Evans and LeBlanc will be joined by Eddie Jordan, Sabine Schmitz, Chris Harris and Rory Reid. The Stig will be rounding out the team.

In a tweet by BBC Two the Friends star is pictured alongside Evans and the Stig promising to drive the show into a new era. 

We can reveal that @Matt_LeBlanc will be joining @achrisevans to drive #TopGear into a new era. pic.twitter.com/6NKaitFgQ8

Monday

Tracey Ullman’s Show

BBC One

10.45pm

Comedian Tracey Ullman returns to the BBC for the first time in thirty years with a new sketch show.

The broadcaster has awarded the contract to experienced independent sports production company, Whisper Films, which was founded in 2010 by Coulthard, BT Sport and former BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey and former BBC F1 producer Sunil Patekl.

This announcement follows the news last month that Channel 4 would become the terrestrial TV home of Formula 1 from 2016-2018.

The year is coming to an end, it is time to remember fondly the past year’s television treats, and look forward to what 2016 will bring in TV entertainment.

Lip Sync Battle UK - Channel 5

This American import is being given a very special British makeover. Hosted by former Spice Girl Mel B and rapper Professor Green, the show will have all your favourite celebrities miming their hearts out for the studio audience’s votes. 

Lip Sync Battle UK starts on 8 January 2016

Top Gear was “an accident waiting to happen”, said Lorraine Heggessey, who told the audience enjoying her RTS London Christmas Lecture that she would have dealt with the programme’s presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, more quickly.

“Jeremy is a bit like a spoiled toddler,” she said. He had “crossed the line several times with quite racist remarks and got away with it”, added the former BBC and TalkbackThames executive.

The BBC has launched a “treasure trove” of its content from the last 60 years.

BBC Store is a new digital service that aims to give audiences easy access to their favourite BBC programmes.

The website allows users to download individual episodes, series or bundles of several series of the same show for a one-off payment, which can then be watched through BBC iPlayer in a new My Programmes area.

Since Jeremy Clarkson punched his Top Gear producer, Oisin Tymon, during a row over the lack of a hot meal, the problems of managing talent have been centre stage.

Former BBC Controller of Entertainment Commissioning Jane Lush said that the fracas distilled some of the key questions that executives and programme-makers face: “How power­ful is talent, where do you draw the line on bad behaviour and is top talent really irreplaceable?”

When Kim Shillinglaw became Controller of BBC Two last year, one of her predecessors took her for a drink. Roly Keating had launched BBC Four, moved on to BBC Two and filled in as temporary boss of BBC One. In a meeting room in New Broadcasting House, Shillinglaw recalls with terrible clarity what he told her.

“He said, ‘You will find BBC Two is the toughest. Let me tell you that now. BBC Four has a lot of individual commissions but not very much money, so there’s a limit to how many things it can commission.

For an insight into the day job of the BBC Director-General two years into his role, I pop into Tony Hall's plate-glass eyrie at New Broadcasting House. I arrive in the aftermath of one of the regular encyclicals that DGs dispense.

He's sung the praises of the BBC's place in a "thriving, free and competitive market", an alternative to what a colleague terms the "Joni Mitchell" school of heartstring-tugging about the Beeb's innate brilliance.