The BBC is axing Blankety Blank, Celebrity Mastermind and Live at the Apollo as part of its ongoing efforts to match its spending with its income.
Recent years have seen a persistent drop-off in the number of households willing to pay the £180 Licence Fee which provides the majority of the BBC’s income.
The £3.9bn annual Licence Fee yield is topped up by dividends from its BBC Studios commercial arm whose activities include running the highly profitable UKTV, one of the UK’s largest portfolios of advert and subscription funded channels.
After decades of moving into every genre and format of content regardless of how well supplied they already are by commercial rivals, the broadcaster is now having to trim its activities and plans to cut hundreds of millions of pounds in expenditure.
The first cuts to be announced were in the News division which is losing hundreds of jobs. A further 700 posts are to be axed from its corporate teams.
Now the BBC’s Entertainment division, responsible for the celebrity-led quiz, cooking and travel shows which account for a large share of the broadcaster’s peak schedules, has set out how it will contribute to the Content division’s overall target of making £100m in savings.
Both Celebrity Mastermind and Live at the Apollo will end following their next series but the BBC has stressed that the main Mastermind series, presented by Clive Myrie, will continue and that it will “still continue to commission ambitious Entertainment shows”.
The wider Content division cuts will result in a reduction of around 100-150 hours of original shows across multiple genres by the end of 2027/28.
Ministers are considering multiple future funding models as part of a wide-ranging review of the Charter under which the BBC operates.
In a statement the BBC said: “We are incredibly proud of all three of these much-loved shows and would like to thank everyone involved, both in front of and behind the camera, for bringing them to screen and making them such a success over many years.
“Unfortunately, we have to make some really tough choices in light of our funding challenges, and these savings have been identified from the Entertainment genre.”