Mark Thompson on the future of the BBC

Mark Thompson talks to Prospect about the licence fee, Britain, the future of broadcasting—and why he's not dumbing down.
July 3, 2009
You can also read John Lloyd's accompanying feature on the future of public service broadcasting for free on our website here

Prospect (P): Let's start with the license fee and its long term viability. Some critics say it can't last.

Mark Thompson (MT): The big question here is whether the British public want to pool their resources to pay something valuable that they can all use. In the 1980s, people like Professor Alan Peacock argued that the BBC's reach and the value of what its did would be eroded by the number of choices offered by digital television, and that this would undermine the idea of every household paying a compulsory charge. This has not proved to be the case: the BBC's reach and perceived indispensability to virtually every household in the UK still feels very secure. You may argue that a television license fee may no longer be the right fiscal treatment—but it seems to me that, if the public and political support for a shared investment exists, fiscal means can be found to pay for it.

P: The other fiscal means would be through the normal tax revenue…



MT: It might be that you define the licence fee in a different way. Perhaps you could bung it in with council tax or income tax, or increase the levy on electricity—though I think this is undesirable. The heart of the idea of the BBC is not the precise fiscal formulation, it's about Britain being enough of a nation and having a sufficient common culture that pooling the investment makes sense.

It also depends on the belief that this intervention—and it's a massive intervention—remains necessary because of market failure: that is, because content produced through the market could not achieve the same things. Now, some people have argued that increased choice and the digital revolution will gradually make market disappear. Yet here we are in 2009 and I would say that, if anything, market failure is growing as a result of technological change. It's true in the US too. In fact it seems to be a global phenomenon, whether or not you've got a major public broadcaster.

P: Isn't there a tension here: that in order for the license fee to be legitimate, the BBC requires the biggest reach possible, yet the market failure argument suggests a much smaller BBC than we have now, one not focused on game-shows and reality TV and all the things its doing on BBC3 or Radio 1?

MT: I'm just about prepared to accept the word tension, or potential tension. But, first, market failure is more broadly distributed across genres than is often realised. If you ask the UK music industry about the way the BBC sustains and supports original music-making in the UK, they will talk about the level of the BBC's commitment: five orchestras, the world's biggest festival for classical music in the Proms; while Radio 1, Radio 2 and 6 Music are crucial in supporting the growth of new talent in the British pop music industry.

Comedy is another example, I would argue, of self-evident market failure across broadcasting—and, again, of market failure in most other European markets. Today, the BBC has ended up as pretty much the only significant player in broadcast comedy. Comedy is just the kind of thing you would expect the market to be able to deliver, but it is in many ways a very pure public service genre. And comedy runs deep. If you're chronicling what it's like to be alive today and how this country has developed since the 1920s, this is as much reflected in the comedies that the BBC has enabled as it is on our news and current affairs. Yet it's very thin outside the BBC.

Then there's the view—held not only by the BBC, but by many international observers of broadcasting—that the presence of a major public service broadcaster with a tradition of innovation and standard-setting changes the way that the market operates in a country. So the tradition, for example, of high quality original drama on channels like ITV and Channel 4 has been supported and encouraged by that kind of drama on the BBC. This is not the case if you go to other European countries where they don't have that tradition.

It's manifestly the case that you could take the obsession with maximising reach too far—to the extent that you start distorting programme strategy to try and reach the last marginal non-user of the BBC, with, you know, BBC Blue offering pornographic services. One of the balancing acts the BBC has been performing since 1927 has been between, on the one hand, finding something that goes beyond what the market can provide and, on the other hand, trying to provide something of value to every household. Is there a potential tension here? Yes. But one thing the BBC has developed over the years is a portfolio of services that reaches different audiences, and where within each service there is a real effort to do something different. The requirement on Radio 1 to be distinctive is probably greater than that on Radio 4, precisely because it's closer to other services the market is providing.

P: You could see that argument with comedy. But can you see it with cop series, or soaps? Is there a particular BBC addition to soaps or cop series that would not come in anyway?

