NOT too many days go by without the BBC and its director general Mark Thompson taking a pasting in the national newspapers.

His time as the Corporation’s boss has seen the Russell Brand-Jonathan Ross controversy, the resignations over the editing of a trailer featuring the Queen, a series of rows over stars’ pay cheques, and endless hoo-ha about television phone-ins.

He tells an audience of students at Bournemouth University that when it comes to the rows about good taste, there will be 60 million views in Britain of what’s acceptable.

He contrasts the BBC with a restaurant where, if you see liver on the menu and don’t like it, you just don’t order it.

“We are a restaurant where if you see liver on the menu, you say ‘I don’t like liver, that’s disgusting and it should be taken off the menu’,” he says.

The 51-year-old editor-in-chief says broadcasters should staunchly defend freedom of expression. But he says some good taste boundaries are absolute, and that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s taunting of the actor Andrew Sachs crossed them.

“We broadcast tens of thousands of hours of output every year. The overwhelming majority of it, 99.9 per cent, is completely proper.

When you make one mistake it can feel really big, but the compliance systems that are meant to check things like this and stop them being broadcast failed in this case,” he says.

As for the giant salaries paid to broadcasters like Ross and Jeremy Clarkson, he says commercial television would look at the revenue their shows would bring in and consider them well worth it.

“Other public service broadcasters have offered many millions of pounds a year more to those artists than we pay. When the artists stay, they don’t stay because we offer them more. We actually offer them less,” he says. Instead, they are often kept loyal by other factors, like the chance to make shows on more obscure subjects for BBC4.

“A comedy would cost two, three, four times as much to make as a chat show and would probably be watched by fewer people,” he says.

In a wide-ranging “media masterclass” talk at the university’s Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, he defends EastEnders as the heir to Play For Today, with “really quite serious social issues being explored”.

He enthuses about the BBC’s future on the internet and other digital media – but says traditional “passive” TV viewing won’t die out. “I do think it’s going to be clustered around genres like drama, like comedy,” he says.

Advertising revenue is collapsing for commercial broadcasters, he says. “We will be commissioning drama and comedy at current levels but beyond the BBC, I think drama and comedy are going to have quite a tough time,” he says.

He adds: “I would be surprised if ITV’s making money out of any drama other than Coronation Street and Emmerdale now.”

But when asked by one of the university’s media students whether there really will be careers for them, he is upbeat.

“My view is that the creative industries are one of the country’s best bets economically over the next 10 to 20 years.

“We’re good at it, we’re known around the world. When I go to Hollywood, the guys from the studios say ‘Have you got any great new entertainment formats, Mark? What are you up to? What are you guys thinking?’ That never used to happen.”