Former player

Steve Hewlett, on the R4 Media Show, has been asking previous BBC DGs for their thoughts on the job, and the succession. Today it was Lord Birt, DG from 1992-2000.  He said he was proud to have joined the BBC as its highest-placed outsider since the Second World War - he came in as Deputy DG, a post now abolished - and said he found "a shabby bureaucratic organisation obsessed with itself". This made Steve chuckle, pointing out that Private Eye still has a BirtSpeak feature to capture the best of the BBC's bloated management utterings - "Do they ?" said the Lord, laconically.

Lord Birt said the currently-floating idea of splitting the job into a Chief Executive and an Editor-in-Chief was daft, like arguing the job of Prime Minister was "too big".  There should be one job, but successful occupants of the office needed editorial qualifications. History, he said, shows that often DGs have been brought down by a failure to resolve an editorial policy question. This may or may not have been a dig at Greg Dyke.

He wouldn't be drawn on who should be next. Asked "should it be a women ?", he said one day it would be a woman, and when that happens there would be three cheers.

Thursday 1300 update: A letter to the March edition of Prospero, the magazine for retired BBC staff, reads thus:

'Distressing images in the last Prospero'.

Could Prospero adopt the same policy as TV news programmes, and warn readers when there are images which they may find distressing? I refer to the picture of John Birt on the letters pages in the February issue. 

Andrew Maywood