How new Director General 'Tigger Tim' plans to change the BBC

Energetic and “Tiggerish” are adjectives which attach naturally to a man who has jumped from head of BBC Studios (formerly Worldwide) to the top job. His obvious weak spots are programme-making knowledge and deep experience of the tricky political judgments which come with the role.

Davie joined the BBC under Mark Thompson in 2005 from a marketing background at Proctor and Gamble and Pepsico and managed an adept side-step to become the head of radio. The main job of overseeing content remained with powerful controllers, however. “Now is the first time Tim will have faced the push and pull of demands from people with big egos and big demands,” says one of those who worked with him.

Good humour takes the edge off envy at his large BBC Studios pay package (he has taken a cut to do the DG job, but it’s not too shabby at about half a million a year). He once found himself in talks over the (ill-fated) YouView internet TV project with the belligerent former owner of the Daily Express, Richard Desmond. Desmond teased him about a lack of media boardroom experience — and had his butler print out Davie’s CV and bring it on a silver tray — albeit with a gruff aside accepting that Davie did a proper job in marketing before sloping off to the Beeb.

An unusual area of sensitivity to a son of Croydon — who, as one Cambridge friend puts it, “carefully tends his glottal stop”— is his private secondary education at Whitgift School, albeit on a full scholarship. His Wikipedia page notes that he was the first person in his family to attend university (Selwyn College, Cambridge). But in days of relentless privilege-checking, it would be better to avoid excuses for the private-school tag and address why state schools are still so poorly represented in many of the top front-line roles.

His first declared objectives are “accelerating change” and enforcing impartiality. The former is a tacit omission that Lord Hall’s latter tenure got bogged down dealing with a long backlog of misjudgments on gender pay, leading to a legal defeat in the Samira Ahmed case; the Cliff Richard debacle, in which the star won a landmark privacy case against the broadcaster; and Brexit-era battles over impartiality.

Item one in the in-tray is a licence fee deal which can end a period of aggrieved to-and-fro with Boris Johnson’s Government. Davie has previously told friends that he wants to defuse tensions with Number 10. “They want us to come up with a deal,” he has told colleagues — and he sees himself as a dealmaker whose commercial background means he can nail that without another rift.

The terms of trade have also altered to the BBC’s benefit, since the broadcaster has demonstrated its worth in the Covid era and seen audiences soar. Added to which the high-water mark of Dominic Cumming’s ideological war on the Beeb has probably passed.

Davie will certainly argue for more commercial freedoms in areas like merchandising and gaming which could spin profits from BBC brands, and seek to raise revenues from commercial tie ups in the US in particular. But few doubt that he will have to make cuts to services to make ends meet.

The volte face, during his time at BBC Radio, over abolishing 6 Music after an audience revolt, was a formative moment. “What is less clear,” says a senior executive, “is what lesson he took from it. He simply cannot defend the whole of BBC territory as it is and he will need to apply an axe early on to avoid the present sense of cuts across all programmes and a lack of priorities.”

The BBC sits awkwardly up against streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and in audio, its BBC Sounds app is on too modest a scale to make it a major player in the growing realm of podcasting where Apple and Spotify call the shots. As a self-described “Brit with a global outlook”, Davie has undoubtedly succeeded in pivoting BBC Studios into a content creator able to do impressive global deals and make healthy revenues. He has told colleagues he wants to “put rocket boosters” under iPlayer to enhance its sophistication and the duration over which shows are available. “He is quite properly very worried about the competition for streaming services,” says a fellow executive.

That brings us to the biggest jeopardy of his tenure — a likely retreat from the licence fee, while arguing to defend a large “central core” of public service output. A retreat from “licence-fee fundamentalism” — a hallmark of the Hall era, is the likely result, though that path remains complicated by the technical difficulties of delivering a subscription-based service.

Lionel Barber, former Financial Times editor and chairman of the Tate’s main board on which Davie also sits, reckons the new DG has the clout and strategic nous for the trials ahead. “Tim sees around corners,” Barber says. “Where here a lot of people can identify problems, he comes up with solutions. He has grown a lot since he tried out for the job in 2012 and he has the guts for it.”

When someone texted the new BBC helmsman to tease that he been described as the “continuity candidate”, the reply was swift: “They may be in for a surprise.” For the BBC, an awful lot depends on what Tigger Tim has up his sharply tailored sleeve.

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist