BBC Strategy Review promises more, not less, competition for newspapers

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 March 2010 at 14:59
Tags: BBC, Media

I love the BBC, but I tend to worry about it a lot.

On p70 of Mark Thompson’s Strategic Review, I found the kind of evidence that supports my fears. The paragraph that gripped me refers to the future of BBC Online. It goes like this:

There will be no specialist content for a specialist audience, such as business-critical information in specialist fields, legal, financial (including trading tools) or other professional content.

Whoa. Trading tools? Specialist legal and financial content? Business-critical information? The idea of the BBC becoming a large-scale B2B publisher is sufficiently bonkers that it should have been suppressed violently the minute it surfaced in conversation at Broadcasting House.

But no: here it is, incendiary to the last, disclosed in an apparently serious document about the future of the BBC.

This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about how far the BBC’s ambitions ran at the high point of the Long Boom. It also makes you wonder about how the Strategy Review will change the balance of power between the BBC and commercial rivals who largely make a living from the written word.

Much remains to be clarified. But here is what Mark Thompson is promising:

• BBC Online’s budget will be cut by 25% by 2013, “with a corresponding reduction in staffing levels”

• BBC Online will cut “whole categories of online activity such as web search, communications and non-content related social networking”.

• The number of sections on BBC Online ( ‘top-level directories’, in the form of bbc.co.uk/sitename) will be halved by 2012, with many sites closed and others consolidated. There will be far fewer bespoke programme websites.

• “Removing generic content [from BBC Online] in areas such as the Recipe Finder and /film.

• BBC Online will feed more traffic to the nationals: “by 2012, an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of ‘click-throughs’ to external sites”

• Local BBC sites in England restricted to news, sport, weather, travel and local coverage of national projects like Coast and A History of the World in 100 Objects. The BBC “will not provide listings, local guides or similar feature material”.

• “Leaving room for local newspapers and others to develop in a digital world by keeping the BBC’s current pattern of local services, and not launching new services in England at any more local a level than today.”

Potentially, there’s some important stuff here. Yet Mark Thompson’s Strategy Review also contains what diplomats would describe as “red lines”. These are fundamental points of principle from which the Corporation will not budge.

News is non-negotiable. As the BBC’s own research demonstrates, taxpayers want the Corporation to generate news more than anything else. The graphic reproduced at the top of this post –- extracted from the Strategic Review — underlines that fact.

Although the researchers asked respondents what they wanted from the BBC on their television sets, the BBC regards online as an indivisible part of the whole. On p33 of the Strategy Review, directly beneath the graph I’ve reproduced here, Thompson’s document contains the following words: “Content delivered via digital platforms is a vital part of this story.”

Elsewhere, the language is stronger. Consider, for example, the Review’s (eminently sensible) suggestion that the web “may [become] the only platform and delivery system that the BBC needs to fulfil its public purposes”. When it comes to the clash of civilisations between TV, text and audio, the BBC intends to be a fully-committed combatant.

Indeed, if all goes according to plan, the BBC’s Great Reprioritisation should intensify competition with private sector news organisations. Take a look, for example, at these priorities, laid out for BBC news journalism across all media:

• Stronger specialist analysis of science, the environment and social affairs

• More business coverage (local and global)

• More international news

• More coverage of local UK politics (”multiplatform coverage of local government and politics through Democracy Live”)

Specifically, for BBC Online, the report promises:

• “More prominence” for audiovisual content, original journalism, expertise and analysis

• Better quality local news websites

• “Stronger” consolidated “knowledge” output in areas like Nature and Music

• BBC News Online to focus “on a generalist, not specialist, audience”

• Entertainment news to become “more serious and concise” with stronger coverage of the media industry, culture and the arts

That’s some shopping list. Consider, too, the hint (on p50) that many of the redundancies at BBC Online will affect technical staff, rather than journalists. (The job cuts, we’re told, will partly reflect “the growing maturity and commoditisation of web design and technology”).

Notably, too, many of the sub-domains earmarked for closure provide readers with entertainment, rather than news. Rival publishers will find it hard to get excited by the prospect of sites like /robinhood being “consolidated under larger audience-facing propositions”. (p49).

