Marks out of ten

I walked into Millbank Tower for the the Theos annual lecture this week with high hopes. It's not every day that you get to hear the Director-General of the BBC address the subject of 'faith, morality, and the media'.

It's amazing how disappointed you can be in less than two hours. Not with the event itself, but with Mark Thompson's sterile treatment of the subject. The DG spoke like a guilty man with a good lawyer: defensive, unadventurous, and sticking strictly to his script. The only consolation he must have taken from the night was that it was a lecture not a debate; any half decent opponent would have had a field day.

It appears that the head of our most influential media institution refuses to even contemplate the idea that the contents of our airwaves could have any effect on the moral character of our society. His formula for making editorial judgements was 'the benefits of a programme weighed against the potential offense'. This again abdicates any form of cultural leadership; the only moral failing the BBC now officially recognises is a failure to get away with it. It is also an open invitation to a culture of offense-taking, as it is clear that our national broadcaster chooses to be swayed by brute force of opposition rather than quality of argument.

The overall effect was like watching a man realising in front of a live audience that the words coming out of his mouth were just inherited dogma and actually made no sense. Admittedly it's a tricky subject to wrestle with, but the Director General is paid over three quarters of a million pounds a year to do exactly that.

In best BBC fashion, I am obliged to try and find at least one positive thing to say. As he staggered across the finish line, Mark Thompson observed that "whatever else it is, religion is about story-telling – about stories which are so compelling that they can change the lives of the hearers for ever. There has never been a better moment in history for story-telling". Amen to that.