Yes, I’m mad as hell at the BBC – but I’ll still pay my licence fee

You know the charge sheet, it’s undeniable. A documentary – Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – narrated by a child of a Hamas commander without attribution. The output of BBC Arabic. “Death, Death to the IDF” aired from Glastonbury by a band named after – what? - a Zionist Jew. (For me the name theft was the worst of it.) Gary Lineker’s reposting of a cartoon rat on an Instagram story “about” Zionism, because being so thick you are functionally unconscious doesn’t preclude you from being the “face” of the BBC.

The worst, for me, was Jeremy Bowen announcing that Israel had blown up the Al-Ahli hospital and then, when it emerged that Israel didn’t blow up the Al-Ahli hospital, saying, “I don’t regret one thing on that.” In response to the misreporting, a synagogue in Tunisia was set on fire, and yet Bowen regrets nothing. What wouldn’t I do for that sense of self? Perhaps he could be a life coach?

The BBC’s new antisemitism training – always a hilarious phrase to type, are they for or against it? – is apparently designed for imbeciles: Yehuda Bauer is out, the Teletubbies in. And James Savile, of course. The BBC knew about his tastes, and they protected him. They lauded him.

That’s the charge sheet, though there are other things that irritate me: Doctor Who sometimes, The Great British Bake Off always– gone to Channel 4, but the memory irritates me – Strictly Come Dancing, Bruce Forsyth’s ghost.

I know the arguments for a publicly-funded broadcaster – only an idiotic Jew is unconscious of the tools of the liberal society – but when the day came to renew the licence, I couldn’t do it. I thought about the slow poisoning of the BBC, its vanity and insecurity, its certainty and cowardice, its anti-intellectualism and its groupthink and I resisted.

I will repent and pay up soon, because I must. It’s my responsibility, even if it is futile, because living in a liberal society has responsibilities. Even futility has its responsibilities. Politics is not a consumer good, even if people treat it that way: this is a representative democracy.

On Election Day I vote for the person I hate least, the person who represents the least danger to those I love in the coming, say, five minutes. This is why I spend more time than I ever thought I would telling people to vote Conservative, and why, when I manage to forget Jeremy Bowen’s face, I will defend the BBC. I might not like them, but the alternative is worse.

I am furious and contemptuous, and I am hurt. I have worked in the media for 25 years and the BBC news department has all the preening vanity of the newspaper lifer: too comfortable, too powerful, too incurious. Have they read Martha Gellhorn? I doubt it. Even so, the nightmare of oligarchy is before us now: do you really want to live in a country where the monied – and only the monied – control the news? Watch Paddy Chayefsky’s marvellous satire of the television news, Network (1976), and its awful conclusion: the world is a business.

Fight for the BBC, I say from my unlicensed home: don’t demolish the last vestiges of liberalism and think you will be safer. Complain, protest, hate – I’m all for hate - but don’t give the worst people what they want: a defunded BBC, and the ravenous open market, meat for knaves.

Defund the BBC and a fresh hell will come along. That’s a principle every Jew can understand.