He seemed satisfied with the low-level, disguised contempt via flattery, of the programme as it was devised. He then judged the programme to represent a coming together of the national community. God help the nation, then, if that’s where we’ve got to.The concomitant of this shifting about with the meaning of “quality” is nervous and excessive praise for the taste of the people out there. Some of us have been saying for many years that we, the audiences, the customers, the voters, are not as daft as those who seek our support often seem to assume. We didn’t say it in the ritualistic, plasticised way used here; we looked also at the other side of the coin and tried to resolve the contradictions.Many people are only basically and not critically literate That goes partly with our divisive education system. More importantly, it is sustained by those vast engines of persuasion which, in their own interest, tell us that we need not lift our eyes higher or wider, that their trash is good bread.

Almost all of us at some time settle for trash, even though we may know better. For all of us the appetite grows by what it feeds on: it is easier to reinforce existing low taste than to suggest that the world is wider and deeper. Valry did not mince his words: “When one no longer knows what to do in order to astonish and survive, one offers only pudenda to the public gaze.”If a referendum were held now on a return of capital punishment it would be passed by 75 per cent. If broadcasting regulations were abolished there would then be immediate pressure for the executions to be televised Commercial television would show them first.

The BBC would be unhappy but would eventually follow suit – on the best “democratic” grounds.This is the very heart of the BBC’s dilemma – the dilemma forced on it for profit rather than in the public interest, by the establishment of a squinting broadcasting system The BBC had to compete to survive and has done so. Sometimes it has competed by formulaic programming, by copying, by buying from the competition programme-makers to whom it would not have given house-room 30 years ago.Huw Wheldon, who was in charge of BBC television in the early Seventies, talked straight about quality across the whole spectrum of programming. He insisted, with detailed examples, that good popular programmes were not the same as bad populist programmes; that the challenge to the BBC, when its competitor produced the populist, was to counter by creating the truly popular.Yet it does after all seem as though the authors of the BBC report can recognise good from bad, popular from populist £85m is to be released for fresh programme ideas. One fears the worst, yet the proposals seem to promise good programmes of many different kinds. They run counter to much of the earlier exculpatory prose.Then their intellectual/semantic situation becomes even clearer. Like many of us, these BBC managers have lost the language for expressing their own levels of understanding; they can think better than they speak. The times are against “judgmental” thinking, so they take refuge in populist and relativistic jargon.

If only they had been more concrete from the beginning by, say, giving a roll-call of good-and-popular programmes that would have told us where they really stand – Bread, Boys From the Blackstuff, One Foot in the Grave, Edge of Darkness, and, going back,Till Death Us Do Part, Dad’s Army, Monty Python, Steptoe and Son. For such things and much else the BBC is widely and rightly respected, and the licence fee thought good value by the majority of people.Even more important, those programmes often broke the class barrier in taste – they spoke to a common national sense of drama, of comedy, of situation and of language That was a remarkable discovery and achievement. By contrast, the authors of this book have swallowed much of the fashionable stratified-by-lifestyle argument by which, even if the sense of class has been slightly weakened nowadays, we are to be more and more “targeted” as members of stratified, separated and discrete social groups That suits advertisers It shouldn’t be accepted without question by the BBC Even today it can at its best prove otherwise.. PICTURE the supermarket checkout of the year 2005: “That will be 75 ecus please.” Or the pub: “One Scotch, one bitter and a packet of crisps … five ecus and 25 cents, sir.” Or the building society: “How big a mortgage did you have in mind, madam?” “Oh, about half a million ecus, please.”

This is what so many senior Conservatives are so desperate to prevent: British people forsaking their historic pound and talking and trading in the same currency used by Frenchmen and Germans.
Would it be such a big deal? Would Britain really miss the pound? I can’t think why.To start with, there can not be a single soul who would regret the passing of the ugly, overweight coin that is the currency’s modern manifestation.