PD James rocks

Everyone heard PD James' drubbing of Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC?

One chap who did is my favourite lifetime achieving, social-history-resourcing, knowledgeable, plain-language speaking, engaging, insightful Badass Pooterley.

Excellent comment and excuse my lèse-majesté reader-friendlier massaging:

"I was stunned at MT's inability to speak English let alone attempt to rebut P.D.James' explicit and implicit questions of what he and others in BBC management actually did.

He went down from Oxford with a First in English.

I could make a better case for the rôle managers play in making organisations succeed:

Not least co-ordinating the work of creative professionals

Doing the staff work required to justify the BBC's licence fee in a far more competitive environment than existed at the time the BBC was conceived as an institution meant to maintain the canon of a relatively homogeneous and deferential society

And running political protection for an organisation ever vulnerable to political and economic predation spurred on by a much more assertive population of viewers than in Lord Reith's time.

This man is a product of 'the way we live now', hired to protect a unique organisation invented in a different world.

That BBC still just survives, but it would have long disappeared into the maw of turbo-charged commercial broadcasting had it not paid for 'protection' of the kind provided by Mark Thompson and his high paid colleagues with their incomprehensible job-descriptions and acronymic styles of expression - strung together with 'ums', 'ahs', 'you knows' and 'sort ofs'.

They're human rottweillers - better known for their bite than their bark.

Thompson could hardly have said any of that to the Baronness, or indeed anyone, in a public interview."

Bravo.