Like millions of listeners to the Today programme on New Year’s Eve, I rejoiced at P.D. James’s inquisition — the more deadly for its courtesy — of the BBC Director-General, Mark Thompson.
Like millions of listeners to the Today programme on New Year’s Eve, I rejoiced at P.D. James’s inquisition — the more deadly for its courtesy — of the BBC Director-General, Mark Thompson. Mr Thompson is not a bad or stupid man, but his very locutions were typical of the modern bureaucrat. Where Lady James respectfully called him ‘Director-General’, he tried to ingratiate himself by calling her ‘Phyllis’. Where she used metaphor exactly — a well-extended image of the BBC as an ‘unwieldy ship’, with the officers ‘very comfortably cabined’ — he employed the phrases of self-defence and evasion — ‘I have to say’, ‘I do think we have priorities’, ‘Let’s be honest’, ‘the decision around Arlene Phillips’ — and the jargon — ‘12 million personal interactions’, ‘delivering’ programmes.
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