In my little book, “Scrap the BBC!” I argued that markets could provide broadcast media just like they provide print media. But I also addressed the possibility of “market failure” by the emergence of, say, a National Trust of the Airwaves.

I told iPM’s Eddie Mair that I like the idea of a voluntary body funded by subscription by the affluent, literate, concerned middle class. It could fund “elite”, “posh” or otherwise unpopular broadcasting which might not be funded by advertisers.

Let’s assume there are 10m fans of Radio 4. If only 2m of them divvy up £1 a week, that more than covers the station’s £73m cost plus “central news gathering” (the BBC central news operation). I’ve also said that 5m people divvying up £100 a year would handsomely fund all of BBC radio and BBC2 television.

Further: I think TV is much less of an equity problem than radio because on a fully digital service it is easy to give the poor pre-paid scrambler cards for their (free) set-top boxes. The state or the National Trust of the Airwaves could make these gifts. That could overcome the problem that Freeview has free rider problems.

Of course I am being mischievous. I do believe what I say: better that firms, individuals and associations sort out broadcast funding than that the state does. But I also enjoy saying that “the middle class” ought to fund “elite” broadcasting. I believe strongly that being middle class is a matter of being literate, affluent and concerned. But I also believe that it is wrong for the middle classes to avoid its duty. It ought to want to lead the nation by taking on more of the work of the state. And besides, it is fun to hoist the middle class lefties on their own petard: broadcasting is something they ought to provide for the poor if they are so darned worried about poor people being unable to access quality material.

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A BBC Radio 5 show (Sunday, 24 November 2008) asked me to go on and discuss this question. Here’s my attempt to think things through.

The answer is that some news media are too excitable and others are too exciting.

Taking a trivial case first: I can’t see that it matters that John Sergeant made such a big splash. It made a welcome change from the Congo and the Crunch. Crucially: Strictly and those other stories are not remotely mutually exclusive.

Secondly, I hardly ever worry about the print coverage of anything. There are papers which are silly quite a lot of the time and no paper which isn’t silly sometimes. Who cares? Taken as a whole, print coverage is wonderful. On the whole, the victims of the press’s worse excesses make a decent return for their trouble.

I do worry about TV. It is famously a “hot” medium: it is briliant at passion and not so good at analysis. I know a 93 year old who finds the BBC 6 O’Clock News very upsetting. I tell him to turn it off and gets his news from his Daily Telegraph instead. Or, I suggest, he could switch back on for the 7 o’clock Channel 4 News. It’s much clamer and more cool than “The Six”.

Never mind that the C4 News is wringing wet and drenched in attitude, it’s a proper news show. I doubt it would suit my old boy: it isn’t driven sufficiently by the headlines. He could of course listen to the news on nice middle-class and steady Radio 4. But like many old people, he can’t be bothered with radio. Weird, but there you are.

Whilst we’re at it, here’s a conundrum. Why is Sky TV rolling news calmer and cooler than BBC News 24? I know it’s visually louder. But it often seems somehow more grown-up. I think that may be because it treats its audience as adults rather than people in need of remedial education.

The point is that television can be very hot or quite cool, and I much prefer channels which treat me as a grown-up.

The BBC has one very deep fear, and that is that it will lose the mass market. That means that it must play to the vulgar strengths of the media in which it deals.

The result is a bit schizophrenic. The 6 O’Clock works both sides of street as best it can. It does the doomy drama of a “Stabbings Season” and parades of weepy victims saying they’re devastated. And then it puts on ana analyst such as Mark Easton to spray some comparative data about, like a fireman at a five alarm fire. (I should perhaps add that the BBC is very seldom any good about climate change: I think that’s because it feels a terrific need to get us to want to save the world, like it knew how to do that.)

There is one slightly peculiar conclusion to all this. It isn’t the agenda which changes as we channel-hop or go from airwaves to print. It’s the style.

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The more young and old fogeys line up against Ross, the more his producers know that they have red meat to throw to those millions of licence fee payers who’d rather have foul-mouthed silliness than, oh I don’t know – what would Charles nominate as preferable? Clark, Schama, Bronowski? Whatever. (I have touched on this at the SAU.) 

But more than that, it is not wise to give hostages to the vulgar, anally retentive forces of what we might as well call the Daily Mail tendency. In a contest between the perma-adolescence of Ross and the grubby prissiness of the Mail, I know which I prefer.

The worst of it is that outrage about Ross won’t help us scrap the BBC.

For that job, we need John Humphrys. In every way, he serves the cause. The other night he complained on Mastermind that he had become trapped in South East England, far away from his beloved Wales. I wonder if he heard the welling chorus which went up from the nation’s rooftops. “Don’t worry, John”, we shouted, “We’ll show you the way to Paddington. We’ve paid you too much for too long. Don’t let us detain you.”

It is one of the merits of Harrumphrys that he brings a certain Daily Mail quality to the Today Show. Suddenly, the chippy terrier seems useful. He savaged an apparatchic from the BBC’s management team on some of the fronts we love. Overpaid bureaucracy and stars. An online presence which stifles media entrepreneurship. A fundamental absurdity in the funding arrangement. She fought back by mentioning his own pay packet and then agreed that joking aside, they’d better discuss policy.

Of course, it’s folly to suppose as many people do that there is no need to pay for the BBC when people can get what they want free online. Nothing is free, and it’s how we pay for media that matters.

We ought to get rid of the BBC’s licence fee because we should be ashamed to be paying for smut and smugness on the rates.

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