MT: Of course. At the moment, we're broadcasting the American programme The Wire, which has been lauded to the sky. It's a very subtle piece of work. It's a cop series, when you get down to it; but then some of the most outstanding work ever done in fiction fits into the "cop series" genre. If you're asking whether the BBC should do tired, formulaic, uninteresting genre pieces, then no, we shouldn't. But I think we should and do try to do something different within the context of popular genre. Sometimes it's a strange, high concept idea like Life On Mars: a time-travel cop series. Or the Criminal Justice drama series we ran last year, which is a good example of an ambitious, state of the nation piece of original writing that happened to be about the criminal justice system. I would also say that Eastenders, week in week out, is genuinely trying to wrestle with contemporary issues as well as providing entertainment—domestic violence, racism and so forth. And it does so in an explicit way, complete with the fact sheets and the number to call at the end of the programme.

There is a legitimate question about the absolute volumes: would it be appropriate for the BBC to be broadcasting hours and hours of acquired American programmes? The answer is no, and we broadcast less of that than ever before. We're trying to buy distinctive, unusual pieces: Mad Men and The Wire. We run less entertainment than we've ever run before.

P: Why put The Wire on so late?

MT: I think The Wire has found its audience. It's a good example of an outstanding drama which is going to reach a relatively small audience, somewhere between 500,000-1,000,000 people. I believe that running it after Newsnight is a good time to reach that audience. Many viewers are not there to watch it earlier in the evening. When we talk to people who feel anxious about its late timing, this is often not about the personal inconvenience of watching it, but because of the semiotics of scheduling—they worry that playing it at such a time suggests that we undervalue it, but we don't.

P: In a time of increased national stringency, people are more than usually open to the idea that the licence fee should be cut back. Indeed, the Conservatives have already said that they want to freeze it. What do you make of this?

MT: Well, to be precise, the Conservatives said they wanted the BBC Trust to tell the government that they didn't want to accept the normal increase. Although, obviously, this might lead to a future Conservative government deciding they do want a freeze.

But yes, there is a privilege and relative security in having the licence fee. And this brings obligations and duties—we are self-evidently in a completely different situation than any other broadcaster. So, at a time when much of the private sector is struggling with multiple, potentially life-threatening pressures, the whole of the public sector, including the BBC, is inevitably going to come under sharp scrutiny.

On the other hand, the BBC is currently engaged in a massively expanded programme of activities, in particular around digital switch-overs. This year we are switching more than one transmitter a day across the UK. We are mentioned in virtually every single one of more than 20 sections of the interim Digital Britain report. If you look at the list of what the BBC is asked to do by the government, it's longer than it's ever been before. And the indications are that the mission is going to get bigger, not smaller.

We're totally committed to the best journalism in the world, but we are also trying to figure out ways of making TV, radio and web journalism in a more integrated and effective way. We have, now, lost somewhere between 7,000-8,000 jobs. Between last year and 2013, we expect to reduce the costs of TV programmes by a net average of 25 per cent. With journalism, which is about half the people in the BBC, we've worked incredibly hard to see if we can make the license fee go further.

P: Is it a disadvantage that you're seen as so big and ubiquitous, possibly more so than at any time in the last 15 years? We're almost certainly going to have a Conservative government in the next few months. If you seem too big and powerful, they're going to be very attracted to top-slicing, to freezing or reducing the license fee..

MT: I would make a distinction there. I think the Conservatives are very sceptical about top-slicing—about spreading direct public intervention and subsidy more broadly. Of course, with any government the BBC itself needs to be very aware of market impact issues. But it's worth pointing out that the BBC is in every measurable way, bar one, smaller than it used to be. It's a smaller portion of the broadcasting economy; it's thousands of people smaller; its physical estate is much smaller.

The one sense in which it's not smaller the relative one, and that is itself a kind of trick of the light—because most, although not all, of the other major players now look an awful lot smaller. It's to do with the decline in ITV as a force, for example. People expected, and the industry expected, that the BBC would become more marginal over time. And this is partly because it was expected that the BBC would be less innovative than the rest of the industry. Yet that's more or less the opposite of what's played out. The surprise to everyone has been the speed with which the BBC has embraced the idea of the web, of mobile, on demand and so forth—and the relative success with which we've done that.

This is partly because the license fee is rather a successful business model in a digital context, while other forms of monetisation are extraordinarily hard. Actually, license fee funding probably makes more sense in a digital age than at any point in the BBC's history. It's also an odd feature that, in the BBC, you won't find much of the complacency you might expect within a very securely funded incumbent. Ours is quite a nervy culture, and one that is surprisingly good at backing innovation. Over the last five years we have spent a lot of time and energy trying to attract the best computer scientists and engineers in the world, the best creative leaders.

