.

So was talk of a seismic shift wrong? Well, gradualist change doesn’t feel quite right either. 

Another way in which our 2005 prediction fell short is in what it left out. Smart phones and the world of the app store. The power of social media.

In 2005 we wanted to launch a seven-day BBC catch-up service available on as many devices as possible. But we didn’t know what those devices would be, and certainly not just how many people would watch the iPlayer not just in the home, but in bed, on a mobile smart phone or tablet. 

The dictum – that we tend to overestimate change over the next couple of years and underestimate it over the next ten – feels like good advice. Look at the behaviour of younger viewers – there’s reason to believe that we may see a period of evolution followed by revolution.

Different kinds of TV are advancing at different speeds. News and information is our advance party, because we expect it to be available in real time wherever, whenever and on whatever device is most convenient. 

Many new sources and modes of absorbing news are weakening the business models for newsgathering and the scheduling of traditional news bulletins just as they are with newspapers. It’s possible to counter these trends and it helps if, like the BBC, you already have a tradition of offering news across multiple platforms – but you have to work much harder.

In the UK we have maintained our reach and internationally have extended it because we generally do not rely on single platforms. Broadcasters can now only hope to have a significant impact with news if they are offering it on television, the web, radio and mobile. This is why in recent years we have launched BBC Arabic and Persian TV channels in addition to our radio and web services. It is also why the BBC will never retreat from delivering news online.

But in entertainment, the principle reason why people turn to TV, it’s a very different story. Predictions of passive consumption giving way to active participation now look not just premature but wrong. Instead, the main impact of the new technologies has been to extend choice. 

There continues to be rapid innovation in the passive TV experience. Far from atomising into a series of individuals watching different things in different rooms, family viewing is alive and well and event television, from X Factor to Doctor Who is as big or bigger as ever.

The evidence of the past five years is that television as a social glue remains very sticky indeed, particularly when it comes to big entertainment formats or national events.

But when time-shifting is easy and intuitive and available on the device you happen to have in front of you right now, people use it. 

In January, the BBC iPlayer hit a new all-time peak of 162 million programme requests, an average of more than six per household. The greatest growth is now on iPads, iPhones, other smart phones and games consoles.

BBC iPlayer worked from day one it was so behaviourally straightforward – no log in, no client to download, you just clicked on a picture of a TV programme and it played.

As an industry we have given too little attention to TV on mobile devices. I believe there’s a strong case for the UK’s broadcasters, mobile phone operators, Ofcom and Government to come together to develop a roadmap for mobile TV in this country. 

The remarkable persistence of linear TV consumption should not make us complacent. We don’t yet know whether even younger people growing up in a completely digital world will follow the same pattern. Or, whether there will be a permanent shift downwards in consumption.

The BBC’s response to the first digital wave was to broaden the choice it offered on TV and radio by developing wider channel portfolios while also establishing a strong presence – centred on its long range historic strength in news – on the web and other digital devices. As a result, we have maintained our reach across audiences. Average consumption of the BBC is actually growing. Quality and approval measures have also increased over the past five years.

The challenge for us now is to concentrate on the quality, value and memorability of our content, not just in television but across our services. 

Science on BBC One with Bang Goes The Theory, last week’s Newsnight Special on Libya, the Proms which last year reached eighteen million people in the UK on BBC Television over the season. That’s our direction of travel.

For eighty years, we’ve been heavily involved in developing platforms and broadcast technologies. We still need to do that – not least because we are the only big player prepared to share our innovations and technology with the industry at large. But we never forget that platforms and devices are a means to an end – and the end is putting outstanding, worthwhile content in front of the public.

This is a summary of the speech I gave this morning at the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference. Read the full transcript here. 

Mark Thompson is Director-General of the BBC

Tim Davie, Director of Audio & Music talks about the new radio programmes announced today and the reasons for changing the name of Radio 7 to Radio 4 Extra.

"Today we announced a series of new programmes which will be appearing on our digital radio stations. Also, we confirmed that we are changing the name of BBC Radio 7 to BBC Radio 4 Extra in April. You can find all the details in the press release."

Read Tim’s post in full on the Radio Blog..

Bridget Middleton is the Editor of About the BBC

The picture shows Roy Plomley and his guest Noel Coward on the occasion of the twenty-first anniversary of Desert Island Discs in 1963. Coward had been on the list of guests drawn up by Plomley when he devised the programme in 1941.