If he returned to the UK today, on the BBC’s 100th anniversary, Morris would find that pretty much all of its output is one long advertisement for itself. In one series, the presenter unearths “lost” BBC recordings with all the reverence one might expect an archaeologist to accord to some piece of Etruscan pottery. In another, the son of the DJ John Peel (the BBC gives much airtime to broadcasting dynasties) discusses his father’s record collection. The BBC, forbidden from carrying paid advertisements on its own channels, pays for posters that advertise its own programmes but also for a more general form of advertising that promotes the whole BBC with slogans such as “This is our BBC”.

The sense that the BBC is “ours” and that it is a “national institution” has, in fact, done great damage to the broadcaster. There is a cosy, self-congratulatory tone to much of its programming. Its presenters can expect to become “national institutions”, which greatly increases their earning power from sources other than their formal salaries. Meanwhile, its position as the national broadcaster has made its political reporting lazy. It expects to be at the front of the queue for interviews and inside information: there was, for example, much indignation last Friday when Liz Truss failed to give the BBC first dibs in her press conference. This means that its definition of journalism often means just repeating what politicians tell their interlocuters: “Friends of the Prime Minister tell me that…”, and so on. What gets lost in this is real research.

The keystone of the BBC is the licence fee — an institution similar to one of those ancien regime taxes on windows or powder for wigs. Everyone who watches is required to pay for the privilege and the fee is complicated and messy to collect. Every householder in the country gets stern letters telling them that they must pay and, ostensibly, detector vans can pick up illegal sets in much the same way that the Gestapo could find the position of Special Operations radio operators in occupied France. The exception to this is the BBC World Service, which is paid for out of general taxation. It is also the part of the BBC that commands most respect. Anyone following events in Ukraine will note that the experts from the World Service are usually less smooth than their counterparts in the mainstream BBC, but they are almost invariably better informed and more interesting.

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The problems with the licence fee are obvious. Once the BBC had an effective monopoly on Broadcasting in the UK — though there were always a few heroic dissidents who insisted on getting their information from Radio Tirana. Independent television companies have existed since the Fifties but they were regulated in ways that meant that they had to observe the same kinds of rules as the BBC. Now, however, anyone with a computer can watch programmes from anywhere in the world and many don’t bother with television sets at all. Anyone who listens to France Culture or watches the Franco-German television channel Arte would regard the suggestion that the BBC is the best broadcaster in the world as laughable. Most of all, the BBC faces competition from the big American streaming services which have deep pockets and the advantage of starting from scratch, unencumbered by the veneration for its own traditions that does the BBC such damage.

There is a simple way out. Sell the BBC, or sell the particular programmes that it makes. This would be less of a break with the past than it might sound. The BBC already sells its formats to foreign broadcasters. Some say that it would be wrong to sell the BBC because its programmes are popular, but this is an absurd argument — popular programmes are precisely the ones that will get made by private sector companies. And they will be made much better. Not least this will be because Netflix will make celebrity programmes that feature real celebrities rather than just people who are slightly famous because they have appeared in other BBC programmes. There is a core of news and documentary programmes that will probably not attract commercial buyers. But these are precisely the kind of programmes that are made well by the current BBC World Service. A slightly expanded version of this service could be funded by the state — perhaps from the receipts from selling off the rest of the BBC. It would concentrate on factual broadcasting and its gravity would be greatly enhanced by the fact that its presenters would be relatively unknown people who would concentrate on doing their job. They would not have their own twitter accounts and they would certainly not perform cringe-making imitations of Duran Duran, which is what Andrew Marr, until recently the lynchpin of the BBC’s political reporting, once did on one of those charity marathons that the BBC periodically inflicts on its audience.

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So why does no one do it? The Right claim to believe in the free market and constantly mutter about reducing or abolishing the licence fee, but the truth is that they like the BBC as it is. It is, like almost all parts of the establishment, conservative at heart: its coverage of the death of the late Queen would have embarrassed the most slavish of Soviet broadcasters. The Chairman of the BBC from 2011 to 2014, Chris Patten, was a former Tory politician — only in the insane world of current British politics can someone who was a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher be described as a member of the “liberal establishment”. There is plenty of pantouflage between the BBC and the Conservative Party. Michael Gove has worked for the Corporation and Allegra Stratton moved from being a presenter on Newsnight to being Boris Johnson’s press advisor. Robbie Gibb had a 25-year career at the BBC before spending two years in Downing Street under Theresa May and then returning to the BBC board. When Jeremy Paxman stepped down as presenter of Newsnight, he was filmed in a matey little scene cycling a tandem into the sunset with Boris Johnson.