So, if you look at the most successful and widely-used websites in the country, we're number three after Google and Microsoft. We're the only British name until way beyond the top ten. We're a significant force globally and are regarded, along with our iPlayer, as one of the handful of content leaders in the world. But there's no evidence that, if you took the BBC out of the equation, the rest of the British content sector would take its place.

P: Given your relative size and your success in the digital world, should you not see yourself as a kind of public sector media venture capital organisation, launching products and then letting them go or selling them on?

MT: That's just the term Tessa Jowell has used. And, yes, one of the things we're talking about doing here is taking the iPlayer—its branding, its technology—and opening that up so that ITV, Channels 4 and 5, and potentially others, BFI, the Tate and so forth, can use it to reach the public.

If you look at Kingswood Warren, our research centre, that has always worked on the assumption that what we do will be shared with everyone. Researchers there essentially created a power analogue coloured television system, NICAM stereo, plus much of Freeview and Freesat. The assumption has always been that the work we do there is going to be open-source and shared—and Canvas [the BBC's in-development "internet television" service, which would allow viewers to watch on-demand services, such as the BBC iPlayer and other internet content, via television sets] is a good current example of that. The assumption is that we will do a lot of the work on Canvas and it will then be shared.

P: Shared with ITV and BT?

MT: Initially. But Canvas [a proposed partnership between BBC, ITV and BT which would allow viewers to watch on-demand services, such as the BBC iPlayer and other internet content, via television sets] is much more than that: it's potentially a vehicle for getting more high quality content on demand onto the main television.

P: When you extended yourself into Lonely Planet, you got a lot of criticism. You were seen to be taking over areas which simply were not by any definition "mainstream BBC." Now you're emphasising much more partnership and co-operation. Do you think Lonely Planet was the right move?

MT: We believed that we had a vast body of television content about travel, natural history and the history of different countries, which we found difficult to exploit globally. We also have a very successful international magazine business. And we thought Lonely Planet fitted very well as a way of packaging up a significant amount of our existing intellectual property and making it work in markets around the world.

But the direction of travel for public service over the last decade, if you take Freeview as an example, has been towards partnership. And for years it has been the norm to presume that we should work with other broadcasters to achieve sustainability and critical mass, particularly in cities outside London. It's not a new agenda.

P: And what about Digital Britain and the role of the BBC compared to other British broadcasters in the future?

MT: The UK has always had a very controlled broadcasting environment. That economic order is now breaking down, and the effect is that hundreds of millions of pounds that used to be available in a broader sense to go into public service broadcasting beyond the BBC are essentially coming out of the system. So the first policy question is, are you going to put some money back in? There's going to be a sale of the spectrum with the switchover from analogue to digital television: is the money from that sale going to go back into the system?

And then there's another question, which is the transition to broadband. The most important thing here is whether we can make sure that no household is left behind in broadband access. In a way, all the content issues are secondary, because once you can get broadband into every household, then the extraordinary plurality and availability of high quality content will solve the content problem.

Nonetheless, as the Digital Britain process goes forward, we're going to have to get practical about what our priorities are and what the limits of the BBC's resources are. Today, unlike a year ago, perhaps the most pressing issues are not to do with Channel 4. The question of whether the ITV model is sustainable is very current.

P: But you accept that without strong public service competition you yourselves would suffer?

MT: Absolutely. The key thing is, first, should Britain have a really strong set of creative, content industries? Absolutely. And by the way, BskyB is a gigantic and very successful new player here. Part of the story here is that you once had a large strong BBC and a large strong ITV. You now have a large strong BBC and a large strong BskyB, and still a fairly strong ITV—though it is increasingly looking in a somewhat parlous state—and Channel 4, Channel 5 and so forth.

P: What about the damage the internet is doing to a lot of valuable traditional media activities, such as newspaper reporting itself? The web takes readers and advertisers and undermines the newspaper business model without then doing the valuable things that newspapers have done. How far are you able to come in and mitigate what's happening there, especially to local newspapers?

