The talented ‘tyrant' giving BBC Breakfast a wake-up call
May 11 marked the high point in the career of Richard Frediani, the BBC Breakfast editor.
His programme, which he has run since 2019, won the Bafta for best TV news coverage for its reporting on the Post Office scandal — the first time the gong had gone to an early morning show. 'Thank you, Bafta, for recognising the importance of breakfast TV,' a visibly moved Frediani told the great and the good at London's Royal Festival Hall. 'Breakfast TV in the UK has been around for more than 40 years, and it has never won this award.'
Frediani brought some of his colleagues, including presenter Jon Kay, on stage and praised them as the people 'who toil through the night, every night, 24 hours a day, seven days a week' to get the show out.
It is a little less than six weeks after that golden night and, rather than bask in his glory, Frediani is fighting to save his career. The executive has been accused of bullying and misconduct on the programme's set in Salford, while rumours swirl that his relationships with star presenters Naga Munchetty and Charlie Stayt have broken down.
Claims that he had presided over an 'intimidating and bullying' culture at BBC Breakfast first surfaced five years ago, but scrutiny has intensified in recent months as a steady drip of allegations have led to him taking an 'extended period of leave' from the show.
Frediani, who is widely known as 'Fredi' in the TV industry, has been accused of physically shaking a female colleague, shouting at subordinates if they make mistakes and kicking a bin in a moment of frustration. A formal complaint was made against Frediani about the former incident, which happened in February last year. Frediani was given control over BBC One's News at One bulletin when it moved to Salford a few weeks later.
Munchetty had raised concerns with bosses about Frediani, according to industry website Deadline, while the newsreader Tina Daheley has refused to appear on the News at One despite being announced as a presenter on the bulletin last year.
Frediani has variously been described as 'a tyrant', 'a bruiser', 'old-school' and 'aggressive'. One allegation against Frediani is that he cornered a colleague against a wall and jabbed a finger at them while complaining about that morning's show; another is that he has cultivated a 'boys' club' and has his favourites.
The Sun quoted a source as saying: 'He is very cerebral but also quite aggressive in his methods. Some people think a recent promotion has gone to his head.' Another said: 'Frankly, he can be mildly terrifying if you're on the wrong side of him.'.
Frediani polarises opinion, but still has many supporters in the newsroom. His defenders would say that he is a robust boss whose apparent conduct – such as shouting or having favoured subordinates – would not have raised an eyebrow a few years ago.
'Maybe he has a different style but he wants the programme to be the best and for people to do the best job,' says an insider. 'Editors can get frustrated when they think that's not happening, and that frustration comes out in different ways. He's old-school. Perhaps what was acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable, and of course everybody has to move with the times.'
'There is definitely an atmosphere on Breakfast. It's an unhappy place. But is that really all down to Fredi? I don't think so. You can tell just from watching Naga and Charlie on screen that there are tensions there,' says another. 'It's all about relationships. Some people take offence at things that others think is OK. All I would say is, if Naga is making complaints about Fredi but the other presenters aren't, might that say something? Only some people have an issue with him.' Kay and Sally Nugent, the other frontline presenters, are said to get on with Frediani.
Frediani started his career as a local radio reporter in his native Preston, Lancs, in the early 1990s, but really made a name for himself running news at Granada – under his leadership it picked up a Bafta for its coverage of the Morecambe Bay cockling trial in 2007 – and as programme editor of ITV News at ITN. He is said to have been so obsessive about his craft that he recorded rival news bulletins and watched them over the weekend, while he did his family's ironing.
Since he was lured to the BBC in September 2019, Frediani has successfully seen off the challenge of ITV's Good Morning Britain for supremacy in the morning news battles, although Breakfast's claimed five million viewership is a fraction of what it was at its peak.
He is admired for having a populist nose for a story, such as Breakfast's early championing of Captain Tom Moore's charity walks during the coronavirus pandemic. Breakfast regularly revisited the Moore family, and helped organise an RAF flypast by a Spitfire and Hurricane for his 100th birthday.
'There's nothing self-centred or grandiose about Captain Tom,' Frediani said in May 2020. 'He's just a wonderful man. You can tell it has hit a nerve with viewers when they are looking for something to rally around. He brings a little bit of good news and light into what are very difficult times.'
His career has not been without its mis-steps, however. The programme had to issue an apology to Harvey Proctor, the former Conservative MP who was falsely accused of being part of a VIP child abuse ring, after an interview with Munchetty. Munchetty wrongly asserted that Cressida Dick, then the Metropolitan Police commissioner, had been cleared by independent reports into the force's handling of the case, which was based on the evidence of the fantasist Carl Beech. Proctor complained after he said the Corporation had dismissed viewers' concerns over the interview.
'I'm very sorry we got this wrong, but I hope you can accept mistakes can happen in live broadcasting and that this was not, of course, a lie,' Frediani wrote to Proctor in an email quoted by the Daily Mail. 'I am, however, very sorry that you were upset by the exchanges and by our subsequent response but I hope I have been able to clarify what happened.'
Frediani is widely regarded as being the BBC's most powerful news executive outside London and is particularly prized for having an instinctive understanding of what audiences beyond the capital want to watch. But some BBC sources suggest that Frediani had been left 'upset' at losing out on the chance to become editor of Radio 4's Today programme when Owenna Griffiths was appointed to the post in the summer of 2020. 'The word is he feels sidelined,' says one. 'Today is much [more] important to managers, obviously, and he wanted to be a key BBC player.'
Observers and insiders suggest that the BBC is in a particularly difficult position with Frediani. This debacle has exploded less than two months after the Corporation's much-heralded 'workplace culture review', which it launched after a succession of scandals where 'untouchable' stars (such as Huw Edwards) were able to act with impunity.
Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, said after the review was published in April that there was not place at the BBC for those who 'abuse power or punch down or behave badly'. The BBC has drafted in a lawyer from PwC to deal with the crisis.
To complicate matters further still, Munchetty herself has now been accused of bullying a junior member of staff at Breakfast. She was also reprimanded for making a sex jibe on Radio 5 Live, according to The Sun.
The BBC says it does not comment on individual HR cases but takes 'all complaints about conduct at work extremely seriously and will not tolerate behaviour that is not in line with our values. We have robust processes in place and would encourage any staff with concerns to raise them directly with us so they can be addressed'. Frediani did not respond to requests for comment; Munchetty declined to comment.
When Munchetty and Stayt returned to the Breakfast sofa on Thursday, for the first time since the scandal hit the front pages of the tabloids and with Frediani away, things did not go entirely smoothly. There were sound and video issues, such as Stayt's microphone failing when he was introducing a segment and the camera panning away, while others were cut off mid-flow. '[It] looks like the interns have taken over the production room this morning,' one wag wrote on X.
For his part, Frediani seems relatively untroubled – at least publicly. Shortly before his extended absence was announced internally, he posted a sun-drenched photograph on social media. 'Beautiful day,' read the caption.
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