Danny Cohen says BBC cannot compete with £160m deal for Jeremy Clarkson show and was rebuffed when it asked to co-produce £50m royal epic The Crown

One of the BBC’s most senior executives has warned of the threat posed by its US on-demand rivals after Amazon spent £160m signing up Jeremy Clarkson and Netflix rebuffed the corporation’s approach to co-produce its £50m royal epic The Crown.

Danny Cohen, the BBC’s director of television, said Netflix’s The Crown, written by Peter Morgan and based on the writer’s acclaimed stage play The Audience, starring Helen Mirren, was a “classic BBC subject”.

But at a time when the BBC’s spending power is being cut, after it was required by the government to shoulder the £600m cost of free TV licence fees for over-75s, Cohen said: “We just couldn’t compete with the amount of money that Netflix were prepared to pay for that production even though we would have loved to have been a co-producer with Netflix on it.”

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Cohen said the BBC had tried to work with the US firm on the drama, intended to be a 50-part series about the “inside story of two of the most famous addresses in the world, Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street”, but Netflix wanted to go it alone.

“Their model is built on having global rights and we have got to respect that. They are a very smart, impressive bunch of people,” Cohen said.

“The key thing we look at more and more is the impact of global competition rather than just in the UK where very big companies can distribute their content around the world. That is a very big challenge.”

Cohen, one of the key figures in Clarkson’s axing from the BBC this year following a “fracas” with a member of the Top Gear production team, declined to comment on the prospects of the presenter’s new show for Amazon.

Announced last month, it will reunite Clarkson with his former Top Gear colleagues James May and Richard Hammond and will cost a reported £160m over 36 episodes.

“We won’t be spending what Amazon is spending,” Cohen said of the new series of Top Gear, which will return in a new format next year fronted by the Radio 2 breakfast DJ Chris Evans.

Cohen said the show – one of the BBC’s most valuable, generating around £50m a year for its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide – would not conflict with Evans’ Radio 2 commitments.

But he revealed the BBC was taken by surprise when Evans signed a deal to present a new series of his music and talk show TFI Friday for Channel 4 just days after he was given the job of presenting and producing Top Gear, making him the BBC’s highest-paid star.

BBC insiders have expressed concern about how Evans will cope with making Top Gear as well as TFI Friday while presenting the Radio 2 breakfast show, the BBC’s most popular radio programme with nearly 10 million listeners a week.

In the 1990s when Evans fronted the Radio 1 breakfast show as well as the first incarnation of TFI Friday, he walked out of the BBC in 1997 after he was refused permission to take Fridays off.

Cohen said: “He’s made a commitment but after he’s finished [TFI Friday] he will be solely focused on Top Gear from the new year. He is working on it all the time.

“Chris’s enthusiasm for it is boundless, his passion for the show is absolutely immense. He is very respectful of the show’s heritage but he wants to bring new ideas to it. I think he is going to produce something absolutely fantastic.”

He added: “He has got more energy than anyone I have ever met. I think he will manage fine, we are liaising very closely with Radio 2, he is very committed to that show. I think he sees it as the heart of his life.”

Cohen said he was impressed by much of Netflix, home to Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards, but said there were also some programmes where “probably some of us have thought, hold on, did you see that one go out? That was not quite so good, if that had been on BBC1 you’d have crucified us.”

Danny Cohen: looking to close the ‘iPlayer loophole’. Photograph: Katherine Rose/Observer

Cohen said the trend among younger people to watch on-demand only, which currently does not require a TV licence, posed big questions for the BBC which the next funding deal with the government would look to address by closing the so-called “iPlayer loophole”.

“That trend is going to seriously impact our finances,” warned Cohen, speaking on the eve of the Guardian Edinburgh International TV festival, which begins on Wednesday.

Cohen launched a robust defence of the BBC’s entertainment programmes, including its Saturday night talent show The Voice, after the culture secretary John Whittingdale questioned whether the BBC should look to be “all things to all people”.

The Voice, a bought-in Dutch format, has become a lightning rod for criticism of the corporation’s entertainment output. Cohen said: “I don’t know why entertainment has suddenly become a dirty word in the context of the BBC. I don’t think politicians want to choose what is on Saturday nights and nor should they.

“We should not just make the sort of entertainment that would get the seal of approval from opinion formers, it needs to be the sort of entertainment people up and down the land want to watch. The Voice is really popular with young people, diverse audiences and less well off audiences. It matters to them as much as Strictly [Come Dancing].

“We have a tiny amount of bought-in formats on the BBC. We have The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den, University Challenge. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with looking to the wider world … it’s the same strategy that brought us Borgen and The Killing.”

Cohen said he was sorry that Tom Jones was upset after he was axed from the latest series of The Voice, which will air on BBC1 next year and is the last in the current contract, prompting speculation that it will switch to ITV.

“I have got huge respect for Tom and I am truly sorry he’s upset,” said Cohen. Jones said he was dropped without “consultation or conversation of any kind” with a BBC executive.



Cohen added: “But I am also excited by the new panel, Paloma Faith, Boy George. Those things happen over time, but I would have never wanted Tom to be upset and I am sorry that was the case.”

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BBC1’s last attempt to come up with a new Saturday night entertainment format, Prized Apart, flopped earlier this year and will not return for a second series. Its latest effort is The Getaway Car, fronted by former X Factor presenter Dermot O’Leary, which will air next year.

“Saturday night is one of the hardest things,” said Cohen. “There haven’t been in the last decade in the UK or anywhere in the world a huge amount of formats that reach those large audiences. It’s really hard – you’ve just got to keep trying.”

Separately, Cohen said the list of “crown jewel” sporting events, which have to be shown on free-to-air TV – including the football World Cup, the Wimbledon finals and the Grand National – should be “protected … and if anything lengthened”.