Outside Mark Thompson's top-floor west London office is a single sheet of A4 paper, framed. On it are a set of financial projections for the BBC from now until 2017, annotated with Thompson's spidery handwriting with names such as George Osborne scrawled on it, and numbers adjusted and crossed out.
It is that piece of paper the 53-year-old director general took with him six weeks ago for a frantic few hours of negotiation that produced the toughest licence fee settlement for a generation – a deal with the coalition government that leaves the licence fee flat at £145.50 (a 16% cut in real terms) and a national broadcaster uncertain about its future.
To make the sums add up, Thompson, in his first major interview since striking the licence fee deal, says that the BBC will have to make savings of at least £300m – not just behind the scenes but in BBC news, on its website and across its television output – and he plans to launch a "big conversation" with staff next year to work out how it is to be done.
He acknowledges that the BBC has just come through an "extremely high stakes period" amid relentless criticism from the Murdoch press and other commercial rivals. The six-year licence fee freeze, he contends, means that it has "neither been singled out nor let off the hook" compared with Britain's other publicly funded cultural institutions.
However, Thompson concedes that it could easily have been different. There are hints that he might have resigned six weeks ago when, 48 hours before the licence fee freeze was agreed, he was told that David Cameron, Osborne and even Nick Clegg had agreed to ask the BBC to pay for the free television licences for the over-75s, a bill that would rapidly have amounted to over £1bn a year, which is nearly double the cost of BBC2.
He has also stated it shall not affect Doctor Who in the near future.
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