CB: I can't play your game with half the money, because the game is up. But what would I least like to lose? In no particular order: all of the BBC radio, and I include Radio 1, partly because none of these costs a lot of money, and BBC 1 and BBC 2. The impact of more straitened financial circumstances will be to put a real dampener on costs in the BBC in a way that hasn't happened so far, although the BBC's savings have been considerable. And I think that it will be not just overheads, but artists' salaries, and some programme rights that will be affected. 

It's heretical, and I hardly dare say it, but it's not absolutely clear what the BBC brings to sport. The creativity that the programme makers bring is limited to good-looking ex-footballer presenters, and maybe some graphics in the case of cricket. The game is the game, whoever shows it.  Now I'm in favour of listed events — there are some things that ought to be available on broadcast television and not exclusive to subscription, but it's not clear that the BBC would die if it no longer covered sport, because other people would do it. 

CM: I'm glad to hear you say it, but it's a principle capable of considerable extension. 

CB: Not considerable extension, because the BBC creates most of its programmes in one form or another. 

CM: An interesting example is regional — if you watch the BBC regional news programmes they're good, but you do wonder why they're there. Because they again have the chilling effect that it makes it pretty well impossible for somebody else to produce a regional programme.

CB: I think that isn't the case. Actually what happened is that ITV lost its regional focus, gave up its regional programming, and stopped producing decent regional news. I was chairman of the BBC and its local news ratings passed ITV's for the first time. That was ITV simply taking their eye off the ball. And they've taken it further and further off the ball, they've lost the identity of the regional companies like Granada, Yorkshire and Tyne Tees, probably irrecoverably. 

DJ: What about the idea of sharing the licence fee, of so-called top-slicing? 

CB: It's complete nonsense. If you want to reduce or cap the licence fee there are perfectly strong, sensible arguments in a straitened economic environment for doing that. But the idea that you somehow redistribute some of it is nonsense. Did you read the Digital Britain report? 

CM: I did actually, yes.

CB: I call it the Twitter Blatherwick Report. It's depressing. It has everything that is most despicable about the government. It held un-conferences. It had a Twitter account. It had an introduction by [Peter] Mandelson and [Ben] Bradshaw. It had the Blatherwick family digitally connected in South London. It had a tsar, a Champion for Digital Inclusion. It had what it described as "a new model of industrial activism", which is the old Industrial Reorganisation Corporation writ large. It had a stealth tax, a £5 annual "supplement" on every fixed-line telephone to pay for the upgrading of the internet.