Alex Belfield, the Nottingham stalker whose controversial YouTube channel propagated racism, misogyny and bullying, is a man who seems to have an almighty grudge against the BBC. With recent controversies ranging from Jimmy Savile to Martin Bashir's Princess Diana interview, criticism of Britain's public broadcaster is certainly not contained to the fringes of society.
But Belfield's actions strayed far from a journalistic exposé of the corporation and that is not the reason why he is now behind bars. The judge in Belfield's case made it clear that he was being sent to prison for his online harassment and stalking of several individuals - with one of his victims labelling him the Harold Shipman of trolling.
His actions raged from spreading vicious lies about his victims through to publishing their personal details, including their home address, online. But in determining Belfield's motivations, and why his YouTube videos garnered hundreds of thousands of views, one can't help turning to the BBC for an answer.
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Belfield, 42, of Mapperley, started his career at the age of 16 on hospital radio in Nottingham, launching a career in radio that included 15 years at the BBC. Some of this time was spent as a presenter for BBC Radio Leeds, where his career with the corporation ended for good in 2011.
He has said of his departure from the BBC that he found it "liberating" to be away from "dreadfully dull and creatively suffocating bosses". But Alex Belfield did not want to simply move on from the BBC and form a new show business career on his own terms.
Instead, his YouTube videos evolved from pantomime and theatre reviews into his "truth-telling" monologues on everything from politics to "cancel culture". But it was when discussing his former employer that Belfield often became the most animated.
Jeremy Vine was just one of the eight victims who were at Nottingham Crown Court during Alex Belfield's trial. When asked during an interview with Nottinghamshire Live whether Belfield fed into an anti-BBC sentiment, Mr Vine said: "For sure.
"He did the whole defund the BBC thing and all of that. Someone told me that 25 percent of all the Freedom of Information requests for one year at the BBC were all from Alex Belfield.
"His whole thing was this crusade that 'the BBC is corrupt' and I disagree with that. That's not why he went to jail, there's nothing criminal there. That's just his riff."
This riff is perhaps best expressed in a video from March 22 this year, where Belfield discusses raids on his home by the police as part of investigations into his behaviour. In the video, Belfield says: "When you tell the truth, and you're a whistle-blower like I, the bomb squad end up coming round, represented by the evil BBC."
He described investigations against him as "the biggest media witch-hunt ever to shut me up, because I was saying too much". I was there for 15 years and I know too much and I'm the only person in show business who doesn't need or want a job," he said.
Belfield regularly evoked his status as a "whistle-blower" to paint an image of himself as a Nostradamus-like figure living in fear of persecution for heresy by the authorities. But looking at some of the anti-BBC content on Belfield's channel calls such an image into question.
In one video, Belfield makes a series of financial allegations about the BBC's Comic Relief charity whilst sat on his toilet pretending to defecate. In another, he calls the comedian Lenny Henry a "sanctimonious p****.
In terms of rattling the BBC's cage, Belfield's videos don't carry the same gravitas as Emily Maitlis' recent lecture in which she claimed that the corporation's board contained an agent of the Tory Party. Ironically, Belfield's videos at many stages don't even match the amount of criticism that the BBC makes of itself.
Nevertheless, Belfield's video seems to have caught the public mood at the right time. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, attitudes towards the BBC have continued to grow ever more complex.
Some surveys suggest that the majority of the British public want the licence fee scrapping, yet others show how much the BBC's output in particular areas is valued - no more so than its recent coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. But questions about an alleged lack of impartiality at the BBC continue to persist, although with one group labelling it left-wing and a seemingly equally-sized group labelling it right-wing.
With the amount of taxpayer money that goes into the BBC, such criticism and debate has been at the heart of the corporation for decades. Only with the onset of social media has it taken on a new lease of life.
Into that new world came Alex Belfield along with several other new political personalities in recent years, ranging from the actor Laurence Fox's Twitter livestreams to YouTube rants by the comedian Jim Davidson. Notwithstanding the continued popularity of the BBC in so many areas, many argue that this new media plurality has given rise to greater consumer choice and to a healthy debate about the future of the nation's public broadcaster.
But in terms of offering stinging critique and biting analysis of where the BBC is going, Alex Belfield can hardly claim to fit into this. Mr Justice Saini at Nottingham Crown Court undermined Belfield's self-portrait of a fearless anti-BBC journalist the most when he said: "I find that the motivating factor in your communications about these complainants was not the exercise of journalistic freedom to comment on matters of public interest, but personal grudges and responses to real or apparent slights."
The grudge that Belfield held against the BBC related to pay. Asked about why he left Radio Leeds in one video, Belfield said: "I asked for a pay rise and they didn't want to pay it so I resigned. I'm a bit bored talking about it to be honest."
But he did talk about the BBC, and jumped on an anti-establishment zeitgeist that had been growing in Britain for years. Instead of using his newfound fame to deliver harsh but fair truths, however, Belfield used his videos to bully, belittle and harass his former colleagues and unsuspecting victims who he had never met.
As debate about the future of the BBC continues, with the new Culture Secretary pledging to continue looking into the future of the licence fee, debate about the future of the corporation should be encouraged - and indeed the corporation itself encourages it. But in learning how to control such debate and on how to ensure that bullies like Belfield aren't a prominent part of it again, social media companies must provide the answer.
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