MT: We are, for as long as we exist with license fee funding, a guarantor of at least one form of plurality: a proven commitment to impartial global news-gathering and good journalism. Of course, if you have the choice of two or more providers of such a service that would be good, but we're here for the duration, and we will be there with AP and Reuters a bit of CNN, although we don't see the Americans around the world as much as we used to.

Influential blogging sites with millions of readers, such as the Huffington Post, do pose an interesting question. If you're in the middle of one of the old models, it feels like the end of the world. If you're working for the HP, it feels rather different. The first things for ourselves is that we are comfortable with the internet as a platform for reaching and talking to audiences—and it may ultimately be the main way with which we get our content to all of our audiences. We're very interested in the challenges as to how you monetise content on the internet. Planet Earth, for example, cost more than £1m per episode to make. The controller of BBC 1's contribution from the license fee was around £300,000—so it relied on more than 70 per cent of its income coming from other sources. We're quite used to a world where the way in which you complete the funding of content by intricate means. Here we are, a little public service broadcaster, and we're thinking about DVD sales in the US as one of the ways in which we're going to make it possible to make this programme.

P: When you say the internet "may ultimately be the main way with which we get our content to all of our audiences," you, as director-general, are sitting athwart a vast shift in media, similar to when television came along.

MT: I think this it is bigger than the arrival of television.

P: You must be thinking that, in five to ten years time, the BBC may no longer have channels at all. Why would you have BBC 1, 2, 3 and 4, if you are presenting a whole smorgasbord of programmes, both from the archive and the present. Is that on the cards?

MT: If one looks at media throughout the ages, people always fear total substitution. People thought television would kill off radio. Then television was going to kill cinema. Yet what we've seen is their co-existence, and the re-organising of their economic value and inter-relationships. Books, it turns out, have a wonderful future in the digital age. I believe that physical newspapers are likely to be with us 20-30 years time from now. And my feeling is that the passive experience of television is actually getting better and better. The arrival of High Definition, widescreens, 5.1 Dolby sound, 3D—enormous amounts of innovation and energy are going into improving the experience of watching television. A fascination with live events, like sports events, is growing rather than diminishing.

Now, people who are interested in news will increasingly think of BBC news as something you get from all sorts of different devices. You get it in sounds, pictures and text. You get it on the move, you get it in the home, in the car and so on. That feels already quite close to a multi-media, multi-platform on-demand phenomenon. Yet when people sit down and watch the 2012 London Olympic games, it will be surprisingly like the 1948 London games: all sitting down in front of the telly to watch a great national event as it happens. And I think when you talk about genre like drama, comedy, documentary and natural history, they'll sit in a place between those two extremes, and there will be elements of both.

P: What about the schedules in all this?

MT: They're a convenient way of navigating through content. TV channels and schedules are navigational devices. They're ways of finding content and of getting a familiarity. That's why when you change schedules, the British public sharpen sticks and come looking for the perpetrators, because they're so used to having these familiar objects within reach.

P: What about if Roly Keating—the BBC's first official Director of Archive Content—comes up with a better way of using the BBC archive, both online and through TV. Will people then think, as my children already do, that they don't need to bother with schedules at all because they can get it all online?

MT: I believe we're heading towards a golden age here. The BBC is an organisation that has not historically taken its archive remotely seriously. There are terrifying and unprintable stories about the stuff that was wiped back in the 1960s and 1970s, simply so people could to re-use the rather expensive two-inch rolls of videotape. Terrible crimes were committed. Now, for the first time, we care passionately about the archive. We put Roly Keating, the former controller of BBC2, in charge of the archive as a service. Ultimately, this archive could be the biggest and richest service the BBC produces.

P: How does this potentially change the calculation?

MT: Well, you might make less content—quite a lot less—but make it to a higher standard. Because it's going to be there forever. And it's not a repeat if you haven't seen it before. We don't think of War and Peace being a repeat if we read it twice, we think it as being worthy of further study.

But woe betide you if whatever bit of content you're making is not of real value. Appetite for quality content is absolutely undiminished. And, by the way, the kind of television that you simply sit down and watch—not just the on-demand stuff—is either growing or is stable in most markets I know about. In the UK it's growing. People are turning away from newspapers and some other forms of media as well, but linear television is growing. I don't mean via the iPlayer, I mean sitting in front of the television set.

P: But not among young people under the age of 30.

