Anna Ford says BBC is still too slow to feature older women

Anna Ford, the former news anchor, has accused the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, of being too slow to put more older women on the screen.

Ford, who has accused the corporation of ageism in the past, argues that Thompson's recent moves to persuade female staff, such as Julia Somerville, back into broadcasting have come "a bit late".

"He has been here a long time and he hasn't done a lot about it," the 68-year-old tells Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Ford also tells Young she suspects the BBC of "tokenism", as Somerville only has 24 days' work a year specified in her contract.

While Ford has no regrets about leaving broadcasting herself, she will say: "I do regret the lack of older women on television simply because it isn't reflective of the society we live in."

The former newsreader describes an "idyllic childhood" in a vicarage in the Lake District with four siblings and parents who had both been actors. Choosing music by Duke Ellington and Paul Simon, Ford also concedes that her own youthful beauty must have helped her career in television.

"Looking back, I think looks played a very important part. And I was beautiful and I can see that now when I look back at those photographs. I think, why didn't I know I was beautiful? Because I didn't."

Talking of her marriage and two children with caricaturist Mark Boxer, who died in 1988 at the age of 56, Ford will also admit to a headstrong streak. Twenty years ago she sent an open letter to a newspaper denouncing novelist Martin Amis for being a bad godparent to her daughter, his late friend's child.

While she will admit this might have been a mistake, she defends another "burst of spontaneity" that led her to throw a glass of wine over Jonathan Aitken at a party after she had been fired from TV-am.

"I don't regret it," Ford will recall. "He says it was red wine. It was definitely white wine."