BBC director-general Matt Brittin has warned that more television and radio services could be closed as the broadcaster pursues a new round of savings, putting BBC Three and BBC Scotland among the channels facing uncertainty.

Mr Brittin, who took charge of the corporation in May, also said the BBC was prepared to explore AI-generated presenters for some future programmes, provided the technology was used within clear safeguards.

The 58-year-old former Google executive discussed the BBC’s financial pressures during an interview for Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg. A preview of the conversation was broadcast on BBC News At One on Friday.

He said strained finances, combined with audiences increasingly choosing on-demand content, could mean that some radio stations and television channels are shut down so money can be redirected towards digital services.

The BBC plans to save £500 million over the next three years and is expected to eliminate about 2,000 jobs. As part of that effort, Mr Brittin said he could not promise that any particular programme or channel would operate indefinitely.

He said the corporation was hoping to make broader funding decisions after a new charter is agreed in around 18 months, but added that the current financial squeeze had brought some choices forward.

“If most of an audience is getting things on demand, we have to examine the cost and value of every service,” Mr Brittin said, arguing that the BBC needed to determine how best to respond to the changing media landscape.

The BBC has already cancelled several programmes in recent months, including Blankety Blank, Celebrity Mastermind, Live At The Apollo and Football Focus. The closure of BBC Three and BBC Scotland could be announced as soon as October.

The possible channel closures follow calls from senior BBC figures for more radical action, including the abolition of entire services such as the BBC News Channel, Radio 1, Radio 2 and the youth-focused BBC Three.

One senior BBC insider argued that making small reductions across every department would weaken the organisation overall. Instead, the source said, managers should consider cutting particular services in full rather than leaving the entire corporation operating below strength.

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Asked by Ms Kuenssberg whether he would permit a programme to be created and presented by artificial intelligence, Mr Brittin said he would consider it, but only within defined limits.

He said the BBC wanted to test the technology and establish where it could be useful, while stressing that the organisation’s work remained rooted in human creativity.

“I don’t think anything we do should be replaced by AI,” he said. The technology could help the BBC stretch licence fee funding further and support decision-making and creative work, he added, but it should not be viewed as a replacement for people.

The corporation already uses artificial intelligence for services such as automated weather updates on its app and recommendations for viewers on iPlayer. However, Mr Brittin also voiced concern that a small number of technology companies could gain excessive influence over how information is created and accessed.

With AI entering a rapid expansion phase, he warned that as few as six companies could eventually control access to information, as well as the production of both reliable material and misinformation.

Mr Brittin said no platform should be trusted automatically. Instead, the BBC would need to monitor how major services operate and ensure its content continued to appear in the right places and serve the corporation’s public mission.

He said the BBC, along with its apps and online services, should act as “the antidote to the algorithm”, contrasting its public-service role with platforms shaped primarily by commercial interests.

Amid the new measures, the National Union of Journalists warned the broadcaster could enter a ‘doom spiral’ caused by planned cuts.

Laura Davison, the NUJ general secretary, said: ‘The BBC’s ongoing campaign of cuts is devastating and demoralising for our members and severely undermines the broadcaster’s ability to serve audiences across the UK. The latest wave of cuts piles on the misery already being felt.

‘Audiences deserve better, too. Millions of people across the UK now live in news deserts. The public wants original, quality and genuinely local news and programming – not more syndication and reruns.’

Kylie Minogue’s blockbuster performance at the MCG has divided viewers, with some criticising the sound while others hailed it as the greatest grand final pre-game show ever.

The pop superstar launched her 20-minute set with Love At First Sight, then delivered a string of hits including The Loco-Motion, Can’t Get You Out of My Head and Confide In Me.

G Flip later joined Minogue on stage for a performance of Padam Padam.

However, the show drew a mixed response from viewers watching at home.

“Kylie doing karaoke versions of her own songs,” one viewer wrote.

Another posted: “Kylie is an Aussie icon but this, well, this has been horrendously bad.”

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Some viewers instead questioned whether the broadcast audio was to blame, with one asking: “Just me or her audio seems off?”

The Melbourne-born singer also received plenty of enthusiastic support from fans.

“Gotta say Kylie is killing it at the pre-game entertainment! Absolutely brilliant!!” one fan wrote.

“Anyone saying this is bad needs to learn how to have fun,” another added.

According to New Idea, Minogue’s appearance reportedly came with a $3 million payday.

