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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week my guests are Patrick Barwise and Peter York, who are the

authors of a new book, well, whose title certainly gives you a sense of what its line is. It's

the war against the BBC, how an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain's

greatest cultural institution and why you should care. Welcome both.

Thank you.

That's a, you know, that's fight and talk. But start with, because I know that a lot of people,

you know, many among them spectator readers will, you know, have issues with the BBC. So to

start, can I ask you both say, you know, what's the BBC, as you see it, for?

What's the point of it?

It's to hold us together.

It's to inform us.

And that really, Matt, Lord Ruth set it out to inform, educate and entertain in that order.

And never more than now have we needed.

It's desperately needed now.

It's desperately needed in the age of the Great Replacement Plan

or Q&N or any of those things.

And it's desperately needed now,

now that we might face Vax refusenics. My answer to the question is it's what law three said that it's it's to inform

educate and entertain it so happens it has a lot of other knock-on effects because it sits at the heart

of our very, very successful broadcasting industry and some of our wider creative industry is

...