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• Sir David Attenborough
• Will Hutton

Even the most immoderately free market media analyst or commentator I have heard or read would concede that there is a need for good impartial news coverage; that a nation deserves access to programmes that reveal truths about themselves and the world. But mostly they would argue too that if that is what the BBC is to provide, it can be slimmed down, the corporation can lose the need to make its Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing, its populist forays can be taken care of by ITV, whose audience share would concomitantly rise, narrowing its dreaded gap, while money would be freed from retrenching the BBC’s ambitions in the digital world, in film-making, in popular TV, in sporting occasions, money that could create better PSB programming and allow Channel 4 access to money that would spare us more The Boy Whose Testicles Play The Harpsichord.

Or perhaps a PSB system can be implemented on the American model of public subscription, or on the New Zealand and Singaporean models, based on a kind of central funding body. Neither of these can really be deemed especially successful, but again they free up money which can be thrown at as much public service broadcasting as anyone wants, and let real commercial players get on with making real commercial stuff.

But what would that BBC then be? Who would watch it? How could an audience be brought to a channel that showed nothing but worthy programming, no matter how excellently produced? Isn’t the whole point of the BBC as a major channel, a real player in TV production across the spectrum of genres and demographics, isn’t the whole point of that BBC its ability to draw audiences into PSB programming by virtue of their loyalty and trust in a brand that provides entertainment, pure and simple? Isn’t the slide scheduling from BBC4 to 2 or BBC3 to 1 an example of that, just as it can be from BBC2 to 1? I have been involved in programmes that have made that journey. Who Do You Think You Are? started on 2 and went to 1, like Have I Got New For You and a documentary I made recently on Gutenberg started on 4 and then screened on 2, getting I am told very good figures indeed, and staying in the top 3 on the iPlayer top ten for a week. It would not have been possible to get that audience, for what I am persuaded (well I would be) was an important and almost copybook example of PSB programming, without the cross channel trailing and station loyalty that the present all-encompassing nature of the BBC allows. In a sense the nature of the BBC as it is, ‘gives permission’ to all kinds of people to watch programmes they otherwise might not.

What is the alternative, a ghettoised, balkanised electronic bookshop of the home, no stations, no network, just a narrowcast provider spitting out content on channels that fulfil some ghastly and wholly insulting demographic profile: soccer mum, trailer trash, teenager, gay, black music lover, Essex girl, sports fan, bored housewife, all watching programmes made specifically for them with ads targeting them. Is that what we mean by inclusivity? Is that what we mean by plurality? God help us, I do hope not.

And anyway, can it not be understood that what we call ‘entertainment pure and simple’ is neither. It seems hardly necessary for me to rehearse the argument in comedy: Gervais and Merchant, Lucas and Walliams, Mitchell and Webb, Catherine Tate, the Gavin and Stacey team, and before them Ali G, Steve Coogan, you name them, they all developed their arts over time, they all made minority failures, they all needed to be brought on. No one but the BBC could have made Blackadder, especially after the expense and relative failure of the first series. Does it count as entertainment or as public service broadcasting? Do we have to make a distinction? That’s the point surely. With all respect to OfCom and Barry Cox, and all the media analysts and broadcasting journalists who insist on one, do we really have to make a distinction?

I have to be personal again. I wanted to make a pair of films about bipolar disorder, did I have to believe that I was making a public service series? Could I not believe as I did, that I was making two television programmes that I hoped as many people as possible might watch, just as I would hope if I was making a drama or a comedy? Yes, those couple of films on manic depression may well have fulfilled a public service, one that could be uniquely followed up via the BBC’s resources on radio, on websites and on help-lines, but the gratifying large audience that tuned in, did they do so because it was public service broadcasting? How insulting to everyone concerned is that?

By asking me to contribute my thoughts, the BBC hoped, I suspect, but in no way insisted, that I would fight their corner against cuts, against the slicing of the licence fee: at the very least they expected I might make a case for the public service aspects of comedy, and for its importance and for the need for it to be nurtured and fostered. I am happy to do that, not out of eternal loyalty and belief in an institution that has, as much as any school or college, made me who I am, but because I genuinely cannot see that the nation would benefit from a diminution of any part of the BBC’s great whole. It should be as closely scrutinised as possible of course, value for money, due humility and all that, but to reduce its economies of scale, its artistic, social and national reach for misbegotten reasons of ideology or thrift would be a tragedy. We got here by an unusual route that stretches back to Reith. We have evolved extraordinarily, like our parliament and other institutions, such is the British way. Yes, we could cut it all down and remake ourselves in the image of Italy or Austria or some other notional modern state. We could sharpen the axe, we could cut away apparently dead wood, we could reinvent the wheel, we could succumb to the natural desires of commercial media companies. Although I have an axe to grind on this, you should understand that it is personal not professional. Actually, if licence fee slicing and other radical plans do go ahead, I do not believe it would affect my career as performer, presenter or producer; in fact I would probably profit more from the change. It is simply that I don’t want to live in a country that emasculates the BBC. Yes, I want to see Channel 4 secure, but I don’t believe that the only way to save it is to reduce the BBC. We can afford what we decide we can afford.

You know when you visit another country and you see that it spends more money on flowers for its roundabouts than we do, and you think … coo, why don’t we do that? How pretty. How pleasing. What a difference it makes. To spend money for the public good in a way that enriches, gives pleasure, improves the quality of life, that is something. That is a real achievement. It’s only flowers in a roundabout, but how wonderful. Well, we have the equivalent of flowers in the roundabout times a million: the BBC enriches the country in ways we will only discover when it has gone and it is too late to build it up again. We actually can afford the BBC, because we can’t afford not to.