Mark Thompson: An ‘A’ for content, and a ‘B’ for presentation

Raymond Snoddy on Mark Thompson’s lecture; the value of the BBC; and how Jeremy Hunt “has got the hang of dodging tricky questions with commendable speed”…

The well known media gossip and style guru turned around at the end of Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh and pronounced to no-one in particular: “If I had been delivering it, it would have been a triumph.”

The senior commercial television executive waved his drink around afterwards and declared: “I like more spikes in my speeches.”

For the media academic who lives in Oxford, it was “a good Oxford essay”.

So shall we agree on an “A” for content and a “B” for presentation?

What was clear that Thompson, who doesn’t easily do passion, did at least do enough to defend himself and the BBC from at least some of the unreasoning attacks the organisation and its licence fee faces routinely from its detractors.

He might have done that little bit better if he had come with a pre-prepared announcement. As a former newsman he should have known that everyone in the audience was gagging for a bit of genuine news.

Real numbers on executive pay would have hit the spot instead of the deliberately imprecise – the total pay of top managers will fall “not by five or ten percent, but by much more.” Sometimes ideas do not wholly satisfy.

But the BBC director-general did at least come up with a few thoughts that will resonate far beyond Edinburgh and ought to inform the discussions that will soon be under way with the Government about the next licence fee settlement.

Around the world there are many examples, Thompson argued, where public intervention in broadcasting is on the wane. But there is no example, he claimed, where as free-marketeers predict, the market has actually stepped up to replace the lost programme investment.

If this is true, as it almost certainly is, important consequences flow for policy.

As Thompson put it: “A pound out of the commissioning budget of the BBC is a pound out of the UK creative economy. Once gone, it will be gone forever.”

Yet when the point was put to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt in an Edinburgh interview, all we got was a slippery politician’s joke about how much Thompson liked his licence fee. As a relatively new politician Hunt has got the hang of dodging tricky questions with commendable speed.

It is, however, a dilemma that Hunt, who has supported the principle of the licence fee on behalf of the Coalition, will have to come to terms with.

Culture Secretary Hunt wants to see an expansion of an industry in which the UK excels, yet at the same time he insists on threatening that the licence fee could and probably should be smaller.

Efficiency is of course another matter. The BBC ought to be encouraged to be more efficient.

But Hunt should also ponder the “pound lost forever argument” in a rather more serious way.

The Culture Secretary also faces problems when he casually refers to the BBC as part of the public sector and therefore the reference point becomes the 25% cuts being faced by most of Government.

The licence fee is not – as Hunt seems to imply though not state – part of the public funding deficit.

The BBC is paid for, and owned by the citizens of this country. It is extraordinarily good value, certainly compared with Sky, and opinion polls find the BBC and even the licence fee considerably more popular – than the present Government.

Thompson’s other weighty contribution was to highlight the obvious – that it is Sky and News Corporation rather than the BBC that continues to expand and grow and is in danger of becoming an unacceptably dominant force.

The BBC director-general was able to point to Sherlock, The Normans, Rev and Tony Pappano’s Opera Italia in recent months as examples of the highest quality public service broadcasting.

Yet out of a programme budget of around £1.9 billion in the year to June, Sky spent only an estimated £100 million on UK originated programmes apart from news and sport.

A masterstroke, then, to appeal to Sky to pull its weight “by investing much, much more in British talent and British content.”

Neat also to ask for Sky to help out the British commercial TV sector by paying modest carriage fees – the very thing that Rupert Murdoch is appealing to the US cable industry to provide for his free-to-air Fox networks in America.

Don’t hold your breath. One Sky executive inquired sharply whether ITV had stepped forward to help Sky at the beginning when it nearly went under.

Carriage fees for the commercial terrestrial channels on Sky are an issue that the Culture secretary may care to examine if he serious about boosting exports of UK programming.

Thompson’s only gaffe was the comment that the move to Salford was a non-issue, although he just about managed to retrieve the situation by suggesting later that he was talking about five years time when the dust had settled. An insensitive Gordon Brown thing to say though as families wrestle with whether or not to uproot themselves and go North.

Yet a bit like Thompson, Hunt did well enough at Edinburgh and avoided all gaffes with a smile on his face.

“Distressingly competent,” noted one journalist.

So, for Hunt it looks like an “A” for presentation, but a “B” for content.