Strictly Come Dancing is not the BBC’s core broadcasting

Rod Liddle — a former editor of the Today programme — says that the Corporation must stop pretending to be democratic if it is to keep the licence fee. Unashamed elitism is the only chance that the Beeb has in the new media world

One of the first things to go to hell when the Soviet Union collapsed was elitist early evening television. Within a remarkably short period of time the opera and the ballet and the documentaries moved down the schedules to be replaced by the sort of free and democratic programming with which we in the West are familiar: jabbering cretins, vapid celeb monkeys talking crap, mindless lumpenprole soaps, Yankee import dross, bite-sized chunks of ‘newz u can uze’ and footie. Ah, good, welcome to capitalism, you Russkies. It was as if an entire nation of 220 million people had seen its collective IQ behave, overnight, much as we have witnessed this last week or so from that other pillar of Western supremacy, the stock market. Down ten points and still dropping. Down still further, I would guess — all the way to Celebrity Rape Island, I’m an Imbecile Give Me a Job and the deathly prole-fest of X Factor, with its perpetually shrieking, ham-faced wannabes strutting their hopeless stuff in front of smug idiots. Where, those older Russians will be wondering and shaking their heads, are the pig iron forecasts and the Kirov and the lies? Gone, gone forever. (Well, OK, they’ve got the lies back now.)

These are the two formerly competing political systems, then; under one administration you got a small home and a job, fairly intelligent — if, uh, somewhat partisan — television programmes provided for you by the state, and electrodes attached to the testicles if you ever kicked up too much of a fuss.