The morning interview with Mark Thompson in his surprisingly small office in Broadcasting House has overrun. He is being “summoned to see the headteacher” at 11.30 - which means a meeting with Sir Michael Lyons and the BBC Trust, the body that regulates the £3 billion-a-year corporation.

Director-generals are too senior to make programmes, although they stand or fall by them, as his predecessor, Greg Dyke, found to his cost in 2003 in the repercussions to an item on the Today programme, in which the journalist Andrew Gilligan accused the Government of “sexing-up” a dossier concerning Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. DGs instead spend their time making policy, and keeping policymakers happy, although their real responsibility is to 25 million television-watching licence-fee payers.

We are late partly because Mr Thompson enjoys long answers and talks through interruptions. After four years in the job and with an annual pay package that has risen to £788,000, he is clearly used to being the boss. So, to fit the last questions in, it is necessary to fit around a typical Thompson day. The final questions are asked at 2.30, after the Trust meeting, as the DG is in the car being driven off for talks with Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary.

This four-year tenure has not been without incident. Jerry Springer the Opera inflamed Christian fundamentlists; misleading footage of the Queen supposedly walking out of a photoshoot cost the Controller of BBC1 his job; and there were several phone-in embarrassments.

Mr Thompson has had to cut costs too - during the interview he says, suddenly: “You know, I think 10,000 posts have gone during the time I've been here” - an indication of how spending ballooned under Mr Dyke. He shows no emotion over the loss of jobs, but then, this is the man who helped to kill off That's Life and Grandstand.

None of the problems, though, has been serious, and despite concern about audiences switching to digital channels, the BBC remains easily Britain's leading broadcaster. “When we cover events, like sporting finals, head-to-head, we beat ITV and Sky - and by increasing margins,” Mr Thompson says. As a result, ITV is not going to bother showing the Euro 2008 football final in competition with the BBC, and ITV's restoration of News at Ten has failed to dent the audience for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News.

Mr Thompson says that the BBC needs to become more distinctive to succeed, and he gives examples of where it has achieved that. He starts upmarket, with The Passion - “the story of Jesus on prime time on BBC1” - and “really good journalism that goes beyond the news - we've brought back Panorama at 8.30pm on Monday night”.

Yet, soon he talks about “high quality at the popular end”, and, after name-checking Gavin and Stacey, that means Sir Alan Sugar. “Look at what the BBC does with The Apprentice. It has some elements of reality, but there is a depth and wit to The Apprentice,” he argues, even though the format was brought in from America. This mix, to Mr Thompson, is what the BBC has always been about. “Lord Reith [the first Director-General] absolutely believed in dance music and comedy,” he says, referring to dance-hall music, and not to something more contemporary.

The sharp point in the debate as to whether the BBC is straying too far from its “public service” remit is represented by Jonathan Ross, who is paid about £18 million in an ongoing three-year deal. “The bigger point in all this is that the public want high-quality entertainment as part of the offering they get in return for the licence fee,” Mr Thompson says.

Yes, but is Ross worth it? “Jonathan is a really good example of somebody who at the BBC can use the full range of his talents, on Radio 2, on the Jonathan Ross Show, or with his work reviewing movies.” Would he hire him again on the same terms? “The right way to answer that question is to say we look at the market, and we look for value for money.” It sounds like a politician's answer.

That, though, is part of Mark Thompson's skill, although perhaps odd for somebody who started his career as a journalist. He joined the BBC in 1979, applying so late that he had to hand in the form in person. His first assignment after relatively brief training was on the religious programme Everyman, going off to Nottingham and Mansfield “to find out if people had religious visions, or had seen the Virgin Mary”.

He has never been far from popular entertainment. A stint on Nationwide, the mostly middlebrow magazine programme, followed. One item he worked on involved a turkey-plucker trying to break his own world record. It turns out that the best way to pluck a bird fast is to kill it first. “With thirty seconds before we go on air he wrings its neck - but by the time we go live, the turkey was still fighting back,” Mr Thompson says, recalling his fear that an unseemly disaster was in the making. Apparently, the record, and the turkey, fell in the end - and Mr Thompson left Nationwide for more orthodox serious journalism, editing the Nine O'Clock News and Panorama.

Mr Thompson went into management at a young age and found it interesting - “it gave me a chance to think about comedy” - and by 1996, aged 38, he was Controller of BBC2, commissioning The Royle Family, The Fast Show, and Goodness Gracious Me.

Eventually, Mr Thompson was hired to run Channel 4, the only time that he has worked outside the BBC, at a time when Mr Dyke appeared settled in for a long stint as DG. Where was he when Mr Dyke fell? “I happened to be going to the BBC to talk to its broadcast [technical services] division about possibly taking them chunks of Channel 4 work. I'm on the way in, and the phone goes. It's Greg, and he says, I'm off, I'm going to hold a press conference. You'll have to come back now'.” Mr Thompson carried on to White City, as planned. “People were clustering around television screens, because by now it had become public, and so I joined them. A couple of people looked at me, and one said, Didn't take you long'.”

In fact, as with his original BBC job application, Mr Thompson dithered, indicated that he would not apply, and entered the race at the last minute.

Selected, he views one of his achievements as helping to rally the BBC news division after it was heavily criticised by the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, the Iraq arms expert. “People were saying either that you couldn't trust BBC news any more, or that the BBC would lose its nerve in the future. I don't think that has happened.”

After Hutton, Mr Thompson decided that there was no time to mourn. Shortly after his arrival he took the decision that the the BBC needed to start making recently transmitted programmes available on the internet.

“In 2004, people were saying, isn't ‘on demand' programming ten years off?” Now, nearly a million people a day watch shows via the iPlayer, and few people remember Hutton, whose impact was intense but brief.”

Four years on, Mr Thompson, who lives with his wife, Jane, and three children in Oxford, has bad news for any potential rivals for his job. At 50, he says: “I am enjoying myself very much and I hope to be doing this job for a good while to come.”

CV

Born
31 July 1957

Education
Stonyhurst College; Merton College, Oxford

Family
Married, three children

Career
1979 Joined BBC as production trainee
1988 Editor, Nine O'Clock News
1990 Editor, Panorama
1992 Head of Features
1994 Head of Factual Programmes
1996 Controller, BBC Two
2000 Director of Television
2002 Chief executive, Channel 4
2004 Director-General, BBC

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