You only really get to understand the true value of the BBC when you live thousands of miles from home.
Working in the Far East, my radio was turned to the World Service day and night, a refuge from state-controlled media.
I never lost the habit. It’s still on in the bedroom, because I’m a news junkie and I want to hear the truth.
That’s what we expect from the BBC, and virtually always that’s what we get – but that accuracy and impartiality is under siege.
The Gary Lineker row brought an ugly information war into the open as never before.
From Right and Left, Auntie Beeb is under fire. No matter which way it jumps, the Corporation will be vilified. But perhaps Garygate is a blessing in disguise.
The BBC is a national institution, like the NHS, and a similarly world-class achievement.
For over a century, it has been an independent broadcasting voice for the people. It has to be cherished and supported or it will die.
But if that independence is to be maintained, there has to be change.
Party politics must be taken out of the top management.
It must not be run by yes-man appointees of any party.
The alternative is degeneration into a US-style of loud, politically-prejudiced voices, who can’t be trusted to even search for the truth.
The advent of social media has made infinitely harder the BBC’s duty to maintain impartiality.
News gatherers and presenters know their duty, and discharge it with commendable professionalism as their courageous coverage of the war in Ukraine has demonstrated.
But celebrity contributors are in the grip of Twitter incontinence.
Such is their self-importance, they cannot shut up. If they must blether, it has to be with a health warning that these are their private views and not those of the BBC.
This isn’t a trivial matter of somebody talking out of turn.
Britain is engaged in an undeclared war over Ukraine. The country is in a cost of living crisis. Who knows where Northern Ireland is going? The party in power is riven with dissent, and unfit to rule.
In times like these, the role of the BBC is to hold the nation together.
The brouhaha over garrulous Gary will blow over – until the next one. The whole point of the external review now under way is that there should not be a next one.
We can do without them, but we can’t do without a national broadcaster whose judgment and objectivity we can rely on.
