The BBC and most politicians argue that the technical nature of television mitigates against programmes of high educational quality in a purely competitive market. They say that some kind of government intervention is necessary to ensure that public service broadcasting happens.

But the BBC is not the only way, and therefore not necessarily the best way to deliver such public service broadcasting. It acts both as commissioner and deliverer of public service broadcasting. There is no way of telling if what we see on our screen is truly in the public interest, short of trusting the BBC and its board of governors.

An alternative would be to have a separate budget allocated to public service programming, financed from the licence fee, so that the money raised from TV watchers would be ring-fenced to be spent on public service broadcasting.

Some broadcasters, like now, would be obliged to meet certain public service broadcasting responsibilities. These would then bid for licence fee funds to make programmes which met those responsibilities. This would introduce competition for licence fee payers’ money as the best guarantor of value for money.

With licence payers’ funds being available to a multiplicity of bidders, what role would remain for the BBC? The logic seems to point to full privatisation, but there may be other options. The BBC might become a private non-profit corporation like the National Trust, for example.

There are those who argue that only the BBC is capable of preserving and reflecting cherished high standards of public culture and ethos. But such things are not best served by a raising one broadcaster to church-like status. Instead, they are a product of our education and civilisation at its broadest, and are preserved by factors way beyond the confines of television.