Tim Davie’s BBC ‘transformation’ doesn’t go far enough

I’m sorry to say that I was a Salford refusenik. When the BBC first got the itch, almost 20 years ago, to send its London-based staff to new locations around the country, as a senior executive at the time I thought the idea was a grisly one. That’s not because I don’t like the north of England: I come from Bradford. But as director of sport I was being asked to put my staff and their families onto buses making a one-way trip to the Greater Manchester docklands – leaving behind the power centres of the BBC and the lifestyle of a capital city. I wrote grumpy emails to the director-general, Mark Thompson, contrasting his plans for Salford in 2011 with our plans for London 2012. After away days to inspect the building site, colleagues were enthused only by the glass of chilled white on the train back home.

We were wrong.