The last time the BBC’s director-general and chair appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport committee, the MPs spent around half an hour grilling them about how the corporation could have broadcast a documentary about Gaza without knowing its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official.
It was bruising.
The pair faced MPs again six months later, on Tuesday, and the backdrop looked even worse, after what Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has called “a series of catastrophic failures” at the corporation.
In the months since their last session, an investigation found that the Gaza documentary breached the BBC’s accuracy standards – and the corporation faced criticism for dropping another Gaza documentary, containing claims that Israel was targeting medics, which was later broadcast on Channel 4.
The corporation also had to apologise for broadcasting anti-semitic comments by the punk duo Bob Vylan at Glastonbury.
And it forced out both the presenters of Masterchef after a review upheld allegations against them.
But Tim Davie and Samir Shah have spent a lot of the summer talking about – and apologising for – these errors and scandals.
By now, their responses are sure-footed.
The committee of MPs ask fairly tough questions, but they don’t grandstand for the cameras in the way that some previous members used to on occasion. (Sometimes I miss those days).
But grandstanding for the committee isn’t Davie or Shah’s style either. The BBC chair, though, is often the one who delivers the clippable soundbites.
In March he said that the controversy around Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was like a “dagger to the heart” of BBC impartiality.
This time, he said: “It doesn’t matter how grand you are, how famous you are. If you abuse your power, we don’t want you working for the BBC.”
He has a memorable turn of phrase and rises to the occasion. “I am absolutely clear that no one is irreplaceable,” was another pithy expression.
But the bulk of the talking this time was by Tim Davie. He doesn’t deliver straight-forward soundbites, instead often embarking on a sentence but adding several clauses before he gets to the point.
But his committee performance was confident and robust.