Responding to my complaint, the Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, invited me to lunch. He is a thoughtful, well-educated man. I suggested to him that the television licence fee was the modern equivalent of the tithes which people used to have to pay to the Church of England: even if you did not believe in Anglicanism, or even in God, you still had by law to enrich the Church because your "betters" considered it good for the nation. For the same reason as the tithes went, I argued, so should the licence fee.  Mr Thompson did not demur from the comparison, though he rejected my conclusion. He explained to me that the role of the BBC was based on Matthew Arnold's idea that culture could perform the elevating role in society which religion, because people ceased to believe it, had vacated.  Searching for how £6 million a year for Jonathan Ross might assist the dissemination of what Arnold called "the best that is known and thought in the world", I read Ross's recent autobiography, aptly named Why do I say these things?  Among the subjects covered are dogs' testicles, Ross's testicles, homosexual dogs, dogs that masturbate, urinating in one's pants, urinating in one's family dustbin, Ross's sexual encounter with a vacuum cleaner, the colour of his pubic hair, the details of his genital wart and how he had to break wind on an aeroplane. Chapters have titles like "Never mind the -------s, where's a public toilet when you need one?"  Ross includes many swear words to emphasise his points, and he says that the life-changing cultural event of his youth was when he saw the Sex Pistols swearing on television: "It was like someone had jumped into the television from the real world and shouted out to me to wake up and start living."  Ross's vast salary and years of success show that he had a correct intuition about the way our culture was going. He spotted that being foul-mouthed and rude would make him indulged by its bureaucrats because they would hate, above all things, to be considered stuffy. And he saw that a youth-comedy subculture in which performers, almost all male, made dirty jokes and tried to humiliate their guests, could move, lucratively, from the fringe to the mainstream. It got him the OBE. Although he is virtually my age, he still passes – at least among executives of much the same vintage – as the Pied Piper who can deliver the young into the BBC's hands.  I do not think that Wossy was merely cynical. It is clear from his book that he really was and is thrilled to find the screen filled with his favourite naughty words. By his own account, he knows very little about history, literature, foreign countries, religion. He probably does believe that swearing is the acme of "real world" activity. He is the voice of the first time in history when our cultural potentates decided that what used to be called "bad language" was good.  The answer to his book's question, "Why do I say these things?" is – because, Jonathan, you are the big mouth of an age with nothing worth saying.  The interesting question now, though, is whether that age is passing. Just as people now realise that financiers who traded "credit swap derivatives" may not, to put it mildly, have earned their multi-million-pound bonuses, so they ask why Ross, who is rude, gets £6 million of our involuntary money, whereas Edward Stourton, who is polite, is downgraded. They have failed to turn Ross's book into a best-seller. I shall be surprised if, after the first few weeks of media curiosity, they stay with Ross's programmes in the old numbers. Like "positions" in our bust banks, the BBC's Ross culture is "unwinding".  Some defenders of Ross and Brand's Sachs attack point out that, when it was first broadcast on Radio 2, only two or three listeners complained, so no one much was truly offended. I would interpret this fact differently. For years now, those who do not like the BBC's version of public culture have been cowed. We have feared that, by complaining, we would identify ourselves as "sad". And we have known that our complaints, if made, would have achieved nothing more than a patronising letter from a BBC operative explaining the nature of "cutting edge" comedy.  Now, though, it feels different. Frank Skinner, the comedian, is making a Panorama programme about obscenity and swear-words in comedy. He interviewed me for it this week. He said that when people argued against obscenity, they always did so on behalf of others, mainly children, as if they themselves were unaffected. No, I replied, I was really speaking only for myself – when I watch Ross's obscenities I am, myself, shocked. I felt strangely empowered by this confession, and not alone.  And, why, Frank wanted to know, did I have the right, just because I did not like Wossy's gags, to try to ban them? I had no such right, I said. My complaint is simply that I am made to pay for this stuff, by law. The Public Purposes of the BBC, expressed in its Charter, state that it must take the lead in "sustaining citizenship and civil society" and "stimulating creativity and cultural excellence". How does laughing at the Queen's sexual organs (Mock the Week), or the verbal torture of the 78-year-old Mr Sachs, assist?  Swearing, in itself, is not really the issue. It is a symptom of something deeper, rather as lesions are symptoms of Aids. It is, indeed, about the civil society to which the BBC Charter refers. We see it being made uncivil, often by the people paid to upholdxit.  Funnily enough, Jonathan Ross makes the point, without realising it, in his book. He recounts an incident in his youth. A family of rather nasty boys lived nearby. The youngest took to running up to old women and hitting their shins with conkers, shouting, "---- off, old lady". "Why?" writes Ross. "No one knew. The older brothers were almost certainly behind it". When Wossy was tormenting Mr Sachs, his "older brothers" in the BBC were, in a sense, behind it. By indulging him and paying him so much, they had given him the licence. Until that licence is decisively revoked, I shan't pay the fee.
In bringing back the disgraced presenter, the BBC betrays the values it is    paid to uphold, argues Charles Moore