Bake off

I hope the comment piece by Jonathan Meades in The Guardian makes the newspaper "cuts" prepared for new BBC DG Lord (Tony) Hall, presented to him this morning on an Barbar IKEA tray (£5.50) by acting Director of Communications Julian "Telly" Payne.

Mr Meades suggests the biggest problem facing the organisation is the structure that commissions tv. It was Birt who thought that commissioning was the BBC's ultimate skillset, and that assembling the UK's finest minds for the role was all that was required for Auntie's survival, alongside a major News Division. Meades' analysis: Channel controllers at the BBC enjoy an increasing autonomy that has resulted in decreasing diversity. The deluge of gardening programmes on BBC2 a few years ago was caused by the then controller's solipsistic assumption that the channel's audience was as entranced by the sod and the trowel as she was.

The current group are in no doubt about their own abilities; a light reading of BBC press releases from (Tele)Vision over the past year accompanies every new commission with trumpets of "impact" "innovation" and "culture". In the move to Broadcasting House, they wailed and moaned about having to live life like the rest, with lockers and meeting rooms - until their area was upgraded from IKEA to Sanderson Hotel. And yet - BBC2 HD's first programme was "Homes Under The Hammer".  BBC1 is still sneaking out Richard Hammond's Secret Service at lunchtimes. BBC2 for Easter brought us Les Dennis and Keith Chegwin. Less than a third of BBC4's programmes are first run.

Mr Meades goes on. The way in which the licence fee, nothing more or less than a poll tax, is divvied up between channels demands urgent overhaul. There is no reason why a channel that drools out light "entertainment" should receive a disproportionately hefty slice simply because it has always done so. It is within the power of the director general to overturn this inverted order. 

Why are former footballers like Alan Hansen and the one who looks like a porky hairdresser paid more than Jeremy Paxman, the most authoritative broadcast journalist in Britain? Is it because they invent new units of measurement – "half a yard" – or model provincial disco clothes, or talk drivel about "role models"? 

...... The fear of seriousness, and the assumption that seriousness is necessarily humourless, has to be overcome. There are manifold audiences. There is no evidence that the majority are as dull and backward as the BBC assumes them to be. The diet of gruesome "reality TV" (there is no such thing) and witless "lifestyle" shows is corrupting – it is a betrayal of the British. And I mean that.