Every morning I wake up to the dulcet tones of broadcaster and journalist John Humphrys on Radio Four’s Today programme. He doesn’t exactly whisper sweet nothings into my shell-like, he can be quite disagreeable and argumentative, but something inside of me stirs and he gets me going every time in a way my Goblin Teasmade just can’t do.

Radio Four is one of the wonders of the modern world and represents everything that is great about the British Broadcasting Corporation or the BBC or the Beeb or Auntie as it’s variously and affectionately known. Being a pensioner, I no longer have to pay for my ‘TV licence’ but, for all those years I did, I never begrudged a single penny, not when I thought about the range and the quality of the services and programming on offer.

Now I read that Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw wants a debate on the future of funding for public sector broadcasting. Well Ben Bradshaw, Doris Brazil has had enough of you! Great Britain needs an institution that is motivated by quality not by profit, that has the resources to invest in world class natural history programming and sumptuous period drama, which delivers local as well as national news, and that provides intelligent radio twenty four three hundred and sixty five; an institution that has John Humphrys.