The head of the BBC, which this week announced thousands of job losses, bit a journalist on the arm when he edited the Nine o'Clock News, it was revealed last night. The story was told in an e-mail to Jeremy Paxman when he was doing research on Mark Thompson, the director-general, for an interview last January. He wrote to Anthony Massey, a journalist at the BBC, and asked him: "I've got to interview Mark Thompson tomorrow. Is it true that he once bit you?" Mr Massey confirmed that the report was true."It was late summer or early autumn of 1988," he said. "I was a home news organiser. It was 9.15 in the morning, in the middle of the old sixth-floor newsroom. I went up to his desk to talk about some story after the 9am meeting we used to have then. I was standing next to him on his right and he was sitting reading his horoscope in the Daily Star (I always remember that detail). Before I could say a word he suddenly turned, snarled and sank his teeth into my left upper arm, leaving marks through the shirt but not drawing blood. It hurt. I pulled my arm out, like a stick out of the jaws of a labrador."
Mr Massey said that the attack was entirely unprovoked. "The key thing is that we did not have a row first, or even speak, and I had never had any dispute with him before. He was recently arrived in the newsroom and I hardly knew him. He just bit me in the arm for no reason." A BBC spokesman confirmed that the incident was true but said: "It is firmly in the past".