The BBC’s strategy chief James Purnell said there are no plans to close BBC4 as part of the £650m cuts faced by the corporation but added: “We are not ruling anything in or out.”



Purnell was speaking after BBC director general Tony Hall outlined his vision for the BBC on Monday, saying it was “inevitable” that services would have to be closed or cut.

Rolling news, BBC4 and the corporation’s children’s TV channels have been identified as possible candidates for the chop but Purnell indicated that BBC4 was safe – for now.

“We are not ruling anything in or out, but we don’t have a plan to close BBC4,” Purnell told Radio 4’s World at One on Monday.

“BBC4 is a great service doing great things as you can see from the Pop Art season on at the moment.”

Purnell, the BBC’s director of strategy and digital, said the BBC would now “do as we have done over the last five years and sit down and go through our books to put as much money as we can into programmes”.

“The last few years we have saved 40% of our costs, this [funding deal] would mean another 20%. Clearly that is going to be tough but we think it is something we can do,” he added.

“We said in the document we want to move at the pace of our audience, we want to do these new services.”

On the BBC’s plans to expand the World Service, Purnell said it had been built into the BBC’s recent pre-budget funding deal with the government – in which it took on the burden of free licence fees for the over-75s – that the corporation could discuss a funding boost for the global news service in the autumn spending review.

“We will discuss with the government whether they would be interested in putting some extra spending in that direction,” said Purnell.

The money would be used to expand services in Russia and North Korea.

“That’s one of the things when we agreed the finances for the BBC as part of the last budget … a small exception was made that we could continue to discuss with them whether there would be some money in the autumn spending review for that.

“We have also said we would try to match it with commercial income [from abroad].”

If the government did not agree to boost its funding, five years after responsibility for the World Service switched from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the licence fee, Purnell said we would “still continue to invest in the World Service but obviously we would be able to do less”.

He said the so-called “soft power” influence of the World Service meant for a “relatively small amount of money, compared to what we spend on defence and foreign policy, we could make a very big difference. It’s one of those areas that the government is very keen on”.

Launched in 2002, BBC4 was the original home of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It and won a string of awards and some of its biggest audiences for biopics about Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

It also won acclaim for comedies such as Jo Brand’s Getting On and The Detectorists, starring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones.

But its budget has been slashed in recent years and it no longer has its own controller, overseen by BBC2 boss Kim Shillinglaw with editor Cassian Harrison in day to day charge.

It still has a small but loyal following for its arts, culture and documentary output, and has looked to innovate with programmes such as its “slow TV” season as it attempts to differentiate itself from BBC2.

Its sister channel BBC3 will go online only in the new year as part of a previous round of budget cuts. BBC4’s supporters will be hoping it does not suffer the same fate.

BBC4 cost £63m in 2014/15, of which £46m was spent on content, and was watched by just under 14% of the population at least once a week (compared to 47% for BBC2 and 73% for BBC1).