When the BBC axed Short Cuts in early 2025, the listener petition to save it picked up a few thousand signatures and an angry sub-thread on the Radio 4 board. It fizzled out the way these things usually do. The corporation didn’t budge. Then on 15 May the BBC, CBC and ABC announced a three-way co-production deal to bring the show back. Falling Tree Productions is making it again, Josie Long is presenting again, and a premiere lands on Radio 4, CBC Radio, ABC Radio and the usual podcast feeds in 2027. Four months from axe to comeback announcement is fast for any broadcaster, and very fast for this one.

It’s also the most interesting thing that’s happened to the audio-doc end of the British comedy world in about three years. Worth taking apart properly.

Same money, three broadcasters

The show ran for 13 years on Radio 4, starting in 2012. It picked up British Podcast Awards Gold and a Third Coast International Audio Festival mention along the way, the audio doc equivalent of a Bafta plus an Oscar shortlist. When the show was cut as part of the 2025 Radio 4 reshuffle, the listed reason was the standard “creative refresh” line rather than budget. Falling Tree had quietly told contributors at the time that the unit price for a finished short had been squeezed for years, and the strand was paying roughly the same per episode in 2024 as it had in 2017.

The new arrangement splits that bill three ways. BBC Radio 4, CBC and ABC are all co-funders, which is not how the Beeb usually buys an audio doc strand. Co-pro deals like this exist for telly, Apple and the BBC pull them all the time. But the Radio 4 model has historically been “we pay, we own, we air, we are British.” A three-broadcaster split on a half-hour radio strand is unusual, and it tells you something about the size of the cheque Bakaya’s office could actually defend internally.

Falling Tree’s open call, due 1 July

Buried in the joint announcement is the bit working audio comics should care about. Falling Tree Productions is taking pitches from anywhere in the world through 1 July at 11:59pm BST. International emerging and established producers can pitch, the production company’s site says. The brief is unchanged from the original run: short, personal, formally adventurous audio documentaries that don’t sound like anything else on Radio 4. The fee structure hasn’t been published. The previous run paid finished-piece rates rather than commission-on-spec, which means most successful pitchers absorbed their own development time.

This matters because Radio 4’s commissioning rounds have been notoriously closed for the last three years. The last open call for a strand like this on the network was the Loose Ends successor process in 2022, and nobody under 30 got commissioned out of that round, which I know because two of the people who pitched have since told me. An open call gives newer audio producers – the ones whose Bandcamp page lists three short docs and a podcast nobody listened to – a route in that doesn’t require an agent or a Soho contact. That’s a smaller-sounding sentence than it is. Compare it to the launch of ComedyUK’s 24/7 comedy radio station, which is gobbling up archived club sets rather than commissioning new audio work.

Long herself, in the joint announcement, said “I can’t wait to start making Short Cuts again. It’s been the joy and privilege of my career to present this series.” That’s a presenter contract – the producer slots Falling Tree are filling are a separate process. Historically those have gone to people like Eleanor McDowall (Falling Tree’s creative director) and Phoebe McIndoe rather than club stand-ups, though a handful of Edinburgh Fringe Audio Award nominees in the last five years did come through Short Cuts commissioning before they ever pitched a TV exec.

The Mohit Bakaya quote, and what it doesn’t say

The BBC’s Radio 4 Controller framed the deal as a collaborative cultural moment:

“A powerful example of how public broadcasters can join forces to champion distinctive audio.” – Mohit Bakaya, Controller of Radio 4, in the joint CBC/ABC/BBC announcement

What he doesn’t say, obviously, is that the same Radio 4 binned the show 12 months ago. The kindest reading is that the BBC’s freelance audio budget for 2026-27 doesn’t stretch to a full British Short Cuts but does stretch to a third of one. The less kind reading is that Bakaya’s office got enough listener correspondence after the axe to make the comeback look like a win for the audience rather than what it functionally is, which is a smaller cheque from the same broadcaster than the show used to get. Falling Tree gets the show back, freelance producers get a route in they didn’t have six months ago, and the corporation gets to send a press release out with a CBC and ABC logo at the bottom of it.

What the BBC giveth, the BBC also moved to Liverpool

In a fortnight where the corporation also confirmed its Comedy Festival is moving to Liverpool, gave SNL UK a bigger second series on Sky-shared terms, and let Mock The Week take its summer specials onto US cable, the revival reads as part of a broader pattern: bring back the audience-favourite formats on lower budgets with co-production partners, and squeeze a press release out of the result. Mock The Week is half-funded now by a US cable network most British viewers haven’t heard of, and the working comics on its writers’ bench will tell you the per-episode pay hasn’t moved with the new logo.

The model works for the BBC. Whether it works for the producers eating their development time on a 1 July deadline depends on what Falling Tree’s per-piece rates look like in 2027. I asked Falling Tree for the number and hadn’t heard back before deadline. What I do know is that Eleanor McDowall has been at Falling Tree for over a decade and is a vocal advocate for paying short-form audio properly. If the cheques have actually gone up alongside the broadcaster count, the working producers come out ahead; if the same budget has just been stretched across more episodes, they don’t, and the McDowall-shaped figure at the centre of Falling Tree will be the first to say so in public.

The petition, for what it’s worth, never got a response from Radio 4. The petition page is still live, with 8,143 signatures, last updated August 2025.

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