Most of all, Conservatives like the BBC because it is easily bullied. Every time a journalist says something that they do not like, they can make threatening noises about the duty of impartiality and hint that they might appoint some particularly brutal Gauleiter as chairman of the governors. Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph perfectly encapsulates this relationship. For a while, he refused to pay his licence fee. The ostensible casus belli was, in fact, a good one. The BBC refused to sack the oafish, pretentious, and unfunny comedian Russell Brand after he used a radio programme to make offensive remarks about a young woman to her grandfather. However, refusing to pay his licence fee has not stopped Moore from appearing on the BBC or from presenting programmes (for which, one assumes, he was paid with licence payers’ money). It was even suggested that he might be made chairman of the BBC governors.

The Left should put a stop to all this. Getting rid of the BBC would end the absurd Tory pantomime of simultaneously getting uncritical coverage and complaining about Left-wing bias. An enlarged World Service would be much better. Neutrality, objectivity, and balance are all problematic words but a broadcasting service that has managed to annoy the governments of China and Russia must be doing something right.

The next government is probably going to be a Labour one and no one doubts either that it is going to have to deal with appallingly difficult circumstances. The BBC has done much to trivialise politics — think of the cringe-making television career of Ed Balls after he lost his parliamentary seat. But if a small, news-focused BBC core were built around the World Service, it would encourage seriousness about public affairs and a new level of clarity and concision from our leaders. Perhaps we will go back to the wonderful days when Clement Attlee was asked whether he wanted to comment on some matter and replied with one word: “No.”

For the first time, O’Brien’s listenership has overtaken Ferrari’s. And for those of us who love phone-in programmes, it’s a symbolic moment in the evolution of the format.

I should acknowledge, incidentally, that it’s terribly unfair to bring up Sawyer’s joke. It dates back to 2006, when O’Brien was still struggling to make the transition from showbiz hack to grown-up broadcaster. In those days, you were as likely to find him interviewing Dick and Dom as Ken Clarke. And he wasn’t above a bit of old-fashioned union-bashing; during a 2007 tube strike, he suggested that Londoners retaliate by boycotting the leader of the RMT: “If Bob Crow turns up at your shop, pub, cafe or minicab firm, don’t serve him.” 

His biggest story came in 2009 when he joined in the tabloid baiting of Frank Lampard over his treatment of his ex-girlfriend, only to find the footballer, somewhat enraged, calling in. Lampard gave rather better than he got, though it is possible that he didn’t quite grasp the nature of the phone-in. “Sometimes you should think about things before you speak about them,” he said, which isn’t really how it works.

But O’Brien is more serious than that nowadays. Certainly that’s the view of his bosses. We know this because there’s a simple measure of how a radio station sees its presenters: the calibre of the person chosen to sit in for them when they’re away. In 2004, O’Brien’s cover on Easter Monday was James Hewitt, famous for having committed adultery with Princess Diana; fifteen years later, it was Labour MP Jess Phillips. Much more serious, you see.

The critical moment in his transformation came during the 2014 election campaign for the European Parliament, when he got a chance to interview Nigel Farage, a man he clearly loathed. The Ukip leader had recently remarked that he’d be concerned if a group of Romanian men moved in next door, and O’Brien demanded an explanation. What’s the difference between that situation and a group of German children moving in next door? he asked, and Farage was nonplussed. “You know what the difference is,” he replied, but O’Brien denied any such thing: “I honestly don’t.”

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He did know. Obviously. Everyone listening knew what Farage was nudging towards. A leader column in the Sun spelt it out: “This is racism, pure and simple: Romanians, he is suggesting, are criminals to be feared.” Indeed he was, and he might reasonably have expected the Sun to be onside, given some of its previous headlines: “Our crime wave is good news for Romania”, “Beasts from the East”, “Capital hit by 28,000 Romanian criminals”.

For the purposes of the interview, it didn’t really matter whether Romanian men were more likely to be criminals than were German children. The point was not to explore the issue, but simply to display open hostility to Farage, and maybe even trap him into saying something overtly racist.

The incident followed in the wake of a celebrated television encounter the previous year, when Eddie Mair (now the host of LBC’s drivetime show) said to Boris Johnson: “You’re a nasty bit of work, aren’t you?” And it was equally effective. Just as Johnson’s career wasn’t arrested by Mair’s rudeness, so Farage — despite claims in the Left-wing newspapers that he’d been “hamstrung”, “skewered”, “humiliated” by O’Brien — went on to lead Ukip to a stunning victory in the Euro-elections.

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Since then, O’Brien’s stock has continued to rise, largely because he’s very good at his job. He has a range of tones, from sympathy for callers with tales of suffering, through to patronising sarcasm for those who don’t agree with him. Most common is a shrugging, brow-furrowed resignation about the state of the nation. It’s the result, perhaps, of having been on the losing side of every national vote since his run-in with Frank Lampard, and because it’s not possible to sustain three hours of anger every day. “We are where we are” — that’s his world-weary catchphrase. Or alternatively, after he’s run through the charge-sheet yet again on how the country has let itself down: “And that’s why we are where we are.”

