MAM
Rhodri Talfan Davies to be appointed BBC interim director general, replacing Tim Davie
LONDON: Tim Davie is finally switching off the lights. The BBC’s beleaguered director-general will depart on 2 April, nearly five months after announcing his resignation in the wake of a Panorama editing scandal that has left the corporation facing a multi-billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from Donald Trump himself.
The American president is decidedly unamused about the way the flagship current affairs programme spliced together two sections of his 6 January 2021 speech. Who can blame him? Though the BBC might argue it was simply tightening up his rambling rhetoric, Trump’s lawyers see it rather differently and are preparing to make the corporation pay handsomely for the privilege.
Davie, who became the BBC’s seventeenth director-general in 2020, has spent much of his tenure firefighting. From impartiality rows to editorial mishaps, the man has had more crises than a Greek finance minister. His departure, announced in an internal memo last November, came as the Trump furore reached fever pitch.
Stepping into the breach will be Rhodri Talfan Davies, currently director of nations and the corporation’s AI tsar. He’ll take the reins on 3 April as interim director-general whilst the hunt for a permanent replacement grinds on. Talfan Davies will join the board as an executive director from 1 Februaryto smooth the transition though whether anything about this mess can truly be described as “smooth” remains debatable.
The incoming director-general, whoever draws the short straw, will inherit a poisoned chalice of Shakespearean proportions. Beyond the Trump lawsuit, they’ll have to negotiate the BBC’s next royal charter (the current one expires in 2027) and wrangle with the government over the future of the licence fee. Meanwhile, Rhuanedd Richards will continue as interim nations director, presumably keeping the seat warm until the musical chairs finally stop.
BBC chairman Samir Shah praised Davie’s “extraordinary contribution” and Talfan Davies’s “passionate commitment to public service broadcasting.” Translation: one chap is leaving under a cloud, and another is bravely stepping into the firing line.
For Davie, April can’t come soon enough. For his successor, it may well come too soon. The Beeb on its part, as ever, soldiers on.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
