EXCLUSIVE: The BBC is reviewing its commissioning practices in its Youngsters’s & Training division following a two-year interval of sweeping change.
Ordered by BBC Chief Content material Officer Charlotte Moore’s division, Deadline understands an audit passed off late final month and its findings are due again shortly.
The phrases of the audit are wide-ranging and embrace whether or not commissioning choices are being made that adhere to BBC public service values and examines the connection between Patricia Hidalgo’s division and the brand new BBC Studio’s Youngsters’s and Household division, which was once an in-house producer however was subsumed by industrial outfit BBC Studios final yr and may now make reveals for different networks.
The BBC insisted that the audit is a “routine evaluation” however a number of sources from each inside and out of doors the division described it as “out of the strange,” with some who’ve labored there for a few years saying they’ve by no means identified it to occur. Whereas the audit is inside, Deadline understands some exterior auditors have been concerned with the method.
“The BBC conducts various audits yearly throughout completely different areas together with commissioning to make sure they’re working as successfully and clearly as attainable,” mentioned a BBC spokesman. “The BBC inside audit crew are working with BBC Youngsters’s on a routine evaluation.”
However sources raised issues to Deadline that the division is eschewing much less industrial youngsters genres reminiscent of reside motion and factual leisure for extra sellable genres together with animation and drama, for instance the Christopher Eccleston-starring Dodger (pictured).
The state of affairs is nuanced and others backed Hidalgo’s method to creating native content material that may be offered overseas.
Former Turner EMEA Youngsters chief Hidalgo joined two years in the past and has incessantly careworn a want to supercharge the division’s animation providing, tripling spend and launching an Ignite initiative to find a UK equal of The Simpsons, which she has beforehand described as “about roast beef as an alternative of turkey.”
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Chatting with Deadline earlier than final month’s Mip Junior, Hidalgo mentioned the industrial technique is one of the simplest ways to safeguard youngsters programing, including that forging codecs that may journey permits her to “put more cash again into [local] content material.” At Mip Junior, she helped assemble a gathering of youngsters’s chiefs from broadcasters the world over to debate main challenges and forge co-production alliances.
The division has undergone different main adjustments since Hidalgo’s arrival as your complete BBC targets massive financial savings.
The unit answerable for delivering short-form content material and working the youngsters’s web sites was restructured with a number of roles closed, whereas high-profile execs and commissioners together with Helen Bullough, Hugh Lawton and Michael Towner have left. Older-skewing linear channel CBBC is about to shut as a part of the cuts.
