Brainwashed from birth: the cult of the BBC

Last week I was on holiday with my family on the Algarve. The good news was that, thanks to the BBC’s widespread availability in Portugal, we didn’t miss out on Murray at Wimbledon. The bad news was that, for the same reason, we couldn’t escape The Apprentice.

But this isn’t an anti-Apprentice column. It’s an anti-BBC column prompted in part by something annoying somebody said to me on Twitter the other day. I’d written, not for the first time, that I considered the BBC ‘a total waste of money’. And the tweeter replied primly, ‘The BBC is a total waste of money or actually you quite like Today, Proms, Glasto, wildlife docs. Can’t have it both ways.’

No, actually, you can. For example, if I were to bake you the most fantastically delicious passion cake you’d ever had with the scrummiest, most unctuous, orgasmic cream-cheese topping and lots of crunchy chunks made from the best organic Californian walnuts but I were to charge you £145.50 for it that would still, for all the cake’s intrinsic merits, qualify as a total waste of money.

And that cake would be even more of a total waste of money if it were soaked in purest essence of Moronica Communitarii, a powerful chemical that warps the brain so that your default response to any issue is ‘Why isn’t the government doing more?’, and which distorts your vision so that when you look at, say, the NHS all you can see is something that looks like ‘the envy of the world’ and which makes you vote for people like David Cameron and think he’s not doing badly all things considered. Especially if, adding insult to injury, consumption of that cake was near-compulsory on pain of imprisonment or a hefty fine.