An obvious post
Thompson named BBC director general
Choosing Greg Dyke's long term replacement was never going to be easy, especially under the circumstances of the selection process and the requirements imposed by the forthcoming charter review. Though as with the choice of BBC Two controller, there was one candidate for the role of Director General that appears to satisfy a host of disparate requirements that nobody else could seem to match.
Although Mark Thompson was publically showing great loyality to Channel 4 as expected, the prospect of being able to take a top role in the BBC's hierarchy must have been far too tempting to ignore, even if it means resigning from your current employer after a relatively short space of time. Hence it was fairly obvious that he was actively interested in accepting such a position despite attempts to appear otherwise, though the BBC had to move swiftly to avoid giving Channel 4 too much time in order to attempt to retain his services.
The choice of Mark Thompson fulfils several criteria that none of the other candidates could hope to match and should help to give the BBC the best chance of escaping the 2006 charter review relatively unscathed. Firstly, coming from Channel 4 means that he is essentially an 'outsider' as opposed to an internal BBC promotion yet at the same time he has plenty of experience working for the BBC in all the right places. Secondly his knowledge of Channel 4's current operations will be invaluable in defending the licence fee from being cannibalised by other broadcasters.
As an added bonus he was away from the BBC during the Hutton Report chaos so he is effectively 'squeaky clean' in this important respect, and having no public political affiliations (unlike Greg Dyke) makes him appear to be impartial from various political perspectives. And political cleanliness will be essential in the run up to the charter renewal in 2006, especially with the BBC's commercial competitors applying as much pressure as they can for changes to be made for their own benefit.
However his work at Channel 4 wasn't without its critics; scheduling Hollyoaks five nights a week and spending roughly £1m an episode on The Simpsons isn't exactly the height of good public service broadcasting, though it's arguable that he was just shoring up the populist side of the channel in preparation for other changes to be made elsewhere at a later date. Mark Thompson has a reputation for being a long-term strategic thinker and it will be interesting to see how his successor will make use of the foundations that he was working on.
So what of Channel 4 now, you may ask? Some are speculating that Dawn Airey may now return to the channel, and this is especially likely now that Sky have shelved plans for a free-to-air channel since otherwise her role currently seems to be restricted to commissioning a handful of programmes in order to avoid Sky One turning into a sea of imports.
All these changes mean that the BBC now has something that could be regarded as a kind of 'dream team'; you would be hard pressed to come up with a different combination of personnel working for the BBC that have the equivalent knowledge and appropriate skills for their respective positions. Whether this combination will exactly have the desired effect remains to be seen, but if they fail in any way you can't really criticise them for lack of trying.
