International Insider: Bad Times For BBC; Gaspard Ulliel Remembered; Berlin Competition Bonanza; David Kosse’s Masterplan

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Afternoon subscribers, Max Goldbart here. It’s been a busy week but International Insider has you covered. Read on for in-depth analysis of the biggest international headlines of the week.Licence (Fee) To Kill: It all started with a tweet.

Negotiations over the BBC’s future licence fee appeared to be plodding along and then suddenly they weren’t. In one of the more outrageous moves by a member of Boris Johnson’s cabinet (and that’s saying something), UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries took to Twitter last Sunday to not only announce she had frozen the licence fee for the next two years, costing the corporation hundreds of millions of pounds, but also plans to scrap it entirely from 2027. “This licence fee announcement will be the last,” Dorries proclaimed grandiosely. “The days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors, are over.”Lighting a fire: Twitter erupted.

A whole host of high-profile figures including Hugh Grant, Armando Iannucci and Lucy Prebble rushed to the corporation’s defence as the notion of arch-BBC enemy Dorries taking away its established source of funding hit home.

Grant branded Johnson’s government “spittle-flecked nut jobs.” Remember, second to the NHS, the BBC is arguably the nation’s most beloved, most talked-about public institution.