Should a former wunderkind be persuaded to take British film’s top job?

Wanted: a new boss for British movies. Amanda Nevill announced in April that she was to step down as chief executive of the British Film Institute, but there’s still no anointed successor. Running the BFI these days is a real challenge, especially because, since 2011, it has also been in charge of allocating lottery movie funds - now a pot of £50m a year. This is in addition to overseeing the national film and TV archives, cinemas on the South Bank, the London film festival and a vast education programme. Names on the wish list include Nevill’s deputy Ben Roberts; Daniel Battsek, who runs Film4; Amanda Berry, head of Bafta; and Michael Jackson, the former controller of BBC One and Two, former chief executive at Channel 4, and, for the past 17 years, a TV and movie exec in the US. Could the one-time wunderkind return to the UK?

Cinema-going itself is in rude health in the UK – surprising and yet encouraging, given that there are so many rival streaming options. But British-made movies? I’ve long believed the UK has too much of a small-screen mentality towards films. So what should the BFI’s role be when competing with the likes not just of Hollywood, but the super-rich Netflix and Amazon? Ideally, by backing movies that are quintessentially British and yet will travel. Not easy. The BFI rightly put development money into the Oscar-winning The Favourite, but, please, can we avoid more tedious historical dramas like Mike Leigh’s Peterloo. The answer is to support fewer films but give each more money to boost their potential. Quality over quantity.

Netflix made Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. I’ve not seen it yet – mainly because I’m averse to sitting in a cinema for three hours and 29 minutes. I promise you, Marty, not to watch it on my iPhone, but on my TV screen over Xmas. My self-imposed rule also means I will probably miss the much-praised new Chinese film So Long, My Son. At three hours and five minutes, it is just over my limit. Time to bring back old-style intervals for lengthy films at cinemas?

No to slow movies, but a big Yes to slow radio. And there is no better practitioner and audio travel companion than Horatio Clare, who is just back from south-west Greenland, where he’s made three Radio 3 programmes to go out on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. As well as evocative sounds such as ravens’ wings and Canada geese, the crackle of frozen streams and howling winds, there will be compositions from John Luther Adams, Arvo Pärt, Max Richter and Steve Reich. Clare tells me that he was followed around by three stray huskies “ravenous for food”, and spotted a polar bear’s footprint. He will also talk about Greenland’s past, present and future – a future drastically threatened after the latest warning that the country’s ice sheet is melting seven times faster than in the 1990s. Maybe the BBC should send these programmes to climate-crisis denier Donald Trump, who earlier this year bid to buy Greenland for its vast supply of rare metals.