Pay Off Your Mortgage in Two Years, Super Vets and Comedy Connections are some of the programmes that will be dropped from the schedules as the BBC makes savings to contend with a licence fee that is lower than it wanted.

In a set of proposals designed to protect key programmes, spending will be concentrated on the schedules between 7pm and 10.30pm on BBC One and between 8pm and 10pm of BBC Two. Priority will also be given to comedy, drama, “knowledge” and news, despite the loss of nearly 500 jobs in this department.

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, the corporation’s television arm, said that the BBC was likely to drop “middle-ground programming” that generated modest audiences in the early evening and late at night. Colleagues said that well-known evening programmes such as Question Time and Newsnight would continue.

Outside the key evening slots, BBC One viewers can expect to see repeats of programmes already broadcast on BBC Three, such as the comedy drama Drop Dead Gorgeous. BBC Three, whose £116.8 million budget was cut by up to £10 million, will show “narrative repeats” of peaktime BBC One programmes, such as Spooks, in the week of first transmission.

There will be few changes to the daytime schedule on either BBC One or BBC Two because executives believe that the budgets on programmes such To Buy or Not To Buy or Car Booty cannot be cut further. “For these kinds of programme audience appreciation is already high,” a spokesman said.

Despite the reduction in the numbers of news staff, amounting to one in six of the workforce, BBC executives were confident that viewers would not notice much difference. Mark Byford, the deputy director-general, said that “only a small number of people watch both the six and the ten o’clock news in the same evening,” so it was unlikely to matter if both shared the same material.

Journalists are to be centralised into one unit. Mr Byford said that this would not lead to Newsnight journalists appearing on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but instead that material should be shared across the programmes if the BBC was preparing a “major investigation into Burma”.

Those who may have hoped that the BBC would rule out making more reality programmes such as Castaway will be disappointed. Although the BBC has scaled back its spending in an area defined originally by Channel 4, it wants to retain flexibility to invest again if commissioners believe that they can create a distinctive hit.

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