Mark Thompson's 8,000 word MacTaggart lecture could have been even longer. The BBC director general cut 1,000 words from what was still one of the longest ever Edinburgh addresses at the last minute, he told MediaGuardian the day after he'd delivered it. Thompson was still working on the speech as he flew from the US east coast back to the UK late last week after dropping his son at Harvard University, where he is a "freshman", as our transatlantic cousins like to say. The DG only arrived in Edinburgh on Friday afternoon after flying up from London. But if that tight schedule was daunting, it wasn't nearly as scary as what Thompson got up to over the summer. He and his son scaled a cliff face in Switzerland by clambering up the tiniest of ladders fixed to the side of the mountain, the bearded one revealed, adding that delivering the MacTaggart was not half as scary. Even locking horns with James Murdoch and his dad must seem like child's play by comparison.
