Quotes

On January 29th 2000, I became the BBC's 13th Director-General and the first who had been to neither a public school nor Oxbridge. I was also the first in peacetime who had never worked for the BBC. But by the end of my first week I woke up deeply depressed. I couldn't believe how bereaucratic the whole place was. The worst point had been getting into my car one evening and finding a pile of papers more than a foot high on the back seat. This was my reading for tomorrow.

British television used to be known as the best in the world, but in the last decade, HBO has helped America quietly steal our crown. (Speaking in 2009)

If British broadcasters want to recapture some of the lustre lost in recent years, and in particular the BBC because they're not funded by advertising, they must be willing to take more risks. Maybe it's time they stopped the scattergun approach to programming and put more money into bigger projects. And in the process, maybe it's time they gave more power to the creatives, to the producers, to the directors, to the writers. (Speaking in 2009)

I think the BBC is hideously white. The figures we have at the moment suggest that quite a lot of people from different ethnic backgrounds that we do attract to the BBC leave. Maybe they don't feel at home, maybe they don't feel welcome. Our biggest problem is at management level. I had a management Christmas lunch and as I looked around I thought, 'We've got a real problem here'. There were 80-odd people there and only one person who wasn't white.