In the wake of the shock and confusion caused by the communications draft bill - the magnificent gift of Channel 5 to Rupert Murdoch and the intriguing prospect of Radio Luxembourg running ITV (and, frankly, who's to say Emperor Rosko wouldn't do a better job?) - there is still a prevailing sense of waking up after a bizarre dream.
On the one hand, the suggestions for the TV industry are entirely sensible: deregulation for ownership and a single powerful regulator are hard to argue with - particularly if the strength of the latter counterbalances problems thrown up by the former. But on the other hand, the reversal of 10 years of careful Murdoch-curtailment - so forceful that Murdoch-phobia led to the inevitable collapse of ITV Digital - is strange to say the least.
Murdoch's gift of a potential terrestrial licence is mostly troubling because he already has too much. Not because he is him, but because four national newspapers, 6m multi-channel homes AND a free-to-air licence is simply too much for anyone. As Professor Steve Barnett told the Guardian last week, this kind of control would be unacceptable even if Mother Teresa exercised it. And if the draft bill had indeed handed Channel 5 to a recently dead candidate for canonisation, it would have been slightly less surprising.
The culture secretary and architect of the draft bill, Tessa Jowell, insisted in an online chat with MediaGuardian.co.uk on Friday that she did no deal with Murdoch. If this is true, one can only hope that somebody else did - otherwise this unwarranted regulatory largesse is even more scandalous than it first appears. The idea of "doing a deal" with Murdoch is entirely positive and indeed to be encouraged. As he is the only individual other than Channel 5's chief executive, Dawn Airey, who currently runs a profitable commercial TV company surely he should be made to spread it around a little?
Murdoch himself is a fabulous deal-maker. Which probably means that when he tuned into the BBC Parliamentary Channel on Wednesday afternoon, he got the shock of his life. "Wendi! Are you watching this?" he must have shouted as the utterly baffling decision to lift cross-media ownership rules with regard to Channel 5 only was announced. He might even have checked on Ceefax to make sure, like an uncertain lottery winner, that his numbers really had come up.
It is, I suppose, possible that Jowell, as she claims, has had no contact with the man who controls four national newspapers, the only functioning digital TV service in the UK, and the only profitable pay-TV business in Britain and is the minority shareholder in the all-important TalkSport radio station. But surely if there are any perks at all to carrying the thankless can of culture secretary, it must be to order one of the world's greatest businessmen into your chambers to elicit a bit of feelgood sycophancy. Perhaps politics really does engender a higher-minded sense of public duty than we thought.
If Murdoch has been given a chance to hammer ITV into the ground up to its ears - and believe me he will - and no one bothered to check whether the downpayments had arrived on the Times' pro-euro stance, heads should surely roll. If Murdoch were running the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and at this rate he soon will be, he would probably have secured a really crafty contra-deal. Like the full opening up of the Sky Digital technology, to save the government's chances of ever pushing digital penetration at a rate fast enough to hit its target of analogue switch-off in 2010.
B y doing no deal, the government has really missed a trick. So as Murdoch has done "no deal" with the government, it will have been really difficult, as the clearly paranoid industry gossip suggests, for his Sky executives to have already "agreed" to buy Channel 5 from the Luxembourg-based RTL. In turn, it would be even more preposterous to suggest RTL has already scoped out the potential of taking over Granada once Granada has taken over Carlton. Again, an issue on which one can be utterly assured that absolutely no deals have been done.
Even more far-fetched would be the suggestion that, if this utterly unimaginable series of events were to take place, in a couple of years Channel 5, or Sky One, as it will never be, will be running an evening schedule of The Simpsons, followed by a Sky News bulletin, followed by a big box office movie followed by a preview of Saturday's live Premiership game up against ITV with a 20% audience share.
At that point, of course, if the laughable occurrence of RTL owning ITV really has happened, we presumably won't care anyway, as BSkyB is a British company and RTL owner Bertelsmann is not.
Still, next time the government embarks on such a major piece of legislation, it should at least think about talking to the top brass. And maybe doing a deal or two.
Emily Bell is editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited
