Call me a snob but the TV licence at £159 is worth it

My husband would pay anything to enjoy Attenborough and Springwatch.

THERE’S A survey doing the rounds saying a shocking number of young people can’t name a single BBC programme.

Sadly, the two teenagers who live in our house would probably tick this box, unless you count Strictly Come Dancing and Match of the Day.

While all the attention has been on pensioners and their relationship with the contentious licence fee, younger generations have literally switched off. Or off and back on again, with the subtitles up on the screen so they can surf their phone at the same time.

“The BBC needs to wake up to this demographic timebomb”, says Julian Knight, chairman of the Commons Digital, Media, Culture and Sport committee.

He also points out that, although the corporation has “excellent children’s broadcasting”, the audience “drifts off ” when it comes to teenagers and adults in their early 20s.

This is true but viewing and listening habits have been undergoing seismic change for more than a decade now. Only one in 20 young adults say they regularly watch programmes live.

Apart from the news, so do

I. I save dramas up as a treat, documentaries for when I’m ironing. And if I’m actually sitting down to watch, I’ll have my laptop, phone, newspaper, magazine or book to hand at the same time.

The question no one seems prepared to answer is: Does this really matter?

It’s difficult to talk about funding without adding fuel to the bitter fire blazing between the Government, which regularly accuses the BBC of left-wing bias, and the corporation, now contemplating the licence fee being frozen for the next two years.

Savings of up to £2bn must be found, which is entirely counter productive; without decent funding, the quality of programming will suffer, dealing a potential body blow to what should be a proud British organisation.

“The days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors are over,” trumpeted Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries on Twitter – obviously – as if announcing the decision was something to be delighted about.

It’s not. It’s simplistic, populist and patronising in the extreme, Ms Dorries. If we took politics out of it for a minute, we’d have a much clearer picture of what is happening with the way we consume television – and radio too.

And then we might be able to recognise that in a multi-media world, all services have a place.

It’s so subjective and shouldn’t be reduced, as so many things are in these binary times, to a simple (forgive the pun) black-and-white choice.

Does it really matter if people watch a bit of BBC, a bit of Netflix and then Amazon Prime? Is the Culture Secretary familiar with the word smorgasbord?

My own parents, both 78, take the word of BBC Look North as the Sermon on the Mount but are devoted also to an Irish music channel they’ve hunted out on Sky.

Speaking at a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting last year, Ms Dorries postured that the BBC suffered from a “kind of groupthink” that excluded working-class people and imbued its coverage with a perceived left-wing bias.

Well, sorry, but like Ms Dorries, who has written novels inspired by her gritty Liverpool upbringing, I was born working class and I don’t feel excluded.

Neither does my husband, a builder, who would pay anything, I suspect, just to enjoy David Attenborough, Countryfile and Springwatch.

To this, I’d definitely add historical programmes such as A House Through Time, excellent drama, such as the new serial Responder, written by a former police officer and starring Bafta-winning Martin Freeman, and Radio 4’s Today programme.

So go on then, Ms Dorries, call me a snob, but I think all this is worth £159 of my hard-earned cash. Currently it works out at £13.25, paid by monthly direct debit.

I do understand that every household will have its own financial pressures but in the long list of direct debits leaving our household bank account, this £13.25 is definitely in the bottom percentile.

And if you knew how it compares with our regular bill for Sky TV and broadband, or even Amazon Prime, you would understand why it still looks like decent value to me.

It’s also why Nadine Dorries must stop scoring political points and start treating the BBC with the respect it deserves – not least from the Culture Secretary.