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• Sir David Attenborough
• Will Hutton

Here was a report that really delivered a blow to the BBC’s solar plexus. Peacock began to foresee the possibility of digital diversity on an unimagined scale, it also put forward the ideas of a consumer-led, market driven broadcasting world, one in which the very principles of a licence fee funded public service broadcasting system would naturally be seen as obsolete. This suited the tenor of the times: deregulation, privatisation and a rigorous dismantling of the frontiers of the state – it was happening in the city and in industry and the utilities, why not broadcasting? The BBC, long seen as harbouring tendencies and personnel that were socialistic at best, Marxist at worst, was suddenly no longer a secure and unassailable acropolis. It was no secret that Norman Tebbit and some of the more fundamentalist free-marketeers and red-baiters of the administration would have been very happy indeed to dismantle the entire structure of the BBC. Peacock prevaricated and the charter appeared safe, but at a great price. Nothing would ever be the same again, the old certainties were dead and the harsh realities of capitalism arrived at Wood Lane and Portland Place. Whole departments were razed and working practices abolished, and something called an internal market was put in place. Radio Times was outsourced, the permanent make-up staff went, engineers, editors and set-designers were suddenly out of a job. Twenty-five percent of the BBC’s output was commanded to be produced from outside sources and a whole new independent sector was born. Companies like Hat Trick and Talk Back achieved almost instant success. Peter Bazalgette, who had been a typical BBC producer, starting life as a That’s Life researcher, then making Food and Drink and other such innocent programmes, started on the path that would lead him to Endemol and unimagined reach and riches. Men and women who had spent their whole lives dreaming up formats and broadcasting ideas as part of their job, suddenly had those ideas outside BBC premises, in their own time, because producers could now become entrepreneurs. There was money to be made and such a thing as loyalty to this new BBC was now a preposterous idea. The smell of Hugh Wheldon’s pipe smoke and tweed was finally expelled from every office, every corridor and every meeting room in the BBC. But at least the charter was safe, the licence fee was safe and the radio stations and the World Service and the general face and form of the BBC were safe and familiar. There was still Blue Peter and the Cup Final and Only Fools and Horses. The spinning globe and the logo were outsourced to Lambie Nairn, but the Beeb was still alive. David Attenborough and Bristol continued to make outstanding natural history programmes, the BAFTAs and Emmys continued to roll in for the innovative new drama and comedy.

And now … well, we know what has happened since. Satellite, digital TV, Freeview and now Freesat, the Internet and mobile telephony, BBC iPlayer for the iPhone, Mac and PC, a plethora of outlets so vast, complicated and fast-moving that audience numbers for traditional TV have plummeted. 3 million is now considered a good rating for a BBC 1 drama. Meanwhile of course ITV has morphed into a new kind of entity, more answerable to shareholders than ever before and Channel 4, always an uneasy hybrid of public duty ideals and free market commercialism, is finding it hard not to descend to freak show documentaries: The Man With a Nose Growing Out of His Bottom, The Girl With Fourteen Nipples and that kind of embarrassment for all concerned. So much so that C4’s very existence and right to continue is being questioned.

And we have a BBC that broadcasts through four major adult channels and a number of children’s channels, it has a news channel, a parliamentary channel and an HD channel. It also has a news channel in the form of its news.bbc.co.uk website, one of the most popular in the world. It has the iPlayer on its site too, streaming content to UK users only. But hell, there’s ways round that. Streaming? Hardly: anything that can be played on your computer can be stored on it and shared. A digital copy is a perfect copy. Once on the net it’s out there and will be bit torrented and Limewired and Gnutella-ed and otherwise P2P distributed. The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to “monetise”; at the moment it’s relying on the fact that you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer, but believe me that will change. It will soon be the work of a moment for my mother to get an iPlayer programme off her computer and onto her iPod, iPhone, or whatever device she chooses. In its digital doings, from interactivity through to HD and online resources, the BBC has been pretty much in the forefront of development, but also in the forefront of annoying those without its advantages.

Meanwhile I have continued to enjoy a happy career as actor, performer, broadcaster, documentary maker and now, with an independent production company of my own, producer, so it is clear that I have had nothing to complain about: the old system was easy for my benighted Oxbridge self and the new system has worked for me too. I may be white and middle class, but hey, I’m gay and Jewish, so all kinds of minority compliance boxes are ticked by my very presence, aren’t they? Well, do gay and Jewish count as minorities in this business? Do you remember that scene in Mel Brooks’s To Be Or Not To Be? He and his wife Anne Bancroft play, if you remember, a theatrical couple in Poland at the outbreak of the war. As the Nazis move in, more members of his company get taken away. One day his wife’s rather camp dresser, Sasha, disappears. Brooks’s character really loses it. He slams his palm into his fist. ‘Enough is enough. First the Jews, then the gypsies, now the faggots. Don’t they realise that without Jews, gypsies and faggots there’s no such thing as show business?’

The point is I have of course a kind of vested interest in the status quo. Or if not the status quo, it might easily be seen that any view I have about broadcasting is that of an insider. A member of the Oxbridge cosa nostra, the gay cosy nostra and indeed the kosher nostra. An insider moreover, who even if he had never stepped into broadcasting would, by virtue of that upbringing I told you about, be destined always to have in his heart a huge place for public service broadcasting as exemplified by the BBC.