Michael Grade's MacTaggart Lecture, widely interpreted as an application for the job of Director General of the BBC, analyses the finances, management and programming of the BBC following a period of robust clashes with the Thatcher government and in the run-up to the Charter renewal in 1994. Grade argues for the significance of programmme quality and standards at the BBC for the wider broadcasting industry. ‘It is the BBC,’ Grade famously remarks, ‘which keeps us all honest.’

Grade identifies a number of key problems confronting the BBC. First, the BBC has adopted a policy of ‘political appeasement’ in its relations with government which can only result in ‘terminal decline’. By contrast, in-house management at the BBC has adopted a ‘sort of pseudo Leninist style’ which relies on ‘central control’ and promises the spectre of ‘editorial dictatorship’. Grade concludes that the Governors cannot be both managers and regulators, and consequently advocates a single new regulatory body – ‘Let us call it the British Television Commission’ – for all television services.