There are two great Shibboleths that must have their obeisance in British public life. One is the National Health Service, such a wonder of the world that no one at all has copied the model. The other is the British Broadcasting Corporation, similarly something that no other wallah has deigned to clone.

At which point we get this:

Now all of this is being laid bare in a TV documentary. I don't like watching myself struggle with physiotherapy, or walking badly. Who would? But after four years of recovery, it was time to be a bit more open, rather more honest.

What we hope is that the film, which investigates exactly what happened to my brain when I had the stroke, will encourage some of my fellow survivors. If there's one thing I can do, it is say 'This happened to me' and offer to share the experience.

Could even be an interesting programme. But then there's this:

But then I realised that, so far, he has treated about 2,000 stroke victims, and while by no means everybody had a successful outcome, nobody seemed to have been harmed by the treatment. It costs about £5,650 a pop – and I plucked up my courage and decided to give it a go.

Give it a go in America that is. Of course, Andrew Marr is entirely at liberty to spend his money (even the money of the program makers who film it all) in any manner he desires. Yes, including on treatment which is only available to people not reliant upon the NHS.

But there is still a certain something to seeing one of the senior apparatchiki of the tax funded British state revelling in, displaying even, to those tax funders the treatment that he, that apparatchick, can have but that they, the tax funders, cannot.

We just wonder whether this crossed the minds of anyone at all involved in making this programme.