So the basic conflict, sharpened by recession, still exists. It’s unlikely to ever be resolved. On the one hand, commercial publishers argue that the BBC is crowding them out of the market. On the other, the BBC argues that taxpayers want it to provide news more than anything else.

At first, the BBC’s Strategy Review looked like a retreat under pressure. But a steely bureaucratic determination runs through the core of this document. Where it matters most, the BBC will not be moved and may even succeed in upping its game.

Mr Thompson plays a blinder: Outrage over BBC cuts spells trouble for the Tories

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 2 March 2010 at 16:37
Tags: BBC

At both the Guardian and the Daily Mail, readers are outraged by Mark Thompson’s plans to prune the BBC’s output. It might not feel like it, but this is excellent news for the Corporation.

Finally, the BBC has achieved its aim: it has moved ahead of the curve in terms of anticipating a Conservative government’s actions. In doing so, Thompson has incited satisfied viewers and listeners to come out and fight — on message boards, Facebook and Twitter.

In response, Vaizey’s conversion to the joys of 6Music feels significant. His admission that he “strongly suspects 6 Music will be saved” hints that an incoming Conservative administration might also bend in the face of protest.

It’s telling, too, that the main sources quoted in coverage at the Times and Mail today are those of union leaders decrying the job cuts.

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, seems to have adopted a low profile, cropping up merely to insist upon “actions, not words”. Hunt’s tone suggests that the Cameroons are distinctly unamused.

This wouldn’t be surprising. With the NHS off-limits, the BBC had started to look as if it would become a post-election punch bag for the right of the Conservative party. Yet Thompson’s proposed cuts have left a hardcore of anti-BBC ideologues looking isolated.

Late last week, the Times argued in a leader column that Thompson needed to do “much more than axe a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to and websites that few have ever visited”. No doubt the onslaught mounted by Twittering fans of 6Music caught the Times’s leader writer by surprise.

The confusion among the ranks of the BBC’s enemies will prove temporary. But this episode will have reminded them that a significant majority of the population likes the BBC. Last September, for example, 77% of respondents to an ICM poll agreed with the suggestion that that the BBC is “a national institution we should be proud of”. (As Andy Beckett points out at the Guardian, this compares with 68% in 2004).

So far, Mark Thompson has encouraged just a few tens of thousands of these voices out into the open. The effect has been remarkable. All of a sudden, the BBC’s ideological opponents risk being cast in the role of playground bullies — hardly the most desirable meme of the moment.

Weirdly, the BBC and its director-general are playing a blinder.

Forget Murdoch in Edinburgh: Let’s have a real fight about TV’s “dinosaur bosses”

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 4 September 2009 at 12:27
Tags: BBC, BSkyB, ITV, Media

Obviously, it’s a pity that Robert Peston and James Murdoch didn’t come to blows at the Edinburgh TV festival last week.

It’s also a pity that the vast murmuration caused by Murdoch’s speech overhadowed another, equally important, theme at Edinburgh: the impending clash of civilisations between the broadcast establishment and web video.

In this debate, Ashley Highfield of Microsoft (and formerly of the BBC) delivered the provocation, with his suggestion that broadcasters have just two years to create “credible, truly digital, brands” before facing what he described as an “iTunes moment”. (The parallel is with the music industry, which failed to create a digital business, leaving the way open for Apple to do it instead.)

The organisers of the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival seemed to take a different view. They chose to kick off proceedings with a feel-good survey written up by Deloitte and researched by YouGov.

Quite clearly, the first line of the accompanying press release was designed to smite the digerati: “New report reveals television advertising still packs the greatest punch”. As for the findings, well, if Lord Grade has daydreams, they presumably go something like this:

• 64% of respondents ranked TV advertising as the format “with most impact”
• Three-quarters of 18-24 year-olds ranked TV ads top for impact
• Only 12% chose search as one of their top three ad formats (again in terms of “impact”)
• 44% researched a company, product or service online in response to a TV ad.

The accompanying quotes from Howard Davies, media partner at Deloitte, left little doubt that the survey had been an exercise designed to deliver good news:

“Online advertising’s poor showing relative to television may surprise given that the former has often been portrayed as television’s nemesis.

