Greg Dyke’s back: The former BBC Director General on his new job – and what’s wrong with Britain’s media

Rain clouds gather and storm winds howl, but Greg Dyke is sheltered indoors, no longer the noble King Lear of the media business, rudely cast out on to the heath to rage about base betrayals in the dark corridors of power ("I am a man more sinned against than sinning." Act III, scene ii).

He may have been forced out of the BBC and later spurned in his approaches to ITV, but Dyke is never far from the heart of the drama in British media and his biggest problem these days is finding space in his diary for multiple commitments in the worlds of broadcasting, film, sport and education, such is the demand for his wisdom and expertise.

His appointment as chairman of the British Film Institute, a role he took up on 3 March, is the clearest signal of his return to the media establishment, almost exactly five years after the outbreak of the conflict that led to his resignation as director-general of the BBC.

He has spent the morning working on BFI business and now he is fidgeting in a Chesterfield armchair in the boardroom of Brentford FC, the beleaguered club of which he is chairman, less than two hours ahead of kick-off. "It's a funny thing is this portfolio life, today it's half BFI and half Brentford and tomorrow I'm going up to 'Thomasland'," he says chirpily. As the non-executive chairman of HIT Entertainment, the media company that owns Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder, it falls to Dyke to cut the ribbon at the opening of the new railway-themed children's attraction at Drayton Manor in Staffordshire.

Asked why he went for the BFI job rather than other media-related opportunities that presumably come his way, he simply responds, "It came up", and throws his hands up. "It was interesting. I've always been interested in libraries oddly." Libraries? Never mind Fellini, Bunuel or Truffaut, the former DG seems to be more of an admirer of Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey system of classification and pioneer of the modern obsession with putting books, CDs and DVDs in their correct order.

Archiving has long been Dyke's thing, he says. "People thought 'nasty populist' but actually I've always been interested in making sure we preserved the history of film and television. I've always thought that you are capturing something about a society that is so valuable and you just mustn't lose it. When I got to the BBC I put a lot of money into digitising the library."

Just as important as preserving Britain's film heritage, and the books written about it, and making that vast back catalogue of 230,000 movies and 700,000 hours of TV available to a wider audience, Dyke – the boss whose resignation brought the BBC staff onto the streets in protest – brings his famous leadership and people skills to the BFI.

"The first thing I've done is go round and say 'hello' to the staff. I want to know what they do and what they think we should do. Organisations have to listen not only to the customers but also the staff. Media organisations are not very good at it – it's certainly not a strength of the newspaper industry," he says, grinning and holding out an arm in sympathy. Dyke, 60, is not afraid to criticise the way other media organisations are run. He is most savage in his assessment of ITV, which last year resisted his attempts at a takeover that was supported by a consortium of venture capitalists.

"I think ITV is in terrible trouble. It's very funny, Michael Grade stood up last week and said, 'the strategy is working', and no-one said, 'well, why did you just sack your programme director [Simon Shaps] then?' It's clearly not working. Look at the share price! Talk about shareholder value! It's 65p today and it was 110p when Michael went there."

The Dyke-led consortium, which bid 120p a share ("they wouldn't get that now"), would have deployed "a very different strategy", he says.

"The strategy they've followed is to try and recreate ITV as it was and that's not do-able. Whoever had the idea of putting Trevor McDonald back in and putting News at Ten back at 10pm against the BBC should have his head examined. Anyone who has ever studied the history knows that when the BBC and ITV go head to head on news the BBC wins easily."

So what would he have done?

"We'd have put it at 11pm and gone upmarket. Look, the whole history of ITV since about 2000, I mean I'm not blaming Michael for this but it's been a disaster hasn't it? It's just completely screwed up. When I was at the BBC we could never understand why they never came back at us. All they did was whinge and they're still whingeing. One of the directors of ITV said the other day, 'it's very hard to fight the state with no funding', and you think well, it's funny how ITV managed to do it for many years quite successfully."

He takes the opportunity to have a swipe at his old rival Charles Allen, the former Granada and ITV chief executive and now Global Radio chairman.

"ITV went wrong from literally the day the Granada blokes took it over. If the people working there think that all you are passionate about is money, which is what Charles Allen did to ITV, then it disappears."

