Former BBC DG Mark Thompson, resting on his digital laurels over Christmas in Maine, has given a long interview to the Irish Times (largely on the grounds that his mother came from Donegal).
He blames lack of strategic thinking about streaming by Governments around the world for the current stress levels in public service broadcasters.
“The work hasn’t been done, and because of that most governments don’t really have coherent answers for what should happen to the public broadcasters. For most public broadcasters, it is a kind of scary moment.”
For Irish readers, he says the licence fee will survive for a while in the UK because Boris Johnson has other fish to fry. “The political capital you need to spend on a fundamental reworking of the funding of the BBC, I just don’t see how you would spare the time for it, honestly. It would be a big battle and it’s not quite clear where that battle would end.”
Margaret Thatcher came to power wanting to do this and “never got round to it”, he notes.
Let's hope all these long interviews bring Mr Thompson's skills to the attention of headhunters around the world in 2020, and he can rejoin the world of gainful employment.
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