What the BBC does for us all

Did you see how little the top people get paid at the BBC? They should all go on strike until they get as much money as Piggy Hester.

Only £800,000 a year for running the thing? What a scandal! Piggy is on £1.2 million basic.

Would he have the talent to bring on an inspired cultural landmark like The Apprentice?

In case you have been fortunate enough never to watch it, this programme is a copy of the American original, which features an almost laughably obnoxious man with a ludicrous hairdo called Donald Trump.

Here it features someone almost as unpleasant, but much funnier: Sir Alan Sugar, and a collection of people who want to win a job in Sugar's business "empire ". Their main quality seems to be overweening self-belief based on a startling absence of business knowledge.

Sugar, an ex-market trader who cannot speak decent English, got into selling cheap computers at the right time and was once richer than Bill Gates.

Not being nearly as smart as Bill Gates he did little with his opportunity and is now in property. That, I suspect, is why the show's contestants stay in an ugly building which someone has been trying to flog - unsuccessfully, despite lowering the price by a million or two - for quite a while now.

Tax payers have to pay licence fees to watch this bilge. According to the corporate drivel on their website, the BBC is supposed to:

■Sustain citizenship and civil society
■Promote education and learning
■Stimulate creativity and cultural excellence
■Represent the UK, its nations, regions and communities
■Bring the UK to the world and the world to the UK
■Deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services

The Apprentice does none of these things. I do not think we should be paying for it. If I want to watch tripe, there is plenty elsewhere. It takes no talent to import bad ideas. The people who run the BBC should go and work for Piggy as cashiers.

BBC is not the only public service we are afflicted by. There is also Channel 4. They run Big Brother, which makes The Apprentice look like the work of Euripides.

Both these organisations spend fortunes on the one thing you hope to escape when you switch over from "commercial" TV - commercials. Only they don't call them commercials. They call some "Station Idents". These are to tell morons which channel they're watching. The others are commercials - to entice people to watch programmes that are coming up.

Some are as bad as The Apprentice. None are as bad as Big Brother.

Incidentally, Sugar is "Enterprise Czar" (what that means nobody knows) to the great Blathering Toad of Whitehall, who cannot tell the difference between TV ratings and the real world or between real enterprise and being in the right place at the right time.

He himself has certainly been in the wrong place for all of us for the last 12 years. In advanced countries only the Japanese Stock Market has done worse than ours since he started spunking away our savings.