Choreography required

There's no doubt Margaret Hodge has enjoyed the limelight afforded by her role as Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Accounts. Today, she needs to demonstrate some intellectual muscle to match her crowd-pleasing questions.

She needs to come up with some route that will allow the BBC to resume its move from the jacuzzis of cash afforded by a licence fee deal set at inflation-plus, to the cold baths of 20% savings under the ineffably-daftly titled programme Delivering Quality First.

There'll be ugly scenes first. Thommo unwisely upped the ante with charges that former colleagues deliberately mislead the committee on how much they knew about severance deals. It could move from ugly to explosive, if The Times is right that Lord Patten has something about Savile up his sleeve.

In the end, the problem they're cracking on severance pay is relatively small. An extra two million or so on what were in effect compromise deals (and thus outside straightforward "entitlements") may not have been tightly monitored - but the cash allowed the dismantling of the Journalism Board, a grandiose praesidium created under Byford, on Thommo's watch, in 2006 - and obviously over-expensive just four years later. It wasn't just Byford who was made redundant.

If old hands like Caroline Thomson had still been around when the NAO team under Peter Gray were compiling their first report for the PAC on the severance deals, they'd have worked hard on alternative phrases to "beyond contractual entitlement" - Lord Patten had to work hard on the self-same issue when George Entwistle's exit deal was probed by the PAC.  Fry, Patten, Agius, Lyons, Adams, Kroll and Thommo are all compelled to express outrage at phrases that challenge their competence on governance. What happened was pragmatic, right-ish at the time, but clearly wrong now. Let's hope Hodge can help them let steam off - and, as we say in the meeja, move on by tea-time.