Farewell HardTalk…or not?

I wanted to write a little about the closure of BBC HardTalk given I was lucky enough to work there for a few months as Acting Editor and can therefore personally endorse how dedicated and effective Stephen and the team are. There are few shows which can boast a running order that goes President Sakhashvili MONDAY Mia Khalifa TUESDAY and Ken Hom (Top Wok chef, as he was billed ) WEDNESDAY but HardTalk did and does.

Stephen, Zeinab, Sarah and the incredible production team under Today alum Lisa Baxter achieve technical and editorial miracles keeping the show focused, relevant and talked-about. The production team are genuinely brave people who go on the road in difficult circumstances - even in my short time there one producer was arrested in Venezuela and detained naked in a police cell overnight while on deployment, showing the programme’s reputation travels far, for good and ill.

I had sat in probably half a dozen BBC News savings meetings over the years where HardTalk closure was on the table but it was always reprieved - partly because it really doesn’t cost very much , the current 3 shows a week are a rounding error in the overall budget of BBC News, but mainly because it’s inconceivable for an organisation as significant and impactful as BBC News not to have a regular long-form interview strand. It’s just part of the table-stakes of being a respected international news provider.

But of course the sands have been shifting in recent years , and not just because of the endless rounds of cuts in BBC News. Let’s look at a few reasons why.

As my former colleague Rob Burley has set out in his book on the issue, BBC News doesn’t believe in the value of interviews in the way it used to , and increasingly believes less and less in programmes in general. The closure of HardTalk and the equally respected Click tech show are part of a trend to streamline BBC News into a rolling news machine that is platform-agnostic - by which I mean that a bucket of ‘content’ is created for both TV and digital platforms, streamlining spending, and treating continuous news on TV and online as part of the same workflow. And to be fair there are good reasons for this - BBC News has historically been slow to pivot spending into digital because power lies in programme fiefdoms, who can loudly defend themselves when under threat. Arguably it has been too slow to invest in news on new and emerging social media platforms, and to put the needs of the future digital audience first. ‘Shows’ don’t really work in an online context - so TV, which is expensive to produce and doesn’t repurpose well into other platforms, looks less and less like a good investment, especially when digital news is more versatile and less capital-intensive, needing fewer studios, galleries, technical staff and so on.

Additionally the style of the BBC’s merged UK and international news channel is increasingly for ‘rolling news first’; the only remaining programmes are ones like The Travel Show that still bring in valuable sponsorship revenue when screened outside the UK. HardTalk was rightly unsponsorable - public service 101. In truth HT was always more loved by its audiences than by News chiefs. When I was there the UK edition was shunted into a post-midnight slot because one of my bosses wanted something more ‘post-pub friendly’ on at 2330, a phrase which struck me even at the time as a fundamental misunderstanding of what a publicly funded news channel is for.

The fixed duration format of news shows is also increasingly outdated. The ‘podcastification’ of the world is an important and not wholly welcome phenomenon. Audience expectations are now for long, free-flowing conversation, and ones which reveal gradually and less through the confrontation-heavy structure of a programme like HardTalk. A fixed-duration 27 minute show cannot emulate that. HardTalk wears its brand in its title ; when I was there I would joke we should rename it SoftSoap, as nervous guests would be more likely to say yes. Anyone listening to The Rest Is Politics, or any number of pale imitations, will recognise that the style of these ‘hold to account’ interviews which were a staple of HardTalk (and indeed On the Record, Today and Newsnight) may be disappearing. I thought this was particularly evident on UK election night coverage this year, for example. You may also have noticed a similar drift in Radio 4 linear programming - including Today - which is increasingly ‘podcast-first’ with even Today’s storied 0810 slot often given over to a cut-down from the show’s spinoff podcast.

None of these changes are necessarily a bad thing, and shifting audience behaviours should never be disregarded. But I still think HardTalk was worth saving and cherishing - and it’s closure may yet be overturned - and here’s why.

One of the real joys of working at HardTalk was being able to spend real quality time constructing an argument to interrogate ideas - not for the sake of a punch-up but because the world is a complicated and nuanced place, and people with serious ideas and enough sense of public service to defend them should be given the space and respect of a well-argued analysis. I’ve had to write briefs for a PM interview in an afternoon before - but on HardTalk a producer could spend several days researching and structuring an argument with Stephen that produced real added value for audiences on air.

The job of a public service News provider is to make the world a less stupid place. We live in an era where ‘content’ - particularly on social media platforms - finds an arc that bends towards stupidity. That’s not always a bad thing - and my TikTok FYP inventory of dog videos and guitar tutorials show I’m as guilty as the next person. But News has to be for something - and it should be about making people smarter. The drift towards endless lightly-curated live coverage on all platforms is chasing audiences at the expense of making people stupid. The ‘news stream’ leaves people exhausted, stressed out and increasingly news-avoidant. That’s not in anyone’s interest. The joy of HardTalk and programmes like it is that it takes people and their ideas seriously enough to properly interrogate them, and to provide context and understanding around increasingly baffling and chaotic events.

I remember one interview Stephen did whioe I was on the programme with the father of an Israeli soldier who had been taken hostage and had died in captivity. It was testy and awkward, it challenged a lot of audience assumptions around the story - in short it was exactly the kind of background context audiences would then remember when events like the past year’s Middle East conflict unfolded.

News should be eclectic, at times awkward and contrary, because sometimes its value is not realised until years after. Audiences would be less well-equipped to understand the world if they hadn’t happened on moments in news coverage that helped them see the context and meaning of events, rather than just hearing about events themselves.

Stephen and the team have always delivered that, and I worry that in successive rounds of cuts, the BBC has left its News division unable to deliver them in the future.