To justify the imposition of an annual licence fee, BBC programming has always had to offer a combination of popularity and piety.Television, which currently takes 55% of the ￡159 fee, has always tended to provide the popularity.In the 1970s the comic double act of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise won audiences of over 20m.Today, "Strictly Come Dancing", a game show, gets ratings of 7m.Radio tends to do the piety.The World Service broadcasts in 42 languages to 492m people.Radio 3 offers programmes with such titles as "Discovering Music: Monteverdi Madrigals".Radio 4 offers the implausibly wholesome "In Our Time".Recent episodes have included "Hegel's Philosophy of History", "The Hittites" and "Tang Era Poetry".The common man has not always been grateful for the BBC's efforts.A 1950s sketch show described the BBC as a "part of the English heritage. Like suet pudding and catarrh".But the BBC mattered.Its news (despite grumbles about lefty bias) was trusted, its radio all but loved.For Britons of a certain age not only the outspread century but humdrum daily life itself was, like a bourgeois Book of Hours, measured out by its tread: breakfast with "Today", supper after "The Archers" and insomnia with the shipping forecast, whose litany of names "North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty..."
