BBC Finally Admits The Royals Just Aren’t Worth the Money Anymore and Cuts Events Team to a Single Staffer

For decades, the BBC has treated royal coverage like the crown jewels themselves, polished, protected, and presented to the nation with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics. The dedicated events team, that elite unit responsible for broadcasting every ceremonial moment from the late Queen’s coronation in 1953 to her state funeral in 2022, was considered the gold standard. The “crown jewel of live British broadcasting,” they called it. Well, someone finally looked at the crown and noticed the diamonds were looking a bit dull.

The Times reports this week that BBC Studios Events, the team responsible for royal and state broadcasts, will be cut to a single person. The remaining 80 per cent of the team will be axed as the corporation hunts for savings across the board. The sole survivor is Claire Popplewell, who has overseen coverage of everything from Nelson Mandela’s funeral to the weddings of the Wales and the Sussexes. She will now be expected to coordinate freelancers for future events such as Trooping the Colour or a state funeral. For the kind of meticulously choreographed live broadcasts that require institutional memory, not a gig economy worker who last covered a royal event three years ago.

The decision came just days after the team won a Royal Television Society award for its coverage of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The timing, as one source put it, is “desperately short-sighted.”

But here’s the thing about short-sightedness: sometimes it’s just the polite way of saying you’ve finally noticed the emperor has no clothes.

For many, it is considered the crown jewel of live British broadcasting and a chance to transmit the most important moments of national life to a global audience. From the late Queen’s state funeral in 2022 to the state opening of parliament, the award-winning team at BBC Studios Events has, for years, captured the pomp and pageantry of the country’s most historic occasions.

Until now, that is. The corporation made the decision to drop the live broadcast of the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey, which took place on March 9, blaming budget cuts for dropping an event that it had shown every year since 1989. Now, the department has been told that all but one of the team will be axed as the corporation seeks to make savings across the board. One source familiar with the planned job cuts described it as ‘desperately short-sighted’. They added: ‘It is literally the crown jewel of live British broadcasting. They would never do this for premier football events, so what is it about national life that they don’t value?

The Times, “BBC Dismantles Crown Jewel Broadcasting Team,” March 2026

The Money Problem They Don’t Want to Discuss

The BBC’s official line is predictable. They cite funding pressures, licence fees, a 10 per cent cut across the board, inflation, and streaming competition. All these are true, valid, and the kind of boring administrative reality that makes people’s eyes glaze over.

But let’s talk about what they’re not saying. The BBC has dropped live broadcast of the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey for the first time since 1989. Thirty-seven years of tradition, gone. No main-channel coverage. Just news bulletins and the rolling channel. The message is unmistakable: this stuff no longer justifies the expense.

And why would it? The crowds at royal events have thinned. The younger generation, the demographic the BBC desperately needs to retain, could not care less about a carriage procession. The heckling has become as predictable as the waving. The approval ratings for the monarchy have settled into a kind of polite indifference that the Palace tries to spin as enduring popularity but everyone else recognises as the slow fade of an institution whose best years are behind it.

The BBC has to be impartial in its reporting, which means it has to show the boos. It has to show the empty streets. It has to report the plummeting approval ratings, the scandals, the awkward moments when Prince William and Kate Middleton greet a crowd and half of them turn away. Maybe, just maybe, the BBC is happier to cut down coverage than to keep broadcasting the slow-motion collapse of an institution it once treated as untouchable.

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The Royalist Backlash

Naturally, the usual suspects are already crying betrayal. Ingrid Seward, royal author and editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine, told The Times: “I think this will really irritate a lot of people. Part of the reason that we pay the licence fee is so that people can watch these important national events, particularly when you consider some of the other things that are broadcast.”

It’s a familiar argument, except it doesn’t bring the country together anymore. That’s the part Seward and her ilk refuse to accept. The country has moved on. The younger generation, the one that will ultimately decide whether the monarchy survives, is not tuning in to watch a carriage roll down the Mall. They’re on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The latter of which the BBC are trying to make enrodes in. They’re watching clips of the heckling, laughing at the awkward moments, and wondering why anyone still cares about a family that costs the taxpayer £86 million a year and delivers nothing but photo ops and scandals.

The BBC knows this. The BBC’s job is to serve the public, not the Palace. And the public, in its infinite wisdom, has voted with its remote control.

What Comes After BBC Studios Events

The dismantling of the BBC’s royal events team is not an isolated decision. It is a recognition that the next 15 to 20 years of royal coverage will look very different from the last 70. Charles may pass at some point, but there will not be the same outpouring of grief that greeted his mother’s death. The crowds will be smaller. The attention will be shorter. William will have his slimmed-down coronation, and the BBC will send a freelancer to cover it.

George is still a child. It will be at least two decades before he marries. The BBC cannot maintain a dedicated events team for two decades on the off chance that someone might eventually care again.

The BBC is adapting to survive in a media landscape where the licence fee is under constant threat, where younger audiences expect content on demand, and where the institution that once defined British identity is now just another brand competing for attention.

The royalists can complain all they want. They can send their biographers to the papers to tut about the BBC’s “short-sightedness.” They can clutch their pearls about the erosion of national tradition. But the numbers don’t lie. The ratings don’t lie and empty streets don’t lie. The BBC has finally stopped pretending that the Crown Jewels are worth the cost of polishing them. And really, who can blame them?