An American is left to salvage BBC’s ailing ‘Top Gear’

LONDON, Aug 3 — In the US television sitcom Friends, struggling actor Joey relies on a winning personality to compensate for his naivete, stumbling into everything from advertising gigs to dates. Now Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey, has lucked into a similar role in the UK.

The American actor is poised to take the lead at Top Gear, the British Broadcasting Corp’s most lucrative entertainment franchise, after star presenter Jeremy Clarkson left the car show and his replacement, radio host Chris Evans, flopped almost instantly.

A lot is riding on the success of LeBlanc. In addition to entertaining viewers at home, the show is one of the UK’s biggest cultural exports. It generates more than £50 million (RM271 million) a year in international sales of programming, toys and games for the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. That revenue is becoming more important to the world’s largest and oldest public broadcaster as the government cuts its funding.

UK viewership of the last Top Gear episode featuring Evans fell to 1.9 million, down from 5.3 million for Clarkson’s finale a year ago. Reviewers panned the DJ’s shouting delivery and said the new team lacked the chemistry of Clarkson and co-stars Richard Hammond and James May — known for stunts like driving through Argentina with a licence plate that appeared to hint at the 1982 Falklands War.

‘Warming up’

“It was always going to be a difficult brief to reinvent a format that way,” said Tim Davie, BBC Worldwide’s chief executive officer. “We’re still just warming up our engines.”

To try to jump-start international growth, BBC Worldwide in late 2014 sold a 49.9 per cent stake in US channel BBC America to AMC Networks Inc, the home of drama series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The US$200 million deal handed operational control of BBC America, including advertising sales, to AMC.

Last year, BBC Worldwide linked up with Sony Corp on a television venture in India, and Davie said he was scouting around for similar opportunities in other markets.

“There’s absolutely no reason we couldn’t do other partnerships,” Davie said in an interview at BBC Worldwide’s headquarters in a former BBC broadcast studio in London. “This is an age where scale counts.”

BBC Worldwide returned £222.2 million to the BBC in the year through March 31. It wants to lift the total contribution to £1.2 billion over the next five years, 30 per cent more than in the previous half decade.

Streaming service

BBC Worldwide plans to introduce a Netflix-style online streaming service in the US later this year, Davie said, without specifying a date. The subscription-based outlet will feature shows from the BBC archives, along with more recent programming. Worldwide is also working with Amazon.com Inc on The Collection, a drama about a French fashion house in the aftermath of World War II.

The BBC also faces new competition as it prepares to shoot a new season of Top Gear with LeBlanc, who joined as Evans’s sidekick. Clarkson, who was dismissed last year after a fracas with a producer, has started work on a competing series called The Grand Tour that debuts on Amazon’s Prime streaming service in the autumn.

In hiring LeBlanc, a rare example of a US star headlining a quintessentially British show, the BBC is taking a page from Hollywood movie studios, which have begun casting non-US actors to appeal to growing international markets.

Davie said the BBC’s priority remains serving UK television-owning households, which pay an annual licence fee of £145.50 that funds the broadcaster. LeBlanc is well-known in the UK, Davie said, because he appeared as a guest on Top Gear and in Episodes, a British-American sitcom in which he played a fictionalised version of himself.

“We didn’t go out saying, ‘We must get an international cast member to build a global audience,’” he said. “We went out to get the best lineup.”

Overseas sales

LeBlanc’s name recognition may be helping with international sales. The new Top Gear has been sold in more than 130 territories, Davie said. That’s up from 89 for last year’s series at the same stage, the BBC said, though short of the 236 countries and regions the last Clarkson-led episodes eventually reached.

In the US, the series’ season premiere with Evans and LeBlanc drew just 388,000 viewers, down from 530,000 for the previous version with Clarkson. The ratings are above averages for BBC America in the same time slot, BBC Worldwide said.

“The presenting team, if it’s more international and broadens the international appeal, could have been part of the calculation,” said Tim Westcott, senior principal analyst at research firm IHS. — Bloomberg

EC pushes for political financing law amid RM2.6b donation controversy

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 6 — The Election Commission (EC) has called for legislation that requires all political parties to declare their sources of funding to make elections more transparent, amid controversy surrounding the RM2.6 billion that was said to be donated to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s account.