“However, what television does best – display and brand building is what online struggles with. Online advertising is best at search, which previously newspapers, had excelled at, particularly for classified.”

At which point, it’s worth turning to marketing academic Mark Ritson’s demolition of the survey. In a blog post, Ritson — who currently teaches at the MIT Sloan Management School in Boston – modestly described Deloitte’s findings as “absolute and total crap”.

First, Ritson criticised the methodology:

“It’s not that consumers lie when asked a question like this. Rather, they simply do not know the answer. Self-reporting data has been proven to be invalid for questions as basic as estimating a consumer’s household income.”

Next, he criticised the survey’s relevance:

“For the past 15 years, no one has cared about comparing one media with another in this binary way. . . Comparing apples with oranges is an irrelevant endeavour in the age of the fruit salad.”

Finally, Ritson lambasted the idea of measuring “impact” without taking into account the cost of rival media and the “effective frequencies” required to yield an impact:

The last time I looked at a rate card, the price of a 30-second spot was wildly different from that of an outdoor ad. . . In the study, TV advertising was reported to have four times the impact of outdoor advertising. What if an out-door ad costs 20% that of a TV ad, and needs only two, rather than three, exposures to deliver its impact? It would work out to be a superior medium even with a lower reported ‘impact’ score.

The TV industry is in trouble, wrote Ritson, partly because it is “run by the kind of dinosaurs who think these kind of reports are good for business”.

Ouch. Perhaps MGEITVF should invite the good professor along to speak next year. He’d stand a better chance of inciting fisticuffs than the ever-so-polite James Murdoch.

Footnote: Mark Ritson (see comments) suggests that Tess Alps of Thinkbox has written a “completely toothless” response to his critique of Deloitte’s research. IMHO it’s anything but that.

We at Thinkbox prefer not to rely on claimed behaviour research, in fact, and instead use rigorous and impartial econometrics to prove that, pound for pound, TV advertising delivers more incremental profit than any other form of advertising, 4.5 times the investment according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Decide your yourself.

Newspapers & live events: There’s money in affinity

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 21 August 2009 at 15:02
Tags: BBC Worldwide, Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, Media, News International

Simon Jenkins went to four festivals this year: Glastonbury, The Hay Festival, the Welsh Eisteddfod and the CLA Game Fair.

(The CLA Game Fair? For metropolitan types among you, the CLA bit stands for Country Land & Business Association, and its Game Fair is a three-day festival of country pursuits.)

Last week, Jenkins found himself marvelling at the vast crowds that attended each of these events — vast crowds “being parted from considerable sums of money in the cause of affinity”.

Sensibly, Jenkins went on to argue that newspapers should emulate the music industry, which has “cast off its enslavement to recording studios and recast itself, almost in Victorian mode, as a mass movement for live audiences”.

At EMI, Guy Hands wouldn’t recognise this description of an industry “casting off enslavement”, but one thing’s for sure: if it doesn’t already, the music industry as a whole will soon generate more revenue from live performance than it does from the sale of CDs and MP3 files.

The increase in performance revenues is compensating for the decline in physical music sales. The lessons for publishers are obvious.

As our lives become more virtual, as the number of shared national moments on telly dwindles, we crave live experience more than ever. It’s partly a tribal thing: attending Glastonbury or Glyndebourne says a lot about who you are.

It’s also partly about the increasing importance of experiences as opposed to products. Not for nothing does an entire sub-sector of the marketing industry devote itself to experiential marketing. In an increasingly digital world, retailers need to find more ways of getting their products in front of us so that we can look at them, touch them, smell and taste them.

Broadcasters have been quicker than newspapers to satisfy this craving. Apparently, the public’s taste for Top Gear has been sufficient to sustain “a £20m world tour”, produced in associated with Clarion Events.

Like Top Gear, Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs started out as a reviews-based show, only to become a vehicle for all sorts of collectively-held aspirations. The original TV programme (produced by Fremantle Media and broadcast on Channel 4) has given birth into a huge exhibition (organised by Media 10).

Along the way, there’s been a massive expansion of focus. On telly, Grand Designs concerns itself with self-build homes. At the NEC, in October, it promises to interest “anyone who has an interest in design, build, interiors, shopping, home wares, gardens, kitchens & bathrooms, and innovation”.