MT: Well that's absolutely true. But my sense is that the appetite of my children and young people for high quality, for the linear passive experience, is not diminishing. It's just that increasingly, if they really like an American show, for example, they buy the DVD box set and watch it at leisure. And what we're trying to do in the industry with projects like Sky Plus and the iPlayer is to give you the ability to stack these things up if that's the way you want to watch.

P: But what if that young audience don't choose what's in your schedules and just watch DVDs or YouTube. There's an awful lot of dross out there on television. You've been cherry-picking all the best things on the BBC of the last couple of years in this conversation.

MT: First, even if it wasn't for the digital revolution, we should be trying to ensure that the amount of dross that we're commissioning and showing is reducing to zero. Look at a BBC schedule from the 1960s and 1970s: acquired programmes make up much of it. Now, there's much more news, current affairs and much more original drama than there ever was before. I mean, the heart of the BBC1 schedule used to be held up by Dynasty, Dallas, The Virginian.

P: But what's replaced them is lifestyle shows, isn't it?

MT: I would say that's not true. We have more arts now than ever.

P: That's if you throw in BBC4, which is watched by hardly anybody, whereas if you said we have more arts programmes on BBC One…

MT: We have more arts programmes on BBC One, certainly, than we had five or ten years ago.

P: What about than 20 years ago?

MT: Definitely fewer, I accept that. But, by the way, I would be a little more careful about BBC Four. Firstly, it's now in 90 per cent of UK households. And I believe that there is a role on television for something like the Third Programme, or Radio 3. It doesn't absolve BBC1 or BBC2 from the need to focus on the arts, but it does mean that you've got an environment where you can do a great deal. We can now, for example, broadcast 26 Proms. Lots of them are on BBC4, but quite a few of them are on Two and some of them are on One. We managed to get 12m people last summer to watch some of the Proms before the last night.

Specialist factual programmes didn't really exist on BBC1 five or ten years ago—they'd gone completely and we're trying to push them back in again. We put Panaroma back at half past eight on a Monday night and we've got David Attenborough and natural history back on One. We've had arts series, often done in a more popular vein, Jeremy Paxman on the Victorians for example.

P: Isn't that the problem, though? You're having to bring in celebrities to present all these factual programmes. And if you play into the "republic of entertainment" when you're doing serious programmes then they're not so serious anymore.

MT: I would say if you analyse Horizon right now, you'll find one or two episodes where perhaps they've got a non-specialist. But you'll also find lots of episodes that are fairly straight-forward science journalism. Moreover, there are one or two of the more "republic of entertainment" programmes which we've launched in recent years which do sit on BBC1—Who Do You Think You Are? is really good example. I think that using programmes like this to engage a broad audience in history via well-known person is a positive development.

P: But that's slightly cheating, because the notion of what counts as a history programme, science programme or arts programme has changed. You're dumbing down the content, making it less challenging: another example is BBC Young Musician of the Year.

MT: We just put an extra £150,000 into the budget so that they can do the heats properly, by the way.

P: But it's a very different programme now. A lot of the semi-finals are about human interest stories as much as they're about music.

MT: There's still a fair amount of music on Young Musician. I'm passionate about classical music, and I find it a lot more enjoyable to watch the programme than I used to.

P: Because it now tells the stories of the players?

MT: As well as giving you some of the music, yes. We're about to engage in a gigantic season of programmes about poetry. I saw a rough cut of it the other day, and there's a rather good Simon Schama piece about John Donne and four of five other serious pieces. There's an Arena about TS Eliot: a 90 minute programme that will run in the middle of the BBC2 schedule, which I think will be the most interesting piece done on Eliot on television or radio for over 40 years. They've managed to persuade Valerie Eliot to open up a lot of the personal archive, and it turned out to be a rather brilliant moment to reflect on Eliot and to move away from that image of him as a tweedy, Anglican, anachronistic figure. And a lot of it is actually about the poetry, and hearing the poetry.

We did a programme just last Sunday, The Lost Art of Oratory, on BBC2, not BBC4 – the first programme we've done on rhetoric in 20 years. Putting Boris Johnson on set describing various Demosthenic rhetorical tropes, and then inter-cutting that with Barack Obama showing how it's done in practise, it's fantastic. We're still trying to fight the good fight there.

