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• Stephen Fry
• Will Hutton

PSB, to me, is not about selecting individual programme strands here or there, financing them from some outside source and then foisting them upon commercial networks. Public Service Broadcasting, watched by a healthy number of viewers, with programmes financed in proportion to their intrinsic needs and not the size of the audience, can only effectively operate as a network – a network whose aim is to cater for the broadest possible range of interests, popular as well as less popular, a network that measures its success not only by its audience size but by the range of its schedule.

Is that what the BBC does? I would like to think so, since I have worked for it and it alone throughout my broadcasting career. But I have to say that there are moments when I wonder – moments when its two senior networks, first set up as a partnership, schedule simultaneously programmes of identical character, thereby contradicting the very reason that the BBC was given a second network. Then there are times when both BBC-1 and BBC-2, intoxicated by the sudden popularity of a programme genre, allow that genre to proliferate and run rampant through the schedules. The result is that other kinds of programmes are not placed, simply because of a lack of space. Do we really require so many gardening programmes, make-over programmes or celebrity chefs? Is it not a scandal in this day and age, that there seems to be no place for continuing series of programmes about science or serious music or thoughtful in-depth interviews with people other than politicians?

The BBC is still strong. Of course, audiences for established networks, the BBC's included, have all diminished. How could they not have done so when so many new channels have appeared? The viewers of these new networks, no matter how few, had to come from somewhere. But the great proportion of people, it turns out, are still primarily loyal to one or two networks. Viewers can only be properly provided with the variety of high quality programming that they deserve by a network, or better, a small group of two or three networks, that are planned and scheduled together to create high-quality programmes of the greatest possible variety.

I have spoken, I know, more about the history of public service broadcasting than of its future. But you cannot plan the journey ahead unless you know where you are. And you cannot properly understand where you are, unless you know where you have come from. Broadcasting technology has changed at an extraordinary speed during my lifetime and will doubtless change more, but human nature does not alter very much and human behaviour does not necessarily keep pace with our inventions.

Today, there are increasing numbers of technical advances that allow viewers to repeat programmes at their leisure and view them when the mood takes them. They can trawl through archives of material that have been gathered and created in the past with public money. There will be many more ways whereby institutions of all kinds, museums, scientific societies, political parties and great industrial corporations, can communicate with particular sections of the public. They all have their place.

But broadcasting is something else. It is that miraculous advance, still not a century old, that allows a whole society, a whole nation, to see itself and to talk to itself. It enables people, no matter who they are and where they are, to share insights and illuminations, to become aware of problems and collectively consider solutions. It is one of the wonders of our age.

It should not be editorially controlled by governments. Nor should it be used exclusively for commercial purposes. It should be a place where all kinds of people, with all kinds of interests and insights, can share them with society as a whole. That, I maintain, cannot be achieved with a few individual programmes, dotted here and there on networks whose aims and basic functions have some other ambition. It can only be done by a coherent network, one that measures its success not only by the size of the audience it manages to gain for an individual programme but – very importantly – by the width of the spectrum of interests it manages to represent. A network, in short, that is dedicated primarily to the service of the public.