Confirmation Mark Thompson is stepping down as BBC director general in the autumn gave Daily Mail scribbler Quentin Letts the perfect opportunity to fire up the Bentley Tourer and display his old-fogeyish credentials as a potential DG candidate on Monday's Newsnight (from about 38 mins). Lettsy again trotted out many of the politically correct rightwing ideas he'd essayed in a Mail column announcing his tilt at the DGship in January: root out "spectacularly PC" elements and "inbred liberalism" from the corporation, along with BBC3, BBC4 and anything that smacks of tawdry ratings-chasing. Instead he'd aim to take the BBC "back to the Reithian ideals" with a "return to elitism", which will apparently "bring in the audiences" – counterintuitive, to say the least. On Newsnight, Letts sparred with TV producer Daisy Goodwin – no doubt in his view part of the "Liberal London elite" that should be ineligible for the DG role – over ideas such as the BBC fulfilling its public service remit by improving its "lamentable" coverage of the law courts. Goodwin, the self-styled "head girl" of indie producer Silver River, skewered Letts pretty well, noting: "You seem to be defining quality as programmes you want to watch." And, even better: "I think you'd have done [the job] very well in 1920." Letts himself admitted he's really got his eye on the editor-in-chief role, not the boring management guff that goes with being DG. And as splitting this role from the DG's existing management responsibilities has already been discounted, the inbred Liberal London elite can apparently breath easy. However, it appears Letts might be in with a chance of getting Jeremy Paxman's vote. He certainly got an easier Newsnight ride from Paxo than Thommo has sometimes endured.
