In the run-up to Christmas, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy launched a public consultation on the future of the BBC. She invited audiences to reflect on what they value, what should change, and how the Corporation should be funded in the next Charter period.

Arguably, it is a waste of time. Because on Christmas Day, the public delivered a far clearer response than any consultation ever could. They switched off.

Only one word can describe the BBC’s Christmas 2025 performance: catastrophic. The scale of the collapse was so severe that it renders the entire Charter consultation exercise absurd. There is no mystery to be explored in focus groups or questionnaires.

The British Audience Research Board (BARB) figures are brutal. Across the BBC’s top ten Christmas Day programmes in 2025, the combined audience was just 34.6million viewers. Last year the equivalent figure was almost 50million. In a single year, the BBC lost more than 15million viewers across its flagship festive output – more than 30 per cent.

The headline comparisons are even worse. Last Christmas, the BBC’s most-watched programme, the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special, notched up more than 12million viewers. This year, its biggest hit, the King’s Christmas speech, managed just 4.6million.

Call the Midwife, carefully engineered to deliver warmth, nostalgia and mass appeal, lost nearly a quarter of its audience year on year. Big-budget specials designed to create shared national moments struggled to reach even three or four million viewers.

Yet confronted with these numbers, the BBC Chief Content Officer, Kate Phillips, responded with evasion. She declared that the BBC still had nine of the top ten programmes shown by terrestrial broadcasters on Christmas Day; that its overall share beat the streaming services such as Netflix, and that audiences are fragmenting everywhere.

This is statistical sleight of hand. When total viewing collapses, boasting about relative position is meaningless. What matters is absolute reach, not relative bragging rights. And in absolute terms, the BBC’s Christmas audience has fallen off a cliff.

This goes directly to value for money. The BBC is not a commercial broadcaster that must persuade people to pay. It is funded by a compulsory licence fee enforced by law. People pay whether they watch or not. In any other sector, a collapse in demand on this scale would trigger emergency restructuring, leadership change and a fundamental rethink of purpose. At the BBC, it triggers a press release and a demand for continued funding on the grounds of past achievement.

That is why the continuation of the licence fee now looks increasingly untenable. Compulsion was arguably more justified when the BBC delivered universality, cultural centrality and genuine public affection. It becomes indefensible when large sections of the public no longer actively choose its output, even at Christmas.

What makes this failure more serious is that it comes after years in which the BBC has insulated itself from almost every form of accountability. Complaints about bias are filtered through systems designed to reject them. Regulators defer to process rather than outcome. Governments hesitate to frame vital reform. Critics are marginalised. The one judgement that cannot be procedurally neutralised is audience behaviour.

And that judgement is now devastating. People are not marching in protest, though millions are refusing to pay the licence fee. They are doing something far more damaging. They are ignoring the BBC, even at the moment when it is trying hardest to matter.

Read More – The BBC’s Christmas collapse is nothing short of catastrophic