He reserves a good deal of his scorn for the “cap-doffing, forelock-tugging” types who aren’t as articulate as him. But he is at least aware of his own humble place in the pantheon of polite society: “When did you realise you were clever?” he fawningly asked the fox-killing, kimono-wearing celebrity tax-lawyer Jolyon Maugham. He often comes across as sanctimonious, superior and smug, of course, but that’s part of the schtick, integral to his appeal. Because while the tone of more-in-sorrow-than-anger piety may irritate some, it provides a self-righteous safety-blanket for others.

He is, in short, a master of the new media world, one in which opinion and tribal values count for more than a pursuit of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In the social-media age, he is one of the finest practitioners of Radio Twitter. Instead of it just being the callers who are opinionated, partisan and given to repetition — as always on a phone-in — the host now adopts the same approach.

And consequently he embodies many of the flaws found on social media.

His political analysis is broad-brush, to put it politely. He has told us so often that Boris Johnson is Britain’s Donald Trump, that the two have eventually blurred into one, and a diatribe against the former is invariably laced with references to the latter. Meanwhile, pretty much everything comes back to Brexit in the end, even ball-tampering in cricket.

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​​In common with many Twitter users, he likes to use hypotheticals against hypocrisy in a can-you-imagine-if-that-were-a-Labour-MP way. It’s a form of whataboutery that sits on the fence — we seldom learn if the response to X’s comments is correct; only that it’d be different if Y had said that — but it does provide an opportunity to attack the newspapers.

And if there’s one thing guaranteed to rile social media it’s the old media on which it still depends entirely. O’Brien has an animus against the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and, particularly, the Daily Mail — though he is quieter about the Express, where he once edited the paper’s gossip column. His anger can lead him into strange territory: critics of the Leveson Report get dismissed as people “bleating about how the government shouldn’t control the press”.

All of this works equally well from the opposite political position, of course. So although he’s the best at it, O’Brien’s not the only one on this tack. Among his rivals, the most convincing for a while was, ironically, Nigel Farage, who had his own show on LBC for three years and who proved — like George Galloway on TalkSport — to be genuinely interested in having an argument with dissenting callers. (After Farage’s departure in 2020, O’Brien tweeted in triumph: “We got our station back.”)

Others have fallen by the wayside. Katie Hopkins in 2017 and Maajid Nawaz this year both lost their LBC shows for Twitter offences. She called for a “final solution” to the problem of terrorism, while he spoke against the Covid vaccine and railed against the “network of fascists who seek a New World Order”. The latter comment seemed to be straying into conspiracist territory, a sometimes unclear but always present danger on social media.

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“I don’t do conspiracies,” says O’Brien. “I just don’t.” But he is happy to suggest that democracy is dictated by a small group of press barons — “the non-dom billionaires who installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street” — and even to allude to “the one at the back of the room, pulling all the strings”. Most notoriously, he indulged the patently absurd lies told by Carl “Nick” Beech about VIP paedophile-rings, a conspiracy theory that hurt actual people.

Unless your life was horribly affected by Beech’s fantasies, this is mostly good knockabout fun. But it does lose sight of what used to be the central value of the phone-in show: the way it served as a mass focus-group. O’Brien long since drove away most of those who might not share his views on such subjects as Trump, Johnson, and Brexit, and his show resembles a familiar social media echo chamber.

But there’s no doubt that this is the future of the format in a fractured and partisan world. LBC has decided that the requirement for balance in broadcasting can be made right across the schedule, rather than within any one show, so that each presenter is allowed, indeed encouraged, to be one-sided. This requires a different attitude, which is why O’Brien never really made the grade when presenting Newsnight. It’s also why LBC has — with the exceptions of Eddie Mair and Shelagh Fogarty — not poached presenters from the BBC.

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If you want the old-fashioned version of the phone-in, where you find out what people are thinking and how public opinion is shifting, then you have to go to the man who was LBC’s number one until last week. Nick Ferrari is just as opinionated — if less predictable in those opinions — yet he allows a far greater diversity among those who get put on air. And he remains courteous to all but the most extreme, giving the impression that he means it when he says, “I want to hear your calls”. But last week’s listening figures suggested a changing of the guard.

Personally, I’m a little saddened by this development, because I do want the old-fashioned version. I’ve been addicted to the phone-in for forty years, ever since I first heard the magnificently irascible Brian Hayes in what is now O’Brien’s slot. But even then there were naysayers. 

“The more I hear commercial radio the more repellent I find it,” the comedian Kenneth Williams noted in his diary, back in 1973, the year LBC became Britain’s first legally approved independent radio station. “The din created by the half-baked talking to the half-educated is horrible.”