P: Its putting two arts programmes on BBC2 this week fighting the good fight?

MT: Well this Sunday, we had the Art of Rhetoric programme, and the rather good single drama on Northern Ireland at 9pm…

P: On Saturday.

MT: It's wrong to see this as a desert. We have launched a whole TV network which is wholly devoted to this.

P: Are you not a bit disappointed with the viewing figures for BBC4?

MT: I don't want them to climb if the price of that is to take the edges off the ambition of BBC Four—just as I've said to each controller of Radio 4 I don't want you to think that there is some artificial target you've got to hit. BBC4 is a channel that gains its audience by word-of-mouth, one viewer at a time, and I believe it is working. It's much better that it has the confidence to stick to the knitting and to be ambitious in the right way and let people find it. I'm very proud of Radio 3, and it doesn't worry me that Radio 3 has a smaller audience than Radio 1, and I don't want the Radio 3 Controller, Roger Wright, to feel that he's somehow inadequate because it doesn't do better.

I hope that what we offer the British public are, firstly, places which are still real bastions of ambition and excellence. But we also offer people a number of entry points. There aren't many main channels anywhere in the world which do what BBC One does, whether it's Last Night Of the Proms or the arts stuff we run on a Sunday night. When we do poetry on the BBC, we do it on our main television networks as well as Radio 3, Radio 4. We're talking now about Shakespeare, and this is probably not for publication yet, but it probably does mean David Tennant in Hamlet for the RSC. I hope that if we do engineer something big about Shakespeare that it will have a very big presence on BBC1 as well as BBC2 and BBC4.

P: And what about the Russell Brand affair? If the BBC is going to spread across the spectrum and you're going to have edgy comedy, there's going to be lots of cultural anxiety about it. Are you going to have to reconcile yourself to coping with half your audience hating what the other half love?

MT: Most restaurants, if you look at the menu and it's got liver on it and you don't like liver, you don't order it and that's the end of the matter. We run a restaurant where, if there's liver on the menu, people say "That's disgusting, it shouldn't be on the menu at all." We can't avoid the fact that different people have different views on what's acceptable and what's not acceptable.

But the reason that the Russell Brand was a big and difficult thing for us was not because of the Daily Mail, but because it was a really unacceptable, profoundly disturbing incident that should never have been broadcast. I wouldn't blame the newspapers for that. It was a really, really bad lapse. It wasn't close to the line, it was a long way off on the other side of the line, and of course there are big lessons to learn.

P: Your predecessor here, in the Mary Whitehouse years, put a portrait of Whitehouse on the wall and threw darts at her. But you can't put a picture of Paul Dacre on the wall and throw darts at it. Not that you'd wish to, of course…

MT: No. Firstly I think we have a more healthy relationship with the public today. I joined a BBC where letters of complaint were often put straight in the bin. We have a different relationship: license payers pay for the BBC, they own the BBC. But also the relationship between broadcasting and the public is changing. I think our challenge here is to be stern where we have to be, but also be brave about broadcasting things that not everyone is going to like. You've got to have quite powerful reasons for not putting stuff in front of the public for them to decide for themselves. One of those powerful reasons might be bullying and intimidation and humiliation of people, which is totally unacceptable on the BBC. At the same time, the public cannot tell you what to do because there are 59m of them. Audiences want a relationship where their perspectives are being taken into account, but where you are also providing them with work from people of real talent and creativity who've got a strong creative agenda.

P: That means, to take an earlier point, that you're no longer the voice of Britain. You're the arena of Britain. Within that you must have some values. But what are these values?

MT: The values are particular to what we do. It's not like the values you have as a human being, it's what values you have as a public service broadcaster. The impartiality for example: most people living their lives don't think the impartiality is a central tenet for us, but it is.

I joined the BBC as a trainee at the age of 22, and decided at that moment I should never have any political affiliation because working for the BBC as a journalist didn't go with any visible political activity. We are curiously fanatical about impartiality because it goes with our delivery of authoritive, truthful journalism.

P: But a lot of your colleagues disagreed with you very strongly about the decision not to broadcast the Gaza appeal. Were they not fanatical enough?

