Restoring morale at the BBC is only the start For the embattled staff at the BBC, good news has been hard to come by in recent weeks. Yet the appointment of Lord Hall, the chief executive of the Royal Opera House, as director-general has gone at least some way towards lifting the gloom. The response to his arrival appears to have been uniformly positive: no less a figure than David Dimbleby gushed that it felt "like serving in the Royal Navy when the message came in: 'Winston is back!" "" It is true that, if one were writing a CV for the job of rescuing the organisation, whose morale has been shattered first by the Jimmy Savile affair and then by the grotesque smearing of Lord McAlpine, Lord Hall would fit the bill perfectly. He is a BBC veteran, who ran its news operation with distinction yet is untainted by the recent scandals. He has extensive experience of turning round failing institutions, having steadied the ship at the Royal Opera House and rescued the Cultural Olympiad from spendthrift chaos. He is a good manager, and a good numbers man, with a proven ability to force large organisations to live within their means. He is a man of high culture and high intelligence. And unusually in the rarefied salons of the arts world, he is acutely conscious that bodies that receive public funding are responsible to that public for how it is spent. But will that be enough? The damage that the BBC has suffered is severe, with many of its most senior staff implicated in the recent sequence of journalistic and managerial errors and the public still seething over the scandalously large payoff to George Entwistle, Lord Hall's predecessor. A bloated executive superstructure appears incapable of overseeing a sprawling organisation; indeed, one of the first items on Lord Hall's agenda will be to take an axe to the leadership set-up - and perhaps to consider whether the responsibilities of his own role might be more wisely divided between manager- and editor-in-chief. And then there are the vertiginous challenges that faced the BBC already: above all the need, in an age of constrained budgets, to do more with less. Indeed, while the new director-general may well be the best man for the job, he cannot restrict himself simply to fire-fighting - to fixing the immediate damage, negotiating a new licence fee deal in 2016, but leaving the BBC substantially unaltered. In an age of tumultuous change, the corporation's function and responsibilities need to be rethought from the ground up. Above all, it needs to forsake its ambitions to compete across the whole terrain of the media - crowding out private competitors in the process - and put the focus back where it should be: on letting great programme-makers make great programmes.