This month in Blackpool there is an event both frivolous and oddly important. It is a festival calling itself “Admission All Classes” and sweeps into its capacious Blackpool bosom such diversities as “neo-variety”, theatre, burlesque, illusionism and drag.

Fashionably ironic London entertainers like the Duckie Collective, veterans of gay comedy and edgy shows at the Barbican Pit, share stages with survivors from the music-hall era like the 86-year-old “living legend comedy magic cannonball champion Alec Powell” and a septuagenarian soubrette. They have already had a Venetian Carnival Ball with a man playing a musical saw.

The title is vital. Vanessa Toulmin, curator of the National Fairground Archive and one of the festival's begetters, is herself a fairground kid turned academic (“the only professor who spins candyfloss at weekends) and feels strongly about class segregation in the arts. Victorians, she says sternly, used to go happily from an opera to a fairground booth, and so should we. So this piece of colourful nonsense in the ancient coastal home of pizzazz may have a lesson for the rest of us - Arts Council, BBC, the lot.

Admission All Classes: keep things cheap, make no assumptions about what is “elitist” and what is “popular”. Reconnect everybody with the ability to be genuinely interested and amused, not to think of culture either as “good for you” or “not for the likes of us”. It's the only hope. Artistic snobbery has unleashed too many unenjoyable, emperors-new- clothes scams in the name of Britart, and too many cruel, hateful moronic entertainments in the name of popular TV. Bring back true pleasure: admission all classes.

This burst of enthusiasm is galvanised by poor old Jane Garvey's Ratner moment last week when - as newish presenter of Woman's Hour on Radio 4 - she declared the network has a “massively middle-class bent”, is full of “middle-class ladies talking about cookery” and that she defies anyone to find a programme that “isn't like that”. This outburst was, to be fair, coaxed from her by a newspaper that, while comically middle-class itself, is the spiritual home of angsty old-leftishness. But if she had set out to portray herself as a dim, rude, parlour-socialist snob who never listens to the station she could hardly have done a more thorough job.

I grow bored with defending Radio 4 from these creatures of arrested development. Like every other listener I have sometimes shouted at it, but more often wanted to kiss the radio grille in gratitude for a gem of information, feeling or insight. Like everyone who works freelance, I have from time to time wished (indeed planned) to shake a purblind controller or commissioning editor as a dog shakes a rat. Long ago I once rang the duty office in a fury because Joan Bakewell on PM began a sentence saying that Christmas is the time when we all put our cards “out on the pi-ah-no”, thus assuming that all listeners had not only a piano but a baby grand with room for cards.

But such aberrations were rare then, and are rarer now. Of all the BBC's mixed bag of channels Radio 4 alone spends its long days trying to offer good-humoured intelligence and a boundless but civil curiosity about the world and its people. It also strives to pass on complex information with what Russell Stannard (the physicist whose books explained Einstein for children) beautifully defined as “a courteous translation”. That it also keeps The Archers going is perhaps unfortunate, but forgivable. Idle journalists sneeringly write about the “genteel uplands” of Radio 4, or call it “staid”: it is notable, however, that their own newspapers regularly pinch stories off Radio 4 programmes, ringing up to beg for the contact number. We do notice, you know.

It is also noticeable that they fall at the feet of comedy artists whose star first rose on Radio 4 (from Alan Partridge to Little Britain, from Linda Smith to People Like Us, radio is the growth medium and TV just the frame). As to middle-class cookery... what? She is thinking of TV, surely. The last two features I made for R4 were about the lives of burlesque strippers and of maritime pilots on the industrial Tees; speaking as a listener, File on Four regularly enlightens me on such cookery-free topics as the surveillance state and the obsolescence of NHS radiotherapy equipment.

But the really important lesson from last week's uproar about the “middle-class bent” is that those two words in that conjunction have to go. Out with the bins, and don't recycle them. They have ceased to have meaning and become a mere insult aimed at whatever group most irritates the speaker (golfers, Lloyd-Webber fans, whoever).

In truth, we are nearly all middle-class, from the Pole who did well with his removal van and bought a couple of flats, to the WRVS lady running the tea bar in a prison visiting room. Few would wish to pose as upper-class, and those who call themselves working-class are usually being sentimental about their forebears, while embracing freedoms and ambitions that mark them as unmistakeably middle.

We have, to be sure, a growing and depressed underclass and a cadre of children whose education failed to give them help or hope. But that is another story; and frankly, BBC radio is one of the few free sources of varied culture and unpatronising education that they may chance on. And they surprisingly often do. Bashing “middle classes” is shadow- boxing, a tedious survival of spotty teenage attitude. Radio 4, like Blackpool's festival, is Admission All Classes. What enrages its enemies is precisely that: unlike them, it excludes and despises nobody.

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