The Belly Bum Corporation

Charles Moore writes:

Pursuing the BBC’s belief that one must ‘push the boundaries’, I have decided to refuse to renew my television licence fee so long as Jonathan Ross continues to be employed by the Corporation. I shall go on watching television at our house in Sussex, pay the equivalent of the fee to Help the Aged (since the BBC likes persecuting the old) and wait to see what happens.

When I disclosed this plan to readers of the Daily Telegraph last week, several emailed to say that they already do this. It was interesting to hear that none of them has been prosecuted.

This confirms something I have noticed from my earlier (and continuing) dispute with the BBC about my London flat, where I do not have a television, but constantly receive threatening letters from TV Licensing telling me that I shall go to court unless I get a licence. The threats are never fulfilled.

The BBC are in a quandary. If they do not get their licence money, they cannot survive, but if they take action against protestors, they will make martyrs. It is a bluff. I am beginning to think that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The row about Brand and Ross has been a turning point for many people. Up till now, we have been uncomfortably conscious that the BBC puts out amazingly revolting things, but we have simply tried to avoid them. Rather like residents who dare not venture out on to the streets at night because of yobs, we have despaired.

But the Brand/Ross scandal has reminded us that we do, in fact, ‘have ownership’ of the BBC, and we are being denied owners’ rights. The favourite argument that ‘If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it’ makes no sense if you are made to pay for it. It is like going to a café and being told that if you want a nice cup of tea you will also be charged for a plate of dogsh*t.

And then it turns out that the charge for the biggest piece of dogsh*t — Jonathan Ross — is £6 million a year. Sorry to use this unpleasant image, but I thought it might be ‘edgy’ enough to fit the bill.

‘I worry,’ says Matthew Bannister, a former BBC panjandrum, ‘that the BBC will become more cowed by this affair.’ Cowed by whom? Think of the Flanders and Swann song, ‘Ma’s out, Pa’s out,/ Let’s talk rude./ Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.’ Ross/ Brand/Mock the Week (which makes gerontophobic jokes about the Queen’s sexual organs)/ Little Britain/ numerous foul-mouthed telly chefs, etc, etc, resemble these naughty children. Mark Thompson and other senior BBC executives are like parents who come home and, instead of sending the children to bed without any supper, nervously applaud their rude words.

So they get ruder. ‘F***! C***! W***!’ they yell, and make jokes about masturbating about Mrs Thatcher (Ross), or how they crippled a woman by raping her (Little Britain USA), or whatever. ‘Clever children,’ say the parents, ‘let us give you more money!’ The BBC bosses have been cowed for years by their feral children. We are asking them to stop being cowed, and to exercise their parental authority, for which, unlike real parents, they are very well paid.

Most eloquent on this subject have been teenagers of my acquaintance and people in their twenties. They are angry at the BBC’s idea that Ross is the acclaimed voice of their generation. He is, after all, only four years younger than I. The most common description I hear of him from my children’s generation is that he is a ‘dirty old man’.

Quite so.

Last week, Moore wondered, if "one thousand people per day" really were caught evading the license fee, then where were the 365,000 people per annum clogging up the courts?

Where, indeed?