Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand sullied the BBC's image Photo: PA  The most telling comment to emerge from the biggest exercise in audience research ever conducted by the BBC didn't come from the sort of viewer or listener you would expect to be disgusted by foul and profane language from our national broadcaster – a major, say, or a matron of a certain age. Instead, it came from a young man in his twenties. "I swear when I'm in the pub with my mates," he said. "But I'd never swear in front of my mum. I'd hate it if the BBC just gave up on the idea that you don't swear in certain situations."  Doubtless it can get fairly "edgy" down the pub when the boys are in. This is a quality that the BBC has put at the heart of its public-service remit, as it has pushed the envelope of public taste. But I'm prepared to bet my licence fee that this young man wouldn't team up with one of his mates to leave obscene messages on the phone of an elderly man about the sexual proclivities of his granddaughter.  Such an instinct among the young, not just for what is morally right and wrong on the big issues but also for what amounts to simple good manners, may have come as something of a surprise to Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, and his senior producers. They have been called in by the BBC Trust and told to clean up their act, even after the 9pm watershed.  The survey, of 2,700 people aged 11 and over, revealed sufficient concern about swearing and gratuitous sex on BBC programmes for the trust to demand an overhaul of editorial policy. Offensive language before 10pm will now be permissible only in "exceptional" circumstances.  The findings and their consequences are a bitter blow to the self-satisfied habitués of the BBC. These are media managers who were formed in the liberal heyday of the Seventies, when, frankly, we were all busy undermining the fuddy-duddy mores of Lord Reith's generation – liberal central-casting had given us John Cleese in a bowler hat, to laugh and point at those stuffy standards. Dangerously, they grew up to believe that the cultural experiments of their youth had established a social continuum of vulgarity. Bluntly, BBC execs became as embarrassing as all middle-aged men and women who think they are still down with the kids.  Imagine their surprise, a generation later, to discover that the society they seek to entertain and inform is somewhat bored and mildly embarrassed by their potty-mouth infantilism. The salons of Broadcasting House must today be sombre and bleak places, as top programmers in linen suits stroke wispy beards and stare forlornly at schedules that need to be filled with something more demanding than profanity and sex. Some harder work is called for.  The turning point – what we might call the watershed moment – came when Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross abused the veteran actor Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter on-air. A contemporary history of the BBC will show that this was when being right-on became a turn-off.  Some viewers vented their anger at the Ross/Brand affair by demanding that the licence fee be abolished and the BBC broken up. The still-smouldering embers of this resentment will have been fanned by revelations this week that the BBC's management ran up a champagne bill for its "celebrities", on our tab, of £48,000.  But the BBC's new audience research is revealing: most of us don't want the BBC to go; we just want it to behave. Or, rather, we want to stop it being abused, as we would want to see an elderly and respected relative treated properly. Viewers and listeners said the corporation should be upholding standards in British broadcasting, but instead had stooped to the level of its commercial rivals.  It's perhaps out of date to apply the affectionate soubriquet "Auntie" to the BBC, reminiscent as it is of more genteel times. Nevertheless, it is as if an old aunt has fallen among ageing hippies, bemused by their strange language and alternative habits. The young man from the pub, in particular, and the audience research more generally, suggest that we consider the BBC worth rescuing. Come on, Auntie, it's time to go home.  This redemptive attitude says much about what we Britons expect from our national institutions. Like errant members of the family, we'll cut them off, say we'll have nothing more to do with them, even say we despise them – but, deep down, we will continue to cherish them.  Our relationship with the BBC is just such a complex, love-hate affair. There's Ross and Brand and Chris Moyles, explicit border-line rape on Holby Blue and the lazy bloke-fest that is Mock the Week. Perhaps worst of all, there's Moneybox and Quote Unquote.  But then there are Radios 3 and 4, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, the World Service, Gardeners' Question Time, QI and Gavin Hewitt in any world trouble spot we want him to be at a moment's notice.  We are bound to ask the question: what would we do if the BBC wasn't there? And, just as the House of Commons has recently been revealed as an open sewer from which we recoil, but is yet our vital legislature, we might acknowledge that the BBC shapes the way we live as much as it is shaped by us.  There is a public desire to be led by our established institutions, while holding them to account. In that context, our state broadcaster is not unlike our established Church. There is a vestige of spiritual hunger for the Church of England to play a role in shaping the life of the nation and a frustration when it fails to deliver.  The furious initial urge is to dispose of it, but in more rational moments we will concede that it's worth saving, so long as it works properly. We won't always treasure it, but we're motivated by a sense of the truth that we don't know what we've got until it's gone.  So it seems to be with the BBC. It is meant both to reflect and to mould the character of the nation. Some will claim dolefully that it does reflect our national life: nasty and brutish. But this wake-up call from the BBC's subscribers, as well as the policy response to it, offers some hope.  Last year, Mr Thompson gave a speech at an event organised by the public-theology think tank Theos, entitled "Faith, Morality and the Media". Given the events that have embroiled the BBC subsequently, that title has proved to be something of an albatross around his neck.  But the truth is that the public is now holding what it pays for to moral account. And the BBC is found wanting. In that speech, Mr Thompson said: "It is my and my senior colleagues' job to ensure as far as possible that the right decisions are made and to be the first port of call if and when the public complain." Tell that to the young man in the pub, Mr Thompson, who doesn't want you to swear in front of his mum.
The liberal elite that runs the corporation now has a chance to reflect the    public mood, says George Pitcher.