Who’s to say that the Mail, the Guardian or the Times or the Telegraph can’t mobilise similar numbers of fans? Grand Designs is watched by around 5m viewers eight times a year, with repeats driving up reach. But the whitetops reach several million readers every day, and their brands have been around a lot longer.

Intrigued, I decided to look up the financial performance of the four festivals that Jenkins mentions in his column. The results were interesting:

Glastonbury: As the great-grandaddy of them all, Glasto is an exception to the rules in terms of size. But its size hasn’t restricted growth: even this well-established event is growing rapidly. In 2005, revenues were £16.3m. As you might recall, there was no event in 2006. But in 2007, revenue shot up to £22.3m. The numbers make me wonder whether Glastonbury broke through the £40m barrier this year.

The Hay Festival: Here, too, there’s significant growth. In 2005, Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts Limited generated £1.2m in revenues. Revenues grew by 22% in 2006, and by a further 26% in 2007. But 2008 was the breakthrough year, with revenue expanding by 53% to £2.9m – probably due to international expansion. Whatever the reason, the company behind The Hay Festival has more than doubled in size in the space of three years.

The National Eisteddfod Of Wales: The only registered charity on the list, and the only one that describes itself as “a process rather than an event”. Eisteddfod has reputedly been dogged by financial problems. But its topline looks healthy enough. In 2008, it generated revenues of £3.8m.

The CLA Game Fair: According to the most recent set of accounts at Companies House, the Game Fair generated revenues of £3.2m in 2006. The event was called off in 2007 “due to the appalling weather”. But in 2008, it generated £3.8m. Once again, the growth rate is impressive: 18%.

The story is consistent and obvious. Simon Jenkins is correct: there’s money in live events. Investing in them should be a no-brainer for newspapers.

Bullshit detection: Michael Jackson vs. BBC expenses

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 July 2009 at 18:22
Tags: BBC, Media

Interesting stat: the has BBC received 748 complaints about its allegedly excessive coverage of Michael Jackson’s death.

According to a BBC source quoted by the Guardian, that’s “10 to 15 times” the number of complaints that the Corporation received about its directors’ expenses, which were published last week.

Of course, this is an apples and oranges comparison. It’s as dodgy as the PR-inspired “surveys” that Ben Goldacre takes apart for fun.

Both stories generated plenty of emotionally-charged coverage, but the news of Michael Jackson’s death was far larger in terms of its impact, and therefore likely to generate more reaction.

It’s also true that complaints about the BBC’s corporate behaviour are rather different from complaints about the BBC’s editorial stance.

That said, it’s worth recalling the sheer aggression with which the Times, the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph laid into the BBC last week. No prisoners were taken.

Presumably, the BBC’s top brass would like us to understand that the bullshit detector wielded by the British public remains finely-calibrated and highly discriminating. Let’s hope they’re right about that.

Why does the BBC spend more on its web sites than all of our national newspapers put together?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 20 May 2009 at 13:22
Tags: BBC, Media

To be honest, I’m not a great fan of the Economist. Using all of that superb brainpower to promote a predictable species of conventional wisdom has always seemed a bit like driving a Rolls Royce to your local Tesco.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with doing this. But it does make you look a bit arrogant. Occasionally, too, it can make you look like a bit of a twat.

So we come to this week’s edition of The Economist, which offers up 3,800 words on the future of the news business.

For anyone who has lived on Mars for the past three years, I guess this kind of thing is useful.

But for the rest of us, the revelation that Mail Online has “built a reputation for celebrity news” hardly qualifies as staggering. The suggestion that local news outlets are “ailing” as cars dealers “trim their advertising” can’t be described as revelatory.

Racing towards the end of the 3,800 words, I was feeling the familiar lack of excitement that often results from reading the Economist.

And then I ran across this reference to the UK’s media market:

The annual budget for the websites of the (state-owned) BBC was recently raised to £145m ($220m). According to Mr [Paul] Zwillenberg [of media consultancy OC&C], the total online spending of the country’s national newspapers is only £100m.

