Lynsey Hanley

As a lonely child I was a BBC addict, nourished as much by Radio 1 and the CBBC Broom Cupboard as by the popular science of QED and Horizon. In the holidays, I watched Why Don’t You?, a participatory children’s programme that encouraged bored kids to “switch off (our) television sets and go and do something less boring instead.” Each episode featured a group of children from different parts of the country, who would explain in thick Scouse or Brummie or Belfast accents how, for example, to make an ice-cream float or build a go-kart. “Why don’t I?” I’d think.

The BBC has helped forge my outlook. Its programming encouraged me not to be scared of the outside world, and furnished me and other working-class people growing up far from the centres of power with at least some of the tools to decode it. I doubt this would have happened otherwise, growing up in the 1980s, amid the multi-state violence of neoliberal economics and nuclear one-upmanship. The BBC made it possible for me to imagine alternative worlds against all available evidence.

Someone who has grown up taking the possibility of alternatives, of choices, for granted is less likely to recognise the significance of this. Unfortunately, too many of those people end up in positions of power; to have a job at the BBC is a position of enormous power. When that power is abused, even unknowingly, it means we’ve given up on those who need alternative worlds the most.

Lynsey Hanley is the author of “Estates: An Intimate Histor y” (Granta) and “Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide” (Allen Lane)