EC chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Yusof pointed out that the election agency does not have any investigative powers to find out if election candidates spend more than the limits of RM200,000 for parliamentary seats and RM100,000 for state seats, as they only rely on receipts submitted by the candidates.

“There must be a law on how much you get from anybody and the like,” Aziz told Malay Mail Online when contacted, noting that the US and UK have such political financing laws.

“Political parties must agree to reveal who are the donors, how much they get, local or overseas… I was told, there was a proposal on that, but one political party disagreed,” he added, declining to reveal which political party it was.

Aziz said the EC would report to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and to the police if it received complaints with supporting evidence that an election candidate had spent more than what was reported to the EC.

Najib said Saturday that he would only reveal the source of Barisan Nasional’s (BN) funds if the opposition was willing to do the same, amid allegations that public money had been used to fund the ruling coalition’s election campaigns.

The BN chairman and Umno president also said he will be pushing for a motion in Parliament to ensure transparency in political funding.

Three years ago, Najib had said Putrajaya will introduce an initiative to require that all funds for political parties be channeled to their official party account, but it is unknown if the initiative was ever implemented.

The prime minister has come under the spotlight after the MACC said in a statement on Monday that the RM2.6 billion in his personal bank account, which was alleged to have come from 1Malaysia Development Berhad, was not channeled from the state-owned fund but was a contribution from “donors” instead.

The MACC, however, did not disclose the identity of the donors nor explain how the money was spent.

Malaysia ranked fifth from the bottom in a recent survey of 54 countries on the integrity of campaign financing in elections, conducted by the Electoral Integrity Project based at the University of Sydney, Australia.

The study noted that reporting requirements for political funding in Malaysia are light, as parties are only required to report on their finances annually and such reports do not disclose a complete list of donors or donations.

Source

MH370: Timeline of one of aviation’s greatest mysteries

Missing MH370

PARIS: Here is a timeline of major developments in the hunt for the Boeing 777, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.

2014

March 8 – MH370 departs from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 am and disappears from Malaysian civilian radar at 1:30 am, just before passing to Vietnamese air traffic control. It appears on military radar until 2:15 am. – Vietnam launches a search operation for the Boeing 777 that expands into a multinational hunt in the South China Sea.

March 15 – Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak says the plane seems to have been flown deliberately for hours, veering sharply off-route at roughly the same time that its communications system and transponder were manually switched off. – Satellite data suggest the jet’s last known location is somewhere along one of two huge arcs stretching north into Central Asia and south into the Indian Ocean. Twenty-six countries take part in the search.

March 24 – Najib announces “with deep sadness and regret” that MH370 is presumed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean.

March 30 – Australia is tasked with coordinating the search with six other nations: China, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea and the United States. After some 300 sorties covering more than 4.5 million square kilometres (1.3 million nautical square miles) fail to find evidence, the priority shifts to submarine exploration.

2015
 
January 29 – Malaysia’s government declares the passengers and crew “presumed dead.”

March 8 – As the one-year mark passes, an interim report by an international investigative team details the flight’s sequence of events. No evidence is provided that would incriminate crew members or suggest a mechanical failure. A sudden drop in oxygen levels that could have incapacitated the crew but allowed the plane to continue flying until it ran out of fuel is considered a credible hypothesis.

July 29 – A two-metre-long (almost seven-foot) wing part called a flaperon is found on a beach on the French island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. Two days later, Australian officials say they are “increasingly confident” the part came from the ill-fated airliner. It is sent to a French military site near Toulouse for detailed examination.

August 2 - Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai says that the part has been “officially identified” as coming from a Boeing 777.

August 5 - Experts and investigators from Malaysia, China, Australia, France and the United States begin examining the wing part, hoping to officially confirm it was once part of MH370. -AFP

August 6 - International experts have confirmed that the debris found on La Reunion Island on July 29, belongs to MH370.

Source

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