TV's latest odd couple

It is one of the most implausible media marriages since Rupert Murdoch dumped his wife of 32 years and got hitched to Wendi Deng, a fecund Chinese TV executive 40 years his junior. Now he's walked down the aisle with, if anything, an even more unlikely bride - his mortal foe and sworn enemy, BBC director-general Greg Dyke.

The nuptials took the form of last week's deal between Murdoch's Sky and the BBC to take over the running of the UK's digital terrestrial TV (DTT) system.

Yet a matter of months ago Murdoch's newspapers - The Sun and The Times - were running a personalised campaign to prevent Dyke taking over at the BBC. Murdoch reportedly told executives at Sky that Dyke was "our enemy", a man on a mission to stop Sky in its tracks.

Over the years, Dyke has been just as bitter a critic of Murdoch and his empire. Before he arrived at the BBC, he castigated Murdoch as "a threat to freedom" because he had caved in to Communist censorship, taking BBC news off the Chinese version of Sky when the authorities did not like what it said about them.

And the last time the BBC and Sky did a deal - over the rights to show Premier League football in 1992 - Dyke, then at ITV, was apoplectic. Sky was offering more money than ITV for the rights to show football, but Dyke knew that the clubs and their sponsors needed the huge audiences they got on ITV. At the time, the Sky audience was tiny.

The BBC, as Dyke saw it, came to Sky's rescue by resurrecting its old Match of the Day highlights show. What amounted to a joint deal from Sky and the BBC meant that the clubs could pocket Sky's

money and still get mass exposure on the BBC. Dyke went spare. He denounced the BBC as "Mur-doch's poodle", acting as midwife to a new and ruthless competitor which, without the football, looked as if it might go bust.

The BBC regime of the time said that it was merely acting in the interests of viewers. But for many others, the very idea of doing anything that would help Rupert Murdoch, the great bogeyman, was little short of treachery.

"Anyone who gets into bed with Rupert Murdoch gets screwed in the end," Dyke warned at the time. He remained resistant to Murdoch's charms and, as a non-executive Manchester United director, did more than anyone else to fight off the attempted BSkyB takeover of the club.

Now it is Dyke himself who has climbed into bed with Murdoch. Losing his own virginity, figuratively speaking, must now be a worry. Dyke and Murdoch - the BBC and Sky - are partners in a media marriage which, if you believe even a fraction of the hype about the new age of digital TV, will leave them in joint control of much of British TV in the future.

It is a shotgun wedding, of course, arranged by a Government desperate to see the disaster of its DTT policy turned around as quickly as possible. The Government has to make DTT work because it is planning to sell off existing TV frequencies to plug the growing hole in Government finances. It has to make sure that most people have switched to digital TV in about 10 years' time.

From the Government's point of view, the unlikely union of Murdoch and Dyke is the perfect match. Dyke's BBC has British TV's biggest income in the form of the £2 billion from licence fees. Already it is talking about diverting about £200 million a year into the smouldering DTT money-hole.

Sky brings with it a clutch of "free" TV channels and the crucial marketing power of The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times which, it can be safely assumed, will be used to plug the new venture as unashamedly as they are used to "cross-promote" the existing Sky pay-TV operation.

Conspiracy theorists this week were wondering which particular Government deregulation goodies were offered to the distinctly unblushing bride and bridegroom. Most likely, say experts, the BBC will get some sort of licence-fee increase to cover its extra spending on DTT, and maybe the go-ahead for expansion plans previously put on hold by the regulators.

Murdoch, meanwhile, may already be expecting a happy event - a possible takeover of Channel 5, at last consummating his courtship of mainstream TV in this country, frustrated for 30 years by regulations preventing him (or anyone else) establishing a commercial monopoly.

Dyke has already been giving interviews, saying through gritted teeth that he has always admired Murdoch's abilities as an entrepreneur.

Murdoch might find it difficult to explain why he is now in a "strategic alliance" with the BBC, an organisation that he has previously demanded should be broken up, have its licence fee removed and be forced to finance its activities through charitable donations and jumble sales. When he was trying to get Sky off the ground in the Eighties, Murdoch said the BBC was a "wasteful and unnecessary organisation" which was "bad for broadcasting and bad for the country".

Murdoch's Times ran a celebrated series of leader articles calling for the BBC to be privatised, penned by recently departed editor and Dyke-baiter-in-chief, Peter Stothard. This week the Thunderer was purring over the cleverness and political skill Dyke has displayed in sealing the deal.

Rupert Murdoch once changed nationality (from Australian to American) in order to pull off a business deal in the US. He dumped the Conservative Party which, under Mrs Thatcher, he had supported with astonishing devotion, when he thought that Labour would better serve his business interests.

So, it is not surprising that he is prepared to do an about-face and get into bed with the BBC, now that it suits his business interests.

But what about Dyke, the partner with no direct personal stake (other than his relatively modest public-sector salary) in the deal? The director-general has been muttering about co-operating with Sky on this venture, but competing hard against them in other areas, such as bidding for sports rights, and generally bumping along together.

That doesn't sound likely. Both Murdoch and Dyke are hyper-competitive would-be Masters of the Universe, scarcely able to operate without the goal of completely destroying the opposition.

After last week's shotgun wed-ding, most people in the business will be looking for the date of the Mexican divorce.

? Chris Horrie is author of Citizen Greg, published by Simon & Schuster.