I worry that commissioners will use this as an excuse to cut budgets for factual even further".
Radio 4 will have a "limited" change to programming with a 2% increase in the number of repeats and a small reduction in factual and current affairs budgets.
Around £10m is budgeted for serious factual programmes and £10m on comedy.
"An audience of 5 million people watching a documentary made for £250,000 per hour is a more efficient way of buying an audience than spending three quarters of a million on a drama," says Fincham. "We guard our budgets carefully, so we are investing in factual, not saving in factual".
There is, says Nigel Walley, managing director of media consultancy Decipher, a continuing appetite for relatively undemanding – and relatively low-budget – popular-factual fare, such as Storage Hunters.
In order to undertake the darker side of the immigration issue such as child trafficking, the government must now create (without having accurate data in place), a sustainable budget and measurement system that collates factual data and statistics.
And every non-fiction writer lives in dread of making a factual mistake, getting it wrong in a way that budget-strapped publishers will not catch.
Charlotte Moore, appointed controller of BBC1 and its £1bn budget, is brilliant at creating and commissioning innovative factual programming: think The Secret History of Our Streets and The Choir, even before you get to Great British Bake-Offs.
Planet Earth, the acclaimed big-budget natural history documentary, was overlooked in the specialist factual category in favour of Channel 4's drama documentary on Hermann Göring.
The budget breaks down into around £10m on comedy, the same on serious factual, £3m for drama and the rest on new forms of content.
