Greg Dyke was an outspoken, convention-breaking television executive. But when he ran the BBC, he stuck to the house script on one defining issue: the model of public funding based on an annual licence fee.
“There really isn’t a viable alternative to the licence fee,” he declared in 2002, defending the levy that has bankrolled Britain’s public service broadcaster since 1927. “Maybe [it] isn’t so bad after all.”
It has taken almost 20 years, but the former director-general has finally changed his tune. “The thing with the licence fee is no one would come up with it as an idea today, would they?” he told the Financial Times. “The idea that you have a compulsory tax on the TV set sitting in the corner is dumb.”