Holding The Nerve

Although he is a bit soft on Pussy Riot, Heydon Prowse writes:

I have an idea to save BBC3.

If director general Lord Tony Hall needs to find £100m in savings, perhaps I could start by giving back the £3.50 I raised last year when I went chugging with my friend Jolyon for a sketch called BBC In Need – a much needed fund to supplement the multimillion-pound payouts to failing Beeb execs.

Another option would be for ex-director general Mark Byford to commit ritual seppuku so that his £3.4m pension could be returned to the state.

Back in the day, Jol and I would have filmed that sketch on our own and posted it on our website Don't Panic Online.

But BBC3 had commissioned us to make it as part of our show The Revolution Will Be Televised.

Put that in perspective: just imagine the Sun having a pop at its own phone hacking scandal, or Channel 5 commissioning a comedy that satirised its owner Richard Desmond's porn interests.

Also in our series we made Tony Blair a saint, presented David Cameron with a Bullingdon Club Annual and gave George Osborne a GCSE maths textbook (he never made it to A-levels).

Even after years of using the internet to go after the rich and powerful I still can't quite believe that the BBC had the guts to allow us to do it.

We originally took the show to Channel 4 – you know, the channel traditionally associated with subversive content.

But in the end only BBC3 bosses Zai Bennett and Sean Hancock had the nerve.

Middle-class, middle-aged Britain is already perfectly well served by the BBC; I did a quick survey of my parents this morning and 100% of those polled agree.

Young people and ethnic minorities, however: not so much.

While other channels are churning out empty-calorie TV – where we can laugh at poor people fulfilling their own stereotypes by being poor, or watch celebrity nail-painting talent shows – BBC3 is creating non-patronising, genuinely youth-focused content.

Billie JD Porter and Stacey Dooley recently went to investigate drugs and sex in Central and South America. Reggie Yates went to South Africa to look at the country's white slums.

Double Bafta-winning Our War followed young British soldiers on the front line in Afghanistan.

And let's not forget comedy such as Bad Education, Cuckoo, The Mighty Boosh, Little Britain and Gavin & Stacey.

These are shows that have launched the careers of some of Britain's most talented comedians and generated serious revenues through worldwide sales.

The purpose of the BBC is to inform, educate and entertain, and the programmes on BBC3 do that better than the £22m spent on The Voice on BBC1.

Cards on the table: I like getting paid to run about making idiots out of bankers and politicians, so this isn't without a whiff of self-interest.

But on the flipside, cutting BBC3 would mean fewer bankers and politicians were made to look like idiots – and that's a scenario none of us want to see.

In Russia Pussy Riot have been imprisoned and whipped for filming dissent.

Here in the UK we have a channel that is prepared to broadcast dissent to the nation, even when the broadcaster itself is the target.

Isn't that the kind of country we want to live in?