BBC director general Tony Hall (aka Lord Hall of Birkenhead, there are some perks in that vale of tears) is stepping down, leaving the job of hanging on to the licence fee in face of a hostile Tory government to someone else.
There’ll be a number of runners and riders touted for the job, one will surely be David Abraham (below), former boss of Channel 4 and now running Wonderhood Studios, a promising-looking creative agency and broadcast production company.
Abraham, who was one of the founders of St Luke’s, did well on all fronts at C4 which has struggled somewhat since he left although, as with the BBC, some problems are probably inescapable in the streaming age.
Abraham, of course, may not be interested, enjoying life as an entrepreneur. But it’s hard to resist the call to arms from what is still a world famous broadcasting institution and an increasingly threatened part of the UK’s cultural life.
He may do well to recall the example of former London Weekend Television boss Greg Dyke, a former DG who was skewered by the Blair government at its most mendacious in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Running the Beeb is the most political of jobs.