But Dyke argues ITV can no longer afford to spend so much on making programmes. "ITV spends twice as much on original production as any other commercial channel in Europe and that's not sustainable going forward. It can't be the ITV it was, it has to be something else now but I don't think they've worked that out. They don't like me anyhow, ha-ha-ha."

He has issues too with the way the BBC is run, claiming the BBC Trust is a "fudge".

"It was clear to me it was going to be incredibly bureaucratic and I still don't think it works. I don't think it will ever work and if you talk to some fairly senior people at the BBC now they've all realised it doesn't work because it's too bureaucratic. There, that'll upset them."

The pace of change at the BBC frustrates him. "iPlayer was just about to be launched when I left and that was four years ago, it ran into real problems with the governance system," he says, before turning to Freeview, which he considers to be his greatest BBC legacy.

"It's phenomenally successful but you couldn't do Freeview today in the time-frame we had to do it. The bloody BBC bureaucracy would take forever."

Since Dyke famously described the corporation as "hideously white" and set targets for making it more diverse, the BBC has been criticised for letting the issue slide.

"It hasn't changed a lot has it? We did change it for a while but the trouble is it's very hard to do when you are losing staff. It's alright if you are growing but if you're going the other way it's very tough," he says, adding that he suspects the BFI is "not brilliant" in this regard, prompting a squirm from the institute's press officer.

The BBC's move to Salford was another Dyke initiative. "It was my last sign-off really. I decided to write it all in my book so they couldn't get out of it," he says. "To be fair, [the current DG] Mark Thompson has never wavered from the idea that the BBC was too South of England."

Dyke would have gone further though. "I was going to move BBC3 as well but somehow the television people managed to kill that off after I left."

Moving the media out of London is a big thing for Dyke. If he accomplishes the dream of a major new BFI film centre on the South Bank he insists it "has to be more than a London project, it has to be a hub with spokes out all across the country", in the shape of BFI "pods" in key cities.

Though the former boss of London Weekend Television accepts that he is "a very London figure", he has learned that there is life outside the capital. As Chancellor of York University he has overseen the soon-to-open department of theatre, film and television, and is "quite a supporter" of media courses, which give students the communication skills "so vital in the world we live in today". He is thrilled by the new BBC Scotland building, for which he helped choose the architect, and thinks BBC staff hesitating over moving north should understand that "restaurants and all the things they like in London do actually exist in Manchester".

Even so, Dyke was lined up as an independent candidate for London Mayor before deciding not to run. "We'd have won wouldn't we?", he says, surprisingly using the third person. "The Tories were not going to put up a candidate to stand against me and the Liberals were going to do the same, in which case we'd have won."

But then he says "I shall vote for Ken. I think he's done not a bad job at all, if you look at London today compared to a decade ago it's a pretty vibrant exciting place and I think he's responsible for some of that." Andrew Gilligan won't like that. The former BBC reporter who triggered the Hutton inquiry which caused Dyke's downfall is now Livingstone's fiercest critic, writing in the London Evening Standard.

As the storm brews outside, Dyke indulges himself in some Lear-like rage over Iraq. "Because the BBC lost its nerve after Hutton there's almost a gap in our understanding in this country about why we went to war," he says, thumping his hand on the arm of the Chesterfield. He's angry that politicians such as Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon who "didn't do their job" in challenging Tony Blair are still active in government.

But he was "pretty impressed" with former Culture Secretary James Purnell and finds Andy Burnham, Purnell's successor, to be "very personable". As BFI chairman he needs a dialogue with ministers and says there is a "new generation now".

Although Dyke acknowledges that "obviously I'm a TV man, I've been in the TV industry for a lo-o-ong time", it's not entirely fair to say that he is not a film fan too. "Movies" are listed among his interests in Who's Who, albeit after "football, tennis, horse-riding".

He points out that the demise of the cinema was prophesied long ago. "That's ridiculous now, it's booming. Film really matters and that's great for the BFI."

But he wasn't, he says, hired by the BFI as a film buff. "If you are chairman or chief executive you shouldn't get down into the minutiae, you should be about the strategy. Let's identify the half a dozen things we are going to do that matter, let's make sure everybody agrees, now let's go do it. It's a very simple view of the world."

Kick-off is approaching. The last time Brentford met their opponents, Peterborough United, they were vanquished seven-nil. Dyke, as ever, is undaunted. "They're a better side than us but with this wind you can do anything, can't you?"