OSCAR-WINNING film producer Lord Puttnam was quite honest about it. If anybody had told him ten years ago that he'd be standing in the Miners Institute in Newcastle as chairman of the UK's General Teaching Council and a member of the legislature of the House of Lords, he'd have thought they were "barmy".

But those are the facts. Education rather than movie-making is his job these days. The producer of films such as Chariots Of Fire, The Killing Fields, Midnight Express and Local Hero has, in his words, "taken early retirement" from the world of film for the world of education.

The small screen, though, was his subject when he gave the second keynote lecture - Enriching The Community: Television In The Digital Age - to members of the North East and Border Centre of the Royal Television Society.

He came armed with some statistics. These days more people work in Indian restaurants in the UK than in our coal, steel and shipbuilding industries combined. If he'd suggested that 20, even 15, years ago he suspects the men in white coats "would have leapt on to the stage to carry me from the room before I could do any serious harm".

Fortunately no one restrained Puttnam, who is Chancellor of Sunderland University. His remarks were aimed at illustrating how much life has changed and is continuing to change at a rapid rate. He echoed a recent assessment that business was going to change more in the next ten years than it has in the last 50.

In this "internet century" information technology is shrinking the world of work to a desktop. Distance is no longer a limiting factor in almost every aspect of our lives. Thanks to the internet, the entire global shop is open 24 hours a day.

His talk to those involved in TV - as both executives and programme-makers -- was essentially a paper for discussion which is probably why the question-and-answer session which followed lasted longer than his prepared speech.

The ever-shifting pattern of this country's TV set-up was illustrated a few days later when the Government gave the all-clear for the major ITV companies to start buying each other up. The prospect of a single more nationally-orientated ITV grows ever closer. Some view this with horror. Others, like Puttnam, believe good can come out of it.

Here he declared an interest as a failed contender for the post of Vice-Chairman of the BBC but said that the Corporation could take advantage of a lessening of interest in the regions by the commercial company.

"As the ITV system quietly sheds its regional identity so the BBC should be avidly taking on that identity and developing it in parallel with its national remit," said Puttnam.

He predicted that as ITV becomes ever more focused on a national agenda, even regional news will be increasingly squeezed into a "once a day opt-out" ghetto. This view alarmed some listeners. Not least unsurprisingly Tyne Tees Television's Director of Broadcasting Graeme Thompson. He pointed out that the station's 5.30pm regional news magazine is actually drawing bigger audiences than the ITV News did in the same slot.

Certainly the popularity of the Newcastle-based commercial company's regional programmes would indicate viewers want to see them and would not allow big bad ITV to remove them from the schedules. New digital technology, Puttnam pointed out, is central to broadening access, allowing the BBC to reach out to communities of all sizes and complexions.

This commitment to the regions would help the BBC to find and develop new talent, he said - a roundabout way, perhaps, of agreeing with Radio 2 presenter Terry Wogan's criticism of the Beeb for spending millions on a campaign to find new presenters and writers.

"The Corporation's strength used to derive from the fact that it developed intense loyalty from a myriad of gifted people, not simply through its ability to attach star names to tried and tested formulas," said Puttnam.

"I believe that the Corporation must find its way back into the talent business and cease to allow others, like Channel 4, to establish themselves as the natural home for the new and the unusually gifted. A stronger focus on all the regions, rather than one or two metropolitan centres may well be the means by which this might best be achieved. We could harness this technological and social transformation to bring about the birth of community television in the truest sense of the word. And with the BBC at the very heart of it."

Community TV was only one of several aspects of the technological revolution considered by Lord Puttnam in his speech during which his self-declared passion for public service broadcasting and education was apparent. Now we can only "watch this space" to see what happens next. But as Puttnam summed up: "The future may well be digital but there's absolutely no reason why that should mean jettisoning all, or any of the very considerable achievements of the analogue age."