“A fairly brutal reminder of my age”

That’s Jon Petrie, the BBC’s outgoing director of comedy. He’s reacting to taking the creative director job at Hat Trick Productions. In the announcement that landed on Monday: “I grew up seeing that logo at the end of shows I loved, which is both exciting and a fairly brutal reminder of my age.” It’s not the kind of line you usually get from a network commissioning chief on the way out the door. That’s probably most of the appeal of the appointment if you’re Hat Trick founder Jimmy Mulville.

Jon Petrie steps down in August after five years running comedy at the BBC. He crosses to the other side of the table at the indie behind Have I Got News For You, Derry Girls and Whose Line Is It Anyway?. He’ll be pitching shows back to his own former chair within a year. The slate he commissioned at the BBC, per Chortle and Deadline, is long. It includes Ghosts, Alma’s Not Normal, Ludwig, Such Brave Girls, Amandaland, Dreaming Whilst Black, Black Ops, Death Valley, Juice and Small Prophets. A properly varied list, even if you take the press-release framing with a pinch.

What he’s actually walking away from

Five years isn’t a long tenure in a job like this. The official line from BBC chief content officer Kate Phillips is the warm-departure formulation you’d expect:

Jon has had a huge impact since joining the BBC five years ago and has been British comedy’s biggest backer by far. I’m very sad to see him go, but he leaves on a comedy high.

That’s Phillips quoted in C21Media’s piece. “Biggest backer by far” is the bit that matters. The BBC has spent most of the last decade getting publicly nervous about the cost of single-camera scripted comedy, and Petrie’s slate fought that. Whether it’ll keep fighting it under whoever lands the permanent job is the next interesting question.

He also leaves the BBC Comedy Festival in Liverpool behind, which marked its fifth year on his watch. Worth noting it’s the only network-backed comedy festival currently running in the UK that exists primarily to develop new writers rather than to sell tickets. That’s a more specific bit of legacy than a leaving-do speech usually bothers spelling out. Other regional festivals are scaling in a different direction. The Aberdeen Comedy Festival has just gone to three weekends and runs on ticket revenue; Liverpool runs on R&D money and a lot fewer punters through the door.

The route in says something too. Jon Petrie joined the BBC in 2021 from Broke and Bones, where he was head of comedy. That’s the Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones outfit behind Black Mirror. So he isn’t a network lifer suddenly going indie for the cash. He went indie, did a tour at the broadcaster, and is now going indie again at the senior end of it. The cynical read is that’s a perfectly engineered career; the less cynical read is that you can probably feel five years of commissioning paperwork in your bones by the end.

What Mulville is buying

Hat Trick’s pitch via Mulville, as quoted in Variety, was: “Everyone here is beyond excited to have Jon join us. I’ve watched with great admiration as he guided BBC Comedy through its most successful and creative period.” The unsaid bit is that Hat Trick has a sitcom problem. Have I Got News For You is still a fixed point in the BBC One schedule and the panel-show side of the business ticks along, but they’ve been slower to land the kind of returnable single-camera sitcom that defines a modern indie’s value sheet. Smoggie Queens on the BBC was the most recent serious attempt.

Petrie’s own line was that “Hat Trick is the OG of the independent production community, and taking on the role of creative director feels like a rare and properly exciting opportunity”. Calling your new employer “the OG” in a press release is either disarmingly honest or extremely well coached. Possibly both. PR people don’t normally write the word OG.

What Hat Trick is genuinely buying is access. Five years of relationships with showrunners, writers and agents who pitched Jon Petrie at the BBC and got greenlit. Those people will take his calls at an indie they otherwise might not have pitched first. That’s the actual value transfer, and it’s why network commissioners moving to indies makes the rest of the production community quietly twitchy. Most writers I know plan their pitching schedule around which commissioner they’re chasing; the broadcaster behind them is almost an afterthought.

The chair, for now

Emma Lawson takes over as interim director of comedy with immediate effect. The BBC will recruit for the permanent role in parallel, which usually means a process that runs through autumn. “Interim” is a slightly awkward chair to commission expensive scripted comedy from, because nobody knows whether the show they’re greenlighting will outlive them in the job. Expect a quieter summer on big new commissions and a busier than usual back end of the year once the permanent appointment lands.

One footnote worth tracking: the BBC’s recent comedy strategy has been to push more topical and shorter-run formats through Mock The Week (now back on TLC in a five-Sunday summer revival) and the BBC New Comedy Awards pulled to Coventry. Both predate the Petrie exit announcement and neither has a guaranteed champion in the new chair. Watch the second-series greenlights when they land in the autumn.

The other thing nobody at either press office will say out loud is that indies poaching from commissioners is meant to be the unofficial career path, and it usually happens after a long stint at the broadcaster – five years sits at the early end of that curve. Whatever the reason, the news lands the same week the Battersea Park Comedy Festival opens in south London with Sara Pascoe, Joe Lycett and Simon Amstell headlining the bills. Hat Trick’s new creative director will be watching that lineup and quietly asking which of those acts has a sitcom in them. Several of them probably do. He’ll be watching from the BBC side of the table until August, though, which makes the next two months an oddly polite stretch of cross-purpose meetings.