Endgame ?

Rev Richard Coles, former Communard, in The Sunday Times, on the recent speech by BBC Director General Tim Davie.... 

I don’t think I have ever heard a DG, speaking ex cathedra, say the BBC is looking at the long-term viability of the licence fee. About time, its critics say, but its defenders too can see that if the model does not work, you have to get a new one before change is forced on you.

So I do not criticise Davie, but saying it means there is no longer the aspiration to sustain the BBC as a great cultural power. It will still make programmes, some of them good programmes, but without its peculiar means of funding I do not see how the orchestra-sustaining, Proms-producing, local-radio-nurturing, soft-power-playing, envy-of-the-world BBC will survive.

It is like hearing ministers tentatively suggest there are alternative models for funding the NHS. Saying it means game over.