‘The BBC made a mistake letting Jeremy Clarkson go'

Telegraph

05-05-2025

Peter Fincham and his sparring partner of 50 years, Jimmy Mulville, are two of the most venerable old heads in British television and between them are responsible for some of the most celebrated shows of the past few decades, from Alan Partridge to Have I Got News For You. Now the old dogs have a new trick – a podcast.
Insiders: The TV Podcast, which launched a few weeks ago, features a conversation between the producers in which they pick apart the issues of the day. Topics are given to them in sealed envelopes – the proposed levy on the streaming services, Saturday Night Live UK, the death of linear scheduling – and the pair apply their decades of experience to provide genuinely illuminating insight.
It is not, they insist, The Rest is Entertainment, Marina Hyde and Richard Osman 's podcast juggernaut which often looks behind the scenes of television, although that show has proved the appetite for insider knowledge of an industry in a constant state of flux. Fincham and Mulville have been there and got the t-shirt – there is no corner of the TV industry that they don't know. Other TV podcasts exist – the BBC's Obsessed With…, Must Watch, and Off the Telly, or Empire's Pilot TV – but these are critic or fan-led review shows. 'Experience always trumps opinion,' says Mulville.
Naturally, the pair have anecdotes galore to sprinkle over the episodes. In the opener, Mulville is particularly entertaining about working on American adaptations of British shows, from Have I Got News For You ('They didn't want it to be too newsy') to Father Ted ('They asked if they really had to be Catholic priests'). Episode three also provided an entertaining analysis of when Mulville offered to buy BBC Three from the BBC for a pound.
Crucially, the pair are not here to lay into the TV industry. Quite the opposite. 'We love television,' says Fincham. 'It's easy to construct an argument saying the BBC is doomed or whatever channel is going to fail, but we believe there's a great future. People say, 'British television is dying. Oh and by the way, have you seen Adolescence?'.'
The pair met 50 years at the Cambridge Footlights (alongside actor Robert Bathurst and theatre director Nick Hytner) and have been involved in a friendly rivalry ever since. Fincham, 68, joined Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones's fledgling TalkBalk Productions in 1985 before turning it into a British comedy powerhouse, producing The Day Today, the Partridge shows, and Smack the Pony. He went on to become the controller of BBC One and then the Director of Television at ITV. Mulville, 70, continued writing and acting after Cambridge, notably in the cult sketch show Who Dares Wins, before co-founding Hat Trick Productions, whose numerous credits include Father Ted, Derry Girls, and Outnumbered.
And the pair are still making waves in the TV industry. Fincham's Expectation TV has recently produced the acclaimed, Bafta-winning BBC comedy-dramas Alma's Not Normal, as well as Clarkson's Farm, while our conversation is conducted over Zoom because Mulville is currently in South Korea finding partners for a new Seoul-set drama (on the day we speak, he had lunch with no less than Hwang Dong-hyuk, aka Mr Squid Game). No wonder the pair believe the industry is in rude health.
Their wide experience has made them come to the same conclusion – that predicting the future of television is futile. Fincham highlights the rise of YouTube 20 years ago. 'Everyone said it would kill our attention spans, but what happened next? The rise of the boxset drama. They said YouTube would destroy television. They say lots of things will destroy television. Ever since I began, they've been walking about with signs saying 'The End is Nigh'.'
While Mulville states that commissioners need to have rules – 'Otherwise you wouldn't say no to anything' – the industry lives on a wing and a prayer. When Father Ted won a Bafta in 1998, the then controller of Channel 4, Michael Grade, sent Mulville a note saying that he didn't get the show when Mulville pitched it, he didn't get it when they made it and he didn't get it when he watched it, but 'thank God you brought it to Channel 4'.
Comedy, of course, is one of the hot topics in TV, particularly in Britain where its diminished presence is lamented. 'Every few years a journalist rings me up to ask if British TV comedy is dead,' says Mulville. 'That's going back more than 30 years. But I think we are going through a bad time in terms of comedy commissioning. I think people are now worried because when you launch a bad comedy, you offend people. If you launch a bad drama, people aren't that bothered. But a bad comedy? It's like you've done a s— on their carpet. They hate you for it.'
Something they hope to swerve in the podcast is too much BBC-bashing. 'I didn't like it when I was at the BBC,' says Fincham, 'my predecessors weighing in, telling me how to do my job. So I am not going to tell the people at the BBC how to do their job. But people are far more interested in the BBC than anything else. For 11 years I went to the Edinburgh TV Festival, three years for the BBC, eight years for ITV. And for the first three years, people asked me about the BBC. And for the next eight years, guess what, they asked me about the BBC. So I won't be an armchair critic.'
Despite that, could the BBC, as Gary Lineker said recently, be bolder in defending itself, stick up more for those who love the BBC rather than pander to those who hate it? 'I think I know what Gary means,' says Fincham. 'I think the BBC can, at times, undervalue its audience, who are older let's be honest, because they take them for granted and become obsessed with getting younger audiences in.'
The non-armchair critic warms to his subject. 'I'll say this actually – I make Clarkson's Farm, and the BBC never needed to let Jeremy Clarkson go. It was a straightforward mistake. They could have found ways of not letting him go. And Clarkson's Farm is the perfect Reithian show – it informs, educates and entertains in equal measure. And it's on Amazon. There's a wider issue here that we could talk about all afternoon, that recurring thing of talent that becomes problematically too big for the BBC and then becomes very difficult to handle. But that's as far as I'll go with that one.' One for a future podcast episode, perhaps.
Mulville, like Lineker, is more bullish. 'The BBC should get out there and say, 'Yeah, we make mistakes. F— it. We broadcast 1000s of hours a week on TV and radio, we're bound to make mistakes. We can be a bit stupid sometimes, but so what? We're a brilliant organisation.' They should take a leaf out of Donald Trump's book and just talk about how wonderful they are. Because if it wasn't there, we'd miss it.'