They know best

"Our job is to get the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers." That mission, for the not-long-for-this-life BBC Trust, is not quite the same as doing what the licence fee payers want.

This was entertainingly demonstrated on yesterday's Media Show on Radio 4, when presenter Steve Hewlett quizzed Trustee Richard Ayre about the decision to accept the ending of BBC3 as a broadcast service, and reject the Executive's plans for a BBC+1 services. The evidence in front of the Trust, from a generously-sized survey of licence-fee payers, was that they wanted the opposite result. So there.