My first thought? Even if the Economist does deploy this information in throwaway fashion in third-last par of a 36-page story, I’ve got to admit that Rolls-Royces have their uses. Occasionally.

On this basis, I’ll tell the Economist what I would find useful. Instead of a recitation of various well-known facts about Big Media, a worthy subject for in-depth coverage would be that disparity between the BBC’s £145m and the £100m invested by everyone else.

Is this disparity a symptom of market failure? Or its cause? Or both? Should the situation be changed? If so, why? And how?

I’m genuinely unsure about all of these questions. What I do know is that the disparity is going to become increasingly harder to justify as the downturn continues.

UPDATE: 20/05/2009 — Some good points in the comments, one of which links to Paid Content’s breakdown of that £145m: “No it doesn’t include iPlayer and other long term projects. But it does include all editorial based around bbc.co.uk — not just news.” (Thanks for that, Matt.)

Few would disagree with Alastair’s suggestion that bbc.co.uk has “raised the bar in terms of user experience and engagement” over the past three years. Given the costs involved, you’d expect that: bbc.co.uk is a great site, and so it should be.

Presumably, though, it has sucked traffic away from the nationals’ sites. I guess the real question here is what the market would look like in the absence of bbc.co.uk. If some of that traffic had flowed instead to the nationals’ sites, could they have monetized it? And then re-invested in their own operations?

Perhaps. But the current moaning about unsold inventory (ad space) and rock-bottom CPMs among the nationals suggests that there would have been a limit to monetization.

Perhaps this is what Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, was getting at in March when he argued that “any potential adverse market impact of the new investment [an additional £31m for BBC Online over three years] would be justified by the public value created”.

UPDATE: 22/05/2009: Martin Belam: “As an ex-BBC employee, I usually find comparisons between the BBC’s entire web spend and newspaper spend on the web a case of apples = oranges. The entire budget isn’t funding the BBC News website alone, and newspapers don’t have to produce charter-bound educational content.”

Editors run a mile as Simon Jenkins mentions the bad smell that clings to Northern Rock

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 5 February 2009 at 15:04
Tags: BBC, Media

It was a bit like a fart in a railway carriage.

Yesterday, in front of the Commons Treasury Committee, Simon Jenkins suggested that the government engaged in “de facto insider trading” by leaking news of its emergency loan to Northern Rock to Robert Peston last year.

As I understand it, Jenkins’ theory is the HM Government already knew it would have to nationalise the Crock. By leaking news of the emergency loan, it hoped to drive down the company’s share price, thus minimising the cost of nationalisation for taxpayers.

If true, this would mean that HM Government manipulated Peston to defraud the shareholders of Northern Rock.

As conspiracy theories go, it’s a nice one. But somehow, I suspect that the Financial Services Authority won’t find time to investigate it.

Why? Well, for one thing, there’s Jeff Randall’s common-sensical suggestion that Crock collapsed “because it was a bust business” – end of story.

But I much preferred the excellent rejoinder from John Thurso MP. Turning to Jenkins, he asked: “Are you seriously saying the government had that level of competence?

Notably, the mainstream media gave Jenkins’ theory a wide berth this morning. 

The only serious reference I could find to Jenkins’ allegation was carried by Metro. And that barely stretched to four sentences.

Presumably, editors recall what happened the last time a media outlet accused the government of high-level wrong-doing.

Funnily enough, it’s almost five years to the day since the careers of Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies were terminated with prejudice in the wake of the Hutton Report.

Footnote: At the Mail this morning, Quentin Letts took the prize for Pesto-related analogy. He suggested that during the testimony, the BBC business editor’s sentences emerged from his mouth “like giant sausages, as long as the Humber Bridge”. Brilliant.

Pestomania: Is Rt. Hon. John McFall out of his gourd?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 27 November 2008 at 17:33
Tags: BBC, Media

It seems that former Tory leader Michael Howard’s call for an investigation into stories published by the BBC’s Robert Peston will culminate in a Treasury select committee investigation into. . .

“the role of the media in financial stability and whether financial journalists should operate under any form of reporting restrictions during banking crises”.

D Notices in the Square Mile? In the context of 24-hour news cycle and t’interweb?

Bonkers.

