Newsnight’s fate is a bad omen for the BBC

Newsnight, we learned last week, is losing ten minutes off its running time, more than half its staff including its entire reporting team and is dropping its investigative films in favour of cheap ‘n’ easy studio-based debates.   

The BBC’s news supremo Deborah Turness calls it ‘an important BBC brand’, but said ‘we’ve made the decision to reformat Newsnight as a 30-minute late-night news-making debate, discussion and interview programme’. She hasn’t quite taken the old captive bolt gun to it yet, then, but this sacred cow is definitely mooing anxiously as it makes its way down the slaughterhouse gangplank.  

I hate to say it, but: fair enough. It’s not advancing age, or not just advancing age, that means that I almost always feel like taking to my bed around the time of Newsnight’s 10.30pm kick-off. I expect you do too. Once, quite the opposite applied. You positively perked up at the portentous opening of the Newsnight theme, rather as Pavlov’s pooches might have done on hearing the bell for din-dins.