MT: I think the very large majority of the people working for the BBC would agree with the principle of impartiality. In terms of the boundaries and application of that principle, you'll get very lively debate in the organisation. But I think that's a strength. On the weekend when the decision had already been made but it was being debated publicly, I spent about roughly ten hours on the phone to other colleagues within the BBC debating the point. I absolutely agree that different people will take different views on the application of the principle, but my own view on what I take to be the core values, about impartiality, is pretty austere.

My view's fairly austere about the public's right to decide on content of real value that is potentially controversial, like the Jerry Springer opera, which we did decide to show. With the BBC Gaza appeal and Jerry Springer, I held in both cases an open meeting that anyone in the BBC could come along to. In both cases I stayed there as long as I needed to listen and discuss and debate the issue.

P: What about if Jerry Springer had been about Muslims rather than Christians?

MT: I don't want to duck the question except to say what I've honestly found the best thing to do is to look at these editorial decisions case by case. Years ago, when I was running BBC2, there was some debate about whether the comedy series Goodness Gracious Me should deal with any of the religions of South Asia—and in particular whether it was sensible in the years after The Satanic Verses to be doing anything which could be seen to be ridiculing Islam. There were some complaints, but we decided that the right to do was to continue with the programme and allow comedy sketches about all those religions.

P: So if Sacha Baron Cohen was invited onto Room 101, and said "one of the things I want to throw into Room 101 is the Koran"…?

MT: I don't think there should be no go areas, but I like to consider individual cases as cases and not hypotheticals.

In the context of broadcasting, you've got to feel that something is been done in a context and for a purpose, that it's got some value. Although the value might simply be: is it funny? Is this successful comedy? I've talked about humiliation, and you don't want a situation where, as a broadcaster, you're for no apparent reason allowing someone to denigrate something. It was important to me that Jerry Springer was a piece of cultural and creative interest. I make judgements based partly on the merits of the piece. If you think the piece is going to cause offence and there's no sufficient countervailing value, then you might decide not to transmit it, and that's something I've done once or twice.

P: What about the idea of the BBC as a "national glue"? We live in more fractious, fragmented times than ever; we have more ethnic parallel lives, we have Scotland perhaps wanting to become independent…

MT: I'm not sure I agree. We tend to believe the things that reinforce the whole fragmentation notion, whereas I think there is a lot of evidence that this remains quite a closely-knit culture where people have a lot of things in common.

And we need to be a lot more precise. Who's doing the gluing, and who's agreed to be glued? People often talk about what we've got in common, but part of this process is being forced to confront perspectives that are not yours. I think the challenge of the encounter with the other is often the most important thing that's going on, as well as the consensus-building and the reminder of shared values. By historical accident, it's part of the BBC's particular place in this country that we are the marketplace or arena in which much of this occurs. But I don't want to overstate it, because in a sense it's for the British pubic to decide how far they wan to feel part of a single body, and how far they want to feel part of different cultures and communities.

The truth will be some of both. For example, I've been told by many of the most brilliant TV observers that it was impossible that Saturday night entertainment could survive because of the fragmentation of tastes and beliefs. And of course the opposite of what was predicted has happened, which is why we've reinvented it, with ITV and others doing the same.

P: You were criticised for leading the BBC news with coverage of Jade Goody's death…

MT: It's a very interesting case study. Should we have covered the death of Jade Goody? Some people would say no. I would say we were right to do so. Should we have led a bulletin with it hours after her death? One was very glad when after a few hours there was something else to lead with. For those of us who were anxious about the decision to lead with it, it was quite hard to come up with strong alternatives. But within a few hours we were doing other things.

Again, we're back to the semiotics of news-ordering. A lead through the day would have felt like too much. One test of BBC news should be significance, and almost always significance means the obvious – an actual crisis, G20, a major earthquake in Italy, substantial political developments at home. In the time I've been at the BBC we've moved from mid-market tabloid news agenda to a more series broadsheet agenda across our services. We're more serious now than the BBC I joined. But we live in a country where for a great number of people, Jade Goody's death has a significance.

P: It's almost not a choice.

MT: It's always a choice.

P: One of the resonances of both the Brand and Gaza debates was the feeling that with the BBC there was maybe too much of a left liberal orthodoxy. That it's not actually reflecting a spectrum, but has moved into a set mentality.

