By and large, I am not a fan of the phrase “You couldn't make it up!”. First, we are a species that came up with Dune, Tristam Shandy and The Clangers. We can, quite obviously, make anything up. And, secondly, “You couldn't make it up” is the province of Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson. Privileged yet inexplicably outraged men, continually hissy over life's odd pips. They are ungracious, cavilling malcontents. I eschew their mentality utterly.

But be this as it may, this week, I myself have finally had reason to utter the phrase “You couldn't make it up!” On Monday the BBC Trust announced that it was going to set up a consultation, to look at the BBC's licence-fee collection tactics. This follows accusations that last year's TV campaign was “bullying”. One ad featured a helicopter hovering over a street, with a voiceover saying: “Your town, your street, your home - it's all in our database.” Subsequently, the Conservative MP Gary Streeter put forward an early day motion in Parliament, signed by 60 MPs, criticising the BBC's “intimidating” attitude. “This is a serious matter,” he said. “A surprising number of people - particularly elderly people - don't have a television. I don't see why they should be bullied and harassed in that way.” Amazingly, it didn't seem to have occurred to Streeter that if these nerve-racked OAPs didn't have a television, they wouldn't have seen the advert anyway - and so would have been spared the psychological thumbscrews of hearing someone saying such a modern word as “database”. Ipso facto, duh.

And yet a costly consultation is now under way whereby a company that sets a global standard in excellence is having to justify reminding people to actually pay for it. YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP!* The move comes in the same 12 months that the BBC Trust decided to withhold £39 million from the BBC's online arm until it was satisfied that it wouldn't “stifle competition”. The BBC's education online service, BBC Jam - which provided free revision help with GCSEs and A levels, and had 170,000 users - was also terminated, after the trust decided that it was “damaging the interests of the competition”.

Now, I'm not the BBC. I don't live at Wood Lane, London W12, and I don't pay Jonathan Ross £18 million a year to stay with me - although, to be honest, on some particularly febrile Friday nights, I have considered it. But if I were the BBC, I would be feeling all confused and angry - like one of the Jets in West Side Story. The corporation's brief is that it must offer services that justify a controversial public subscription. And yet, it must not be so brilliant or commercial that it stifles competition. That feels like the margin of error is about 0.8 per cent either way - and that if anyone had more than, say, three good ideas in a week, they would have to be fired, in case they made someone at ITV2 or Google feel sad.

Of course, the problem is that, as a public service provider, the BBC isn't a simple profit-or-loss machine, like its commercial rivals. It is - and has been, since 1922 - an idea; a fabulous, ludicrous, inspired idea. This means that judging its success has, ultimately, to be argued over, instead of proven by the accounts ledger. Since the Hutton inquiry, the eight decades-long argument about the BBC has become increasingly narrow. Angry-sounding people keep shouting about “accountability”, “agendas” and “bias”, as if the BBC were a shady gang of foreigners, stockpiling weapons-grade plutonium; rather than being a broadcasting corporation in West London, making In the Night Garden and Strictly Come Dancing. After the resignation of Peter Fincham, the BBC One Controller, over the risible “Queengate” affair, a whole new layer of management has been installed, to double-check and query all communiqués. You can imagine what a thrusting, creative atmosphere that has inspired. We are making the BBC gradually peck itself to death, like a big, neurotic hen.

The bizarre thing is, we don't really want to do that. Even the people who think they hate the BBC, and see it as a Marxist fleshpot presided over by an unholy triumvirate of pouffes, perverts and Paxman, don't want it to disappear. They still love Radio 3, and Attenborough, and Dickens adaptations. Whatever our politics or interests, the BBC is as much a part of being British as drizzle, toast and “Sorry”. As a nation, we'd be devastated if the BBC finally did become a commercial channel and started plying its trade in seedy back streets - tottering in Perspex heels and offering “£25 for a documentary about Atlantic Ocean bottom-feeders, darlin'”.

Of course, the BBC does any number of stupid, offensive or annoying things in any given year. It does, after all, employ Vernon Kaye. And that long-haired git on Coast. But when it comes to the continuing existence of the licence fee, we do all need to think for a minute, and then just shuuuuuuuut uuuuuuup. Anyone who genuinely finds the licence the most upsetting aspect of life in Britain has almost certainly attained a state of existential nirvana, and should go volunteer in a soup kitchen, instead.

The BBC can't be made into a bland, cringeing, apologising rebuttal unit. The whole point of the BBC is that it's a fabulous mad aunt, who lives in a dilapidated cottage in the middle of the metropolis surrounded by books, bassoons and children. And that if you go in the kitchen to put the kettle on, an emeritus professor of microbioecology will strike up a conversation about the pivotal nature of wheat mutation in 20,000BC, and be so engaging that you end up opening a couple of bottles of claret and staying for dinner. It's 38p a day for the Olympics, the Shipping Forecast, Doctor Who, The Thick of It, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Life On Mars, Terry Wogan's breakfast show, and the most recognised and trusted website in the world. If you'd rather spend that on a first-class stamp, to complain about it to your MP, you're mad.
*Wow. It feels quite good saying that. I feel rather powerful. Suddenly I want to iron my jeans and be absolutely vile to some poor minimum-wage drone at a customer services call centre for two hours. I might even shout: “I know my rights, sunshine!”

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