Comment - Panorama's new face

The BBC's George Entwistle explains why C4's Dispatcheshas nothing to fear from the Panorama move

From next week Panoramawill move to Monday nights after EastEnders. The BBC's George Entwistle explains why Channel 4's Dispatcheshas nothing to fear from the move.

Panorama'scoming home. Britain's longest-running, best-known TV current affairs programme returns to Monday nights on 15 January. It's been there before, of course. The strand went out on Mondays for more than 40 years before its sojourn after the news on Sunday. Now we're going back.

We're going back to having a main presenter too - another programme tradition for at least 30 of its 50-plus years. We're keeping the music: one of the best signature tunes in the history of British television. And the new titles sequence contains more than a suspicion of the programme's traditional look. But I think the single most important thing about the new Panoramais that it will be on air 48 weeks of the year (rather than 30, as in 2006). That means the audience will be able to count on us being around to tackle whatever the world comes up with.

We've moved Panoramabecause we think we can give the audience a better service on a weekday night in peak. The programme's been doing very well on Sundays. We've reached big audiences and made serious impact with films on VAT fraud, teenage drinking, the Catholic church and, back in December, on the ground with British troops in Afghanistan. The weekday Panoramashave made a splash too - bail hostels, fake passports undercover and Alex Millar's remarkable football investigation. All of them matched high impact journalism with big audiences. We think all this kind of stuff belongs at the heart of BBC1. And from next week that's where you'll find it.

I learnt some time ago that you can't even think about doing things to Panoramawithout attracting lots of attention. While a few media correspondents have hit F12 for their standard 'dumbing down' article, some have raised questions worth answering.

The role of the main presenter is one. We're delighted to have signed Jeremy Vine, who's there to provide an engaging and consistent face for the programme. We hope he can build the kind of relationship with the BBC1 audience that he's so successfully created with his listeners on Radio 2. He'll be very much knitted into the fabric of the programme too, bringing his top-flight journalistic experience to reporting on at least 10 films a year. When he's not reporting, he'll do a brief introduction and then leave the stage clear for Panorama'sreporters to tell their stories.

The new slot will be competitive - we know that - but some of our recent big hits tell us we understand how to make the kind of films people find compelling. We brought over 4 million to a film about VAT fraud - because we told it in the right way. It's true, however, that there's no audience target for the show in its new berth. BBC1 is a mixed genre channel; its commitment to serious current affairs is part of its DNA.

There will be weeks when Panoramacovers complex domestic stories, or weeks when it covers big international issues such as the Middle East. That's part of what we're here for - and we hope we'll tell those stories in such an engaging way that as many people as possible will watch and understand their significance.

A lot of what we're planning for the show at the moment is directed towards making modern television too. If that means being entertaining where appropriate, I have no problem with that. What Panoramavalues as content will change very little, but we hope some of the treatments we use will hold more surprises. If you have something worth saying, it's surely worth finding the way to say it to as many people as possible.

In this column last week, Channel 4's deputy head of news and current affairs, Kevin Sutcliffe, followed his boss's lead by expressing a worry that Panorama'sscheduling change will lead to increased competitive pressures for TV current affairs as a whole. I really don't think he's right about this. For a start, the principal argument seems to me weakened by how little inhibited C4 was in 2005 when it came to schedule Dispatchesagainst ITV1's current affairs show Tonight with Trevor McDonald, which was already in the 8pm slot.

More optimistically, Panoramais moving from an inheritance on Sunday of around 4 million viewers after the news to one on Monday of between 8 and 9 million, after EastEnders. There's a potential new audience for TV current affairs here, people who were always unlikely to start watching Dispatcheshalf-way through. If we make films as well as we can, significant numbers of them should now start watching Panorama. And that would be a step forward for the genre as a whole.

I entirely understand that a great many people feel they have to say something about Panorama. It's one of the very few television programmes whose fate and fortune are important to us all. I would be delighted if the new slot on BBC1 provided everyone with the opportunity to stop politicking and concentrate on what the programme is there to do - bring top-flight TV journalism to a mass audience.
George Entwistle is the BBC's head of current affairs