But should we take this to mean that John McFall, the Labour chairman of the Treasury select committee, has taken leave of his gourd?

Perhaps not. As McFall surely knows, the real issue here isn’t the BBC’s business editor, or unworkable reporting restrictions. Neither is it Peston’s work on Northern Rock, which seems to have been sound.

It’s the possibility that HM Government broke the law on the morning of 17 September by priming Peston with a story about the HBOS-Lloyds merger ahead of its formal announcement.

This is the story that really upset the Square Mile.

Of course, the chances of the select committee getting to the bottom of this bit of intrigue are less than zero. And that’s probably a good thing.

This is because Peston’s story had a positive outcome: it stopped the short-sellers from completely trashing HBOS. Whatever the motivation, his source happened to be acting in the best interests of both the economy and taxpayers.

Bending the rules to breaking point during a banking collapse isn’t without precedent. Once upon a time, the Bank of England specialised in solving such crises by cutting highly pragmatic deals in smoke-filled rooms.

No doubt Michael Howard would have been horrifed by some of them.

Those days are long gone. But if Peston’s story represented a slight return to the tactics of yesteryear, we’re none the worse for it.

Triangulation for dummies: Sir Michael Lyons hears ancient cry ring out on Derry Street

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 4 November 2008 at 13:51
Tags: BBC, Daily Mail & General Trust

During Alastair Campbell’s heyday at No.10, I never quite got hold of the slippery business of triangulation.

Better late than never, though. This week, I reckon I’ve found an example.

Here’s David Newell, director of the Newspaper Society, talking to Press Gazette yesterday about the BBC Trust’s “public value inquiry” into the Corporation’s plans to expand local video news provision:

“The BBC Trust cannot be the chief cheerleader for the BBC, encouraging it to extend local services out of more and more taxpayers’ money, at the same time as being the independent regulator determining the public value of those services and their impact on local media.”

(Chief cheerleader? That’ll be a reference to negative comments about the regional press from Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust earlier this month).

Oddly enough, this looks very similar to the petard on which BBC bosses have hoist themselves over the Brand-Ross affair.

In the old days, it would have been the Beeb’s chairman who defended the Corporation amid a controversy. But because Sir Michael has a regulatory role, he couldn’t be seen to do so.

Arguably, this has left the BBC much more exposed than it would have been in the days of Sir Christopher Bland (chairman, 1996-2001) or Marmaduke Hussey (1986-1996).

No doubt the timing of the Newspaper Society’s legal challenge is entirely coincidental. But coming in the wake of the Brand-Ross debacle, it’s a sharp reminder of how enthusiastically the BBC has painted itself into a political corner.

At Daily Mail & General Trust, they could be forgiven for ordering trebles all round.

PS: On this score, Peter Preston spoke a lot of sense over the weekend when he suggested that the “great old corporation we know and ought to appreciate more for its manifold good works needs every friend it can get - and had better get on with finding them before the next damned thing happens”.

He might have added that the BBC’s search for friends needs to bear fruit before the recession starts taking down local newspapers and web start-ups in large numbers.

The Beeb’s strategic decision to expand everywhere and do everything on behalf of everybody has always looked unsustainable. It could yet start to look malevolent.

The odd thing is that the BBC Trust — and Sir Michael Lyons in particular — doesn’t appear to understand what’s required.

Pesto gets mashed up: First of many You Tube wind-ups?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 14 October 2008 at 16:55
Tags: BBC

Thanks to ManMadeHound for posting a comment on one of my recent posts on Robert Peston.

He/she points to a brutal mash-up on You Tube that involves Andrew Neil watching as Pesto attempts to explain the credit crunch — yet again — in a BBC studio.

Neil and Peston are accompanied by two other talking heads — Terry Smith of stockbrokers Collins Stewart and economist George Magnus of UBS.

Peston’s ad libbing takes him to the brink of a cliff named Coherence. The clip is worth watching for that alone. But if you hang on for a while, until around 7:00, there’s an unexpected (and funny) surprise…

PS: There’s another You Tube effort on Peston doing the rounds. This one involves some Richard Clayderman-style piano, lots of stock shots of the great man. . . and footage of Daleks prowling around a shopping centre and talking with passers-by. Simply odd.