The Government wants the BBC to lead the nation through digital switch-over, not just promoting it and offering information but providing what is called “targeted help”. This is money spent, to you and me – up to £70 million to pay for the cost of switching the 1,000 or so Channel 4 transmitters that still need to be converted to digital, and unspecified amounts to help the poor or needy to buy digital boxes so they can continue to watch television. It’s is a neat ploy by the Government. The final throws of switch-over in different parts of the country could be ugly. People will realise late in the day that the TV in the children’s room or in the bedroom will not work any longer and they will be angry. Expect the popular tabloids to have a field day with old ladies who “have lost the only pleasure in their lonely lives, their television”. Unless it is very careful and very canny, the BBC will take much of the stick.

One of the big questions hanging over the BBC is how its new system of governance will work. The governors will be no more, replaced by the BBC Trust. When I first heard of this I smiled knowingly in the belief that this was a largely cosmetic move. It clearly is not. The Trust will approve and police licences for all the BBC’s services, will sanction or refuse the creation of any new service and measure these and the BBC’s performance in all spheres against a “public value” test. What is more, it will be resourced to do this properly. There are difficult seas to navigate here. If the service licences are described too loosely, they will be meaningless; too tightly, and the commissioners will be hamstrung, unable to develop their channels and networks creatively. The latter is the greater danger, I fear.

Likewise it is essential that the Director-General is able to cut himself enough slack to be able to experiment with new service concepts before running to the Trust for approval. The smack of firm regulation and an honest assessment of market impact are necessary, but the Trust must ask itself: would our regime have allowed the BBC to trial television or colour or Nicam sound or digital channels or the website or digital radio? And for all the economic theory employed, market impact assessment is a pretty inexact – even subjective – science.

The senior management of the Corporation is genuinely anxious about this new governance. So it should be, you may well say. Under Michael Grade as chair of the Trust we can be fairly confident that the new measures will be sensibly applied. But Grade will not be chair forever. With non-executive directors joining the Executive Board (and it is not ruled out that one should chair it), the potential for destructive conflict is present. This can be avoided with good management on both sides. But where it will be much harder to avoid is between the Trust and Ofcom. The regulatory body will apply its own market impact test, monitor the BBC’s compliance with Ofcom’s fairness and standards code (i.e. how well the Trust is doing its job) and is bound to have more imperial ambitions. How these internal and external regulatory arrangements play out will in large part determine the health and strength of the BBC.

The encouraging thing for the Corporation’s supporters is that it has again thought through and understood the landscape it is about to traverse in a way that only News Corporation seems able to do among other players in the British media. The second digital wave will, according to Thompson, “be far more disruptive than the first and the foundations of traditional media will be swept away, taking us beyond broadcasting”. He plans a BBC that offers all its content online, providing the opportunity for users to create their own drag-and-drop schedules, share them with others and contribute their own video content to BBC sites. I would expect the BBC’s strategy here to be as groundbreaking and successful as its website has been. There will be howls of pain from commercial operators as they witness this. Some will be justified and much will depend on how skilfully the BBC decides where to go and when. The cost of distributing content in this way will be huge. Assuming he obtains adequate money, Thompson will have to implement these plans with care, so as not to spend too far ahead of the public’s ability and willingness to join in.

The take-up of broadband has been faster than any comparable technology. Thirty three percent of homes have it now and 65 per cent is the BBC’s forecast for 2009. But Thompson and the eager beavers around him would do well to remember that 35 per cent will not have it and that the last 25 per cent, as with digital television, may take years to come on board, if they ever do.

Careful thought

If the licence fee settlement dictates, as it most likely will, that the Corporation must moderate its ambitions, my vote would be to trim its plans for local services. It knows that people value localness and wants to provide it, but this is an area where others may most be hurt or stifled. If push comes to shove the BBC is, above all, a national and international broadcaster. News, central to the BBC’s raison d’etre, has already established a leading, possibly the leading presence online. Key “news” into Google or Yahoo, or Ask.com, and BBC News heads the list of 11 million sites. I believe it will reinvent itself to maintain this dominant position. It has already announced that the 24/7 provision will become its spearhead – “The primacy of continuous news” pushing investment of money and talent into News 24 as well as online. The BBC wants to become first choice for on-demand news and shared user-generated content, the leading source of debate, the trusted guide to the best of the blogs and the top source of local news. All this is possible. It will appear attractive to citizens who want a source of news that aspires to – and mostly achieves – impartiality, is independent of commercial influence and is seeking to sell users nothing at all.

I have two chief concerns. Firstly, the very size and scope of BBC News is a vulnerability as well as a strength. The BBC’s account of the world is so influential – think the Today programme, the Ten O’clock News, or Newsnight – that politicians can sink or swim by it. The famous Gilligan interview illustrates the point – yes, it was at the crack of dawn and brief, but look who put it out and on which programme. BBC News is in excellent hands at the moment, but there is the danger of it becoming not just dominating, but domineering; of being seen as over-mighty. This is no reason to cut it down, but it does mean that it will need the most expert leadership. It requires deeply-embedded, thought-through systems of editorial expertise and control to handle the encyclopaedia of ever-changing content the BBC intends to offer. The news division must constantly interrogate itself about its preconceptions, levels of knowledge and openness to ideas and criticism.

This leads to my second concern. Can the BBC fulfil its promise to become truly accountable? At the top, I am sure they mean to. But this is a cultural matter. It doesn’t come easily to many producers or journalists to listen to complaint, let alone confess that they just might have been in error and, heaven forfend, say sorry. In the coming era of on-demand, in the existing era of chat rooms, blogs and user-contributed content, to be trusted will mean being responsive as well as accurate. This will not be easy. The doing of it needs to be volunteered, visible and friendly. The current governors’, soon to be Trust’s, complaints page has the starchy formality of officialdom. We need journalists and producers themselves engaging with correspondents.

On air the corporation is stingy in this area with only Points of View and Feedback. Producers are, it appears, shy of standing in the spotlight. This has to change. As actors sign contracts committing them to publicising their films and dramas, so it should be a condition of employment that production and editorial staff appear to answer for their work when asked.

The biggest overall test for the BBC is whether it can make its programmes match its rhetoric. There are, have been and, I am sure, will be, plenty of programmes corporation bosses can point to and say, “There, that’s what we do and what we stand for.” The current mantra will include The Street, Bleak House, Planet Earth, Life on Mars, Bach Christmas, the Reith Lectures, Dragons’ Den. Splendid. Well done everybody. But the talk from the Corporation implies that we can look forward to productions of this quality and distinctiveness not just now and then or even monthly, but daily – and so we should.

Both Thompson and Tessa Jowell urge the BBC to “frame your mind to mirth and merriment”, to entertain. The audience have never thought otherwise. I worry, though, when I hear of “fewer dramas with longer runs”. That is not a recipe for risk taking, extending range and encouraging new talent. It’s a conventional schedule-building strategy. Not good enough. Can Thompson create the conditions within which programme commissioners feel trusted and free and do not slip back into old, fearful and understandable habits, going for the safe, the imitative and the well tried? These reflexes are hard to resist and may need to be extracted by painful operation.

Permanent watch

The challenge is not just to help them find more of the similar, but to try some of the very different. The use of the BBC’s Radio Player and the recent trial of a broadband television “catch-up” service for those unfamiliar with it offer hope. Programmes from the digital radio networks were almost as well used as those from Radios 1 and 2, some niche television programmes performed disproportionably well, and nearly a third of the sample used the service to watch a programme they had never before heard of. Will this be how the BBC can still tempt people to new experiences, and lead them off the safe path of the known into the pastures of the undiscovered?