Minogue had revealed she was feeling nervous ahead of the performance, telling reporters on Friday: “I am nervous, excited right now. I am all those things.”

Jay Slater’s mother has returned to Tenerife to retrace the final known steps of her 19-year-old son for a new documentary. In the programme, she also reveals the horror of being shown photographs of Jay’s dead body.

Jay disappeared in June 2024, triggering a huge search operation across Tenerife. His case also prompted a wave of conspiracy theories and online abuse, with trolls making unsubstantiated claims about what had happened and targeting his family and friends.

Two years on, his mother Debbie Duncan remains haunted by the question of whether her son suffered during his final moments before he was found dead in the hills of northern Tenerife.

For Channel 5’s Cause Of Death, the 57-year-old returned to Tenerife’s Rural de Teno national park alongside Jay’s uncle, Glen Duncan. Together, they revisited the route he took before falling to his death.

Ms Duncan also described how Spanish police showed her images of Jay’s body when she returned to the island to collect his phone.

Ms Duncan, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, said: ‘I did think about it (viewing his body) and thought, I don’t think I can. But then, when we had to go back to Tenerife to get paperwork from the courts and to collect his phone, to my horror there were images of Jay. I thought my heart was going to stop beating.

‘Whenever people say, “How did you know it was Jay?” Well, it was Jay. My beautiful boy.’

She later visited the place where Jay left the road and broke down as she laid flowers for her son. Ms Duncan said Jay would have been ‘so sorry for the mistakes he made’.

The documentary was filmed only weeks after Ms Duncan received the delayed Spanish post-mortem report. It confirmed that Jay died after falling into a ravine measuring 82ft in depth.

In another section of the programme, she discusses the findings from both the Spanish and Home Office post-mortems with pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd.

Dr Shepherd, who carried out the Home Office post-mortem, told The Sun that, given the trolling Ms Duncan had endured, it was ‘really important she knew the truth’.

He said: ‘She wanted to know how his injuries would have affected him. I was able to tell her that yes, it was an awful injury, and yes, it killed him. But the head injury was so severe that it probably would have killed him immediately. It was the end — there was no pain and suffering.’

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Despite the evidence, conspiracy theorists circulated false claims, including suggestions that Jay’s disappearance had been a ‘revenge attack’ linked to his past behaviour. Some even questioned Ms Duncan’s conduct and asked why she had not appeared visibly more distressed.

Jay’s body was found four weeks after his disappearance in a remote area near Masca. An inquest in 2025 concluded that he died on June 17, 2024, from injuries consistent with a ‘heavy fall from height’. Nevertheless, online sleuths continued to spread fabricated claims about the case.

Dr Shepherd said his examination established the cause of death as head injuries. Jay’s body showed no evidence that he had been restrained or assaulted, but the findings did not stop further abusive messages.

Speaking on This Morning earlier this year, Ms Duncan said: ‘It’s just never ended, two years on almost, and they just keep coming – it’s going round in circles, the comments about, “He was involved in the mafia and drug dealing”, and then it gets really personal.

‘[Trolls have been] calling his family, calling me [saying] “they’re drug dealers… he had a bad upbringing”, it just got really personal.’

‘They don’t know us, they don’t know our family, they don’t know Jay but yet they just judge… and the conspiracies started almost immediately.’

Last year, Debbie hit back at ‘disgusting’ online trolls after the family were bombarded with more than 30 million videos speculating about the case.

She first revealed she was calling for a law change to tackle the spread of misinformation and online abuse during the investigation into a missing persons case back in October 2025 and has been campaigning for Jay’s Law over the past 12 months.

Jay went missing during his first holiday without his parents, after partying at the NRG music festival and Papagayo nightclub in Playa de Las Americas.

After the event died down, he got into a car with two men he’d met on the holiday and drove to their Airbnb in the village of Masca, about 20 miles away.

After leaving the property, he phoned his friend Lucy Law saying he was lost in the mountains and his other friend Bradley Geoghegan to tell them he was trekking home after missing a bus.

When he failed to return to his accommodation he was reported missing.

Before long, dozens of conspiracy theories about Jay’s whereabouts were posted online.

Some of the theories claimed that he had been kidnapped by drug dealers and murdered in the mountains after losing a bag of drugs, while others claimed he had staged his own death or been killed by relatives.

• Cause Of Death is on Channel 5 on Wednesday at 9pm