MT: It is very important that, in our journalism above all, we genuinely respect the full spectrum of views and ideas. I would say that we worked quite hard in recent years to ensure in our coverage of Europe, immigration, business, that we're reflecting a wide range of ideas. I think sometimes in the past we were guilty of just a pattern—but it's not so much a question of overt liberal bias in the 1980s and 1990s, so much as a world perspective that was not as complete as it might be.

For instance, I grew up in a BBC which frankly wasn't sure if it was in favour of business or not. We've tried hard to be more broad-minded but also more expert in the way we cover business, and it's been our good fortune to wrestle with that just before the biggest business and financial story of any of our journalistic careers. We have now in place, by any standards, a strong line-up of business and economics correspondents—and we are more able to cover that story well than we would have been five or 20 years ago.

P: One thing that you've not been doing properly under your director-generalship is religion. I think the Archbishop of Canterbury has said as much…

MT: He didn't say that actually, it was made up by one of the newspapers.

P: But there is an argument that the only thing about religion you have on Good Friday is a programme about the Messiah, probably a good programme, but not what you'd call a coverage of what is one of the supreme Christian holidays.

MT: Last year, you'll recall, we had a BBC1 drama about the Passion, which ran right through prime time on BBC One. Now that's something that the BBC would never have done in the 1960s or 1970s.

This is a culturally diverse nation where you've got a large number of competing concerns. Satisfying all these groups on this topic would probably fill all our airwaves and all media, so you are wrestling with the art of the possible here. What are we trying to do? The Passion is a good example of a big landmark project. Moreover, Dermot McCullough, who wrote that brilliant book about the Reformation, has done a history of Christianity for us, another gigantic piece that is coming into the schedule.

We absolutely should find space for a reflection on the rich role of Christianity in our heritage, and in my view a programme about the Messiah very much fits into that category. But also, through everything from Songs of Praise and Morning Service, we're making sure we do editorial and journalistic coverage of religion well. And we should be trying to cover the high moments in the calendar, and other religious calendars—and more broadly the debate about science and religion.

Would I like more prominence for that sort of programming? Yes, but it's the same for the arts and science. History's a bit different because there's a great deal about history already. But with science and the arts and religion we'd like to do more. In religion it's about trying to celebrate breadth, and trying to find big projects which we can get across to a big audience, like The Passion. In the arts, we do music of every kind pretty well across our services. How can we take some of the other arts, like literature, theatre, and take the lessons we've learnt from music over the years and apply them? It's all unfinished business.

P: Is the BBC Trust working well?

MT: I do think it's working well, but governance of the BBC should be judged over a period of time. We are currently two years and three months into a ten year charter. The trust has had some big challenges: new services and products, like iPlayer, to approve or turn down; how to handle a major taste and decency row like Russell Brand. But rather than pass final judgement on it now, we should see how it plays out over the course of this charter.

P: Back to BBC4. I'm a bit disappointed with some of your answers to questions about dumbing down. A lot of your answers were about programmes which simply aren't watched by anyone, or you're cherry-picking, or the definition of arts, science and history programmes has subtly changed.

MT: To someone who's utterly convinced of a general pattern of dumbing down and cultural decline, no amount of examples which point in the opposite direction will convince them.

But if you look at the story of Simon Schama, for example, on BBC television, you see anything but decline. Principally on BBC2, also BBC1, Simon has brought an intellectual brio to history that I feel bears comparison with some of the great challenging television of the 1960s and 1970s—the American history series from last autumn, the history of Britain before that, his series on landscape and memory.

That programme about rhetoric we discussed earlier wasn't watched by that many people, just about 800,000—yet that again bears comparison with anything you would have found on BBC television in what might have been regarded as the golden age in serious programming. There are some significant second order questions. Are we committed to doing music and the arts on television? We are. In some areas like, like the Proms, we're doing more, and doing it better I think. Within that we sometimes make individual choices, like Alan Titchmarsh presenting the Proms on BBC One, which triggers some people's worries about dumbing down; but they forget that we've moved the number of Proms we're broadcasting on television up from five to 26. It's great to see that the Culture Show has been rather boldly scheduled in the middle of BBC 2, and I'd like to see more weighty, serious pieces on the Culture Show.

There's plenty of work still to do. When I was controller, we managed to commission a three-part series about existentialism, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. Now that's where I'd like to get back to. But whether I can bring all 3,000 colleagues with me I don't know.