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• Sir David Attenborough
• Will Hutton

The years passed and brought with them for children Blue Peter, every Oliver Postgate from Noggin the Nog to Ivor the Engine by the way of The Clangers and Bagpuss. Mr Benn, Play School, Play Away, Rent-a-Ghost, Grange Hill and the Multi Coloured Swap Shop. How lucky our generation was. How spoiled. ITV played its part, of course it did, with Magpie and How and much else. This was a period of revolutionary drama from directors and writers such as Alan Clarke, David Mercer, Kenneth Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Plater, Michael Apted, Stephen Frears, Dennis Potter. Play of the Month, Play of the Week, Play for Today. Cathy Come Home, Edna The Inebriate Woman, Pennies From Heaven, I Claudius, Tinker Tailor. Popular drama from Z Cars to Colditz. And comedy: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Monty Python, Up Pompeii, The Goodies, Dad’s Army, Dick Emery, Morecambe and Wise, The Likely Lads, The Two Ronnies, Porridge, Reggie Perrin, Fawlty Towers. … ITV gave us Rising Damp, and those definite article ITC adventures from Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner: The Avengers, The Champions, The Adventurer, The Baron, Man in a Suitcase, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, The Protectors and of course The Sweeney and The Professionals. And during this time BBC 2 had arrived and with it Civilisation, The Ascent of Man and the full realisation of its first controller, David Attenborough, as the world’s natural historian.

A succession of progressive, imaginative, tolerant, liberal in the loosest sense, and amiably hands-off TV executives from those legendary BBC Chairmen, Hugh Carleton-Greene and Lord Hill, downwards had created, or presided over, a cultural revolution of astounding depth, variety, imagination and dynamism. And then, just as I was leaving prison, starting simultaneously my period on probation and at University, the way you do, the wind changed and Margaret Thatcher, the new Mary Poppins, descended into Downing Street, with new medicines for us to take, but very few spoonfuls of sugar to help them go down. I am not going to blame her or make political points. The wind had changed and she blew in with it and would one day be blown away by another change. But here she was and fundamental questions were asked, genuinely radical unthinkable thoughts were thought in an age of privatisation and anti-dirigiste, anti-statist conservatism.

The first few years of that long administration in fact changed nothing. Her government was busy with a terrible recession and the Falklands war, fighting miners, that kind of thing. During exactly this time, I left University and began on what, for want of a better word, I shall call my career.

Comedy was my point of entry into television. Comedy had been my rock and roll as a child and now I was allowed to do it for a living. There is an argument that comedy is a greater public service than any other genre of art or culture: it heals divisions, it is a balm for hurt minds, it binds social wounds, exposes real truths about how life is really led. Comedy connects. The history of BBC comedy in particular is almost a register of character types, a social history of the country. Hancock, Steptoe, Mainwaring, Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty, Baldrick, Victor Meldrew, Alan Partridge, Ali G, David Brent, the matchlessly great General Melchett – it is much harder to list character types from serious drama who have so penetrated the consciousness of the nation and so closely defined the aspirations and failures of successive generations. A public service broadcasting without comedy is in danger of being regarded as no more than a dumping ground for worthiness. Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

Meanwhile, back to history, for a moment. What was happening to broadcasting during the time I was cutting my comedy teeth? In drama, the word “play” had been all but banned. It was Film Four and Screen Two. The multi camera studio drama, such as I Claudius, had become a thing of the past, the way led by Brideshead and other single camera filmed pieces. ‘Yoof’ TV made an appearance thanks to Planet 24 and Janet Street-Porter and the Peacock Report appeared.

The Peacock Report, referred to by broadcast professionals in that way they have, as Peacock, came less than ten years after the Annan Report, which the great Noel, Lord Annan had submitted to parliament in 1977. Annan had been the first to detect a caterpillar in the perfect garden salad of the BBC’s golden age. He thought television as run by ITV and the BBC needed a shake up, it lacked a kind of diversity, plurality and edge, all happily unfamiliar words in those days. For the first time the founding Reithian tenets of authoritative patriarchal broadcasting were challenged: the de haut en bas principle in which the educated producer, presenter, writer knew what was good for the country and for the audience was under fire. The first and most direct result was Channel 4 three or four years later, specifically charged to speak for minorities and sections of society who did not want to be spoon-fed by the supercilious educated classes. The arts and documentaries, drama and comedy were still presented but in a kind of punked up style, all attitude and in-yer-face. TV went from Oxbridge to concrete, missing out red brick altogether. But the words ‘radical’ and ‘reform’ meant something quite different to a new and ideologically fired government and so in 1986 a new report emerged: Peacock.