Some things at the BBC need to stay sacred

British Broadcasting Corporation: A Britain without the BBC would be a lesser one
12 April 2012

Delivering Quality First is the name given to the BBC's sweeping internal inquiry into the shape it should take in the future. Yes: I agree. It could just have been called "the inquiry into the future of the BBC", or "the BBC management review", and saved us all from being a bit sick into our mouths. The present participle mission slogan is as empty and inane a branding cliché as "solutions", and I'd hate to think licence-fee money was spent on consultants to come up with it.

But if a leak from the inquiry's findings is to be believed, it is actually setting about to live up to its name: it's reported that this week the BBC will announce, amid 20 per cent overall cuts, the ringfencing of the budget for Radio 4. Good.

The inquiry, due to report this week, comes at a time when the BBC is feeling intensely vulnerable.

Money's tight. Much that it does is done as well for free elsewhere. It was battered by its war with the last government, yet it has few friends in this one.

Mistakes and transgressions such as Sachsgate have been used as sticks to beat the BBC by the corporation's commercial and ideological enemies.

If Auntie was your actual auntie, she'd be the one with a whiff of gin on her breath, a series of mean boyfriends and a tendency to develop mysterious bruises. But she'd also be the auntie you liked and trusted most.

A Britain without the BBC would be a lesser one. But to justify a compulsory tax to sustain it, we have to make a clear case that a) what it does is an unarguable public good, and b) it is something that we cannot be confident the market will provide on its own.

The very heart of that case is to be found on Radio 4. It may or may not be a public good to have Doctor Who. It is certainly a public good to have a well-informed electorate, and a forum for the disinterested holding of politicians to account.

It's a public good to maintain independent reporting teams stationed abroad, and it's a public good to have a body of documentary work and criticism that describes the country and the culture to itself. It's a public good, in an age of fragmentation, to have the broadcast equivalent of a parish pump.

If you object to what you see as the BBC's institutional Leftism - as many on the Right do - you're not objecting to the idea of a publicly funded, politically neutral service; if anything, you're implicitly endorsing it. You're complaining only that this one doesn't seem to you to fit the bill. As for The Archers, well, nobody's perfect.

Now for the long game, Liz

Wonderful to hear the romance between Shane Warne and Elizabeth Hurley has moved to the next level. They have confirmed their engagement via the modern court-and-social column that is Twitter, after Warne's surprise proposal during the Alfred Dunhill Links golf event at St Andrews.

His last tweet before asking for her hand has been understood as a tender tribute to her golfing skills: "@ElizabethHurley Let's play the dunhill together next year - you up for it ? You swing great & have nice rhythm - with a super short game ! X" It's odd to address your girlfriend via your 546,778 Twitter followers when a text message might have done just as well. But who knows? Perhaps he's being sponsored by Dunhill. He wasn't telling us anything we didn't know. Miss Hurley's short game is famously good.

Gridlock still rules, even on the Sabbath

London is to be home to a nationwide first this year. Not far from where I live in north London, the country's first hands-free green man pedestrian crossing is to go into operation at Henlys Corner, near a busy synagogue. The idea is to allow observant Jews to cross the North Circular Road on the Sabbath without violating religious law by pushing the button.

The ingenious ways in which Sabbath rules can be got around - the eruv, for instance, where by circling your neighbourhood with a wire it counts as an extension of your home and outdoor prohibitions cease to apply - are an inspiration to us all. That said, crossing the road at Henlys Corner has never been all that difficult: I don't think a car has progressed through that thrombotic junction in living memory at anything faster than a crawl.

The City's least revered guild

I read an interesting interview at the weekend with Chris Huhne's estranged wife Vicky Pryce. She sounds like a formidably accomplished woman. But one of those accomplishments was just bizarre: she's Master of the "Worshipful Company of Management Consultants". Did you know that there even existed such an organisation?

I thought Pryce was joking until I looked it up. It exists. Motto: "Change through Wisdom." The City guilds and livery companies - with their good works and their amiable old farts playing dress-up in wood-panelled halls - are endearing exactly in as much as they are relics of London's medieval life. But in the history of twee, mock-Tudor hogwash, a "Worshipful Company of Management Consultants" takes the biscuit.

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