When I joined the BBC in May 1955 there was only one channel, and we were it. But not for very long: ITV had been given the go-ahead to start in September — an act of cultural barbarism, in our view, and totally unnecessary: we were confident that there was no public demand for it. People were perfectly satisfied with our monopoly service.

But already staff were defecting. It is strange to recall how they were regarded — not just as job-changers but as deserters, traitors, even heretics. Many BBC staff felt an almost religious attachment to the corporation; we were a temple of broadcasting purity, the golden mean between what we saw as the cheap crude commercial populism of the US and the government-run propaganda machine of the USSR.

The strength of this belief derived from the fact that, if it were not true, there was no justification for the licence fee; so we had to believe it. It is not held so strongly now, but it is still there and is part of the argument the BBC is still using to defend itself and its source of revenue.

It was never terribly convincing and has become steadily less so as the commercial channels have shown they can produce excellent programmes in every category, while the BBC screens are plastered with advertising every time they televise a sporting event. Meanwhile the BBC’s need for licence renewal and rises in the fee have made it look more vulnerable to ministerial pressures than its commercial rivals.

An even greater formative influence on the BBC over the years has been that the charter does not require it to produce any programmes. The corporation was set up to provide them, but not necessarily to make them.

Of course when it started it had to produce them — there were no other radio producers in the country back in 1926 — but the dominant ethos has always been that of managing a publishing house rather than editing a newspaper or magazine. So when a third channel became available in the early 1960s it was both a threat and a challenge; the BBC attitude was: “There should not be a third channel, and the BBC should run it.”

These two factors — corporate gigantism and belief in a unique moral mission — have made the BBC what it is today. And yet both are of vanishingly small concern to viewers and listeners. What they value the BBC for, and have throughout its 80-year history, is good programmes, and it has a long and proud tradition of making them.

The behaviour of the BBC has been questioned, challenged and criticised pretty much every day since it was incorporated, but up till now its existence has been taken for granted. Even when I sat on the Annan committee on the future of broadcasting (1974-77) none of the half-a-hundredweight of submissions we received argued seriously for its dissolution.

But the change since then, and particularly in the past 15 or 20 years, has been profound. Videotape, DVDs, CDs, CD-Roms, cable, satellite and the digital revolution have given viewers and listeners a range of programmes unthinkable when I was on the Annan committee, let alone when I joined the BBC back in the monopoly days of 1955. They make it impossible not to ask what the BBC is for. Do we need it at all? And if we do need it, what do we want it to do? And how should it be funded?

I am a Friedmanite; my first reaction is to look to the market for a solution. However, broadcasting has always posed a problem. International telecommunications agreements and a limited frequency spectrum have always in the past created a need, or at least an excuse, for some sort of government intervention or regulation.

But that was then and this is now: cable and satellite broadcasting of digital signals have more or less removed that need, or that excuse. And there is an even bigger threat to that argument coming over the horizon: convergence. It cannot be long before broadband and our TV screens combine to give us access to all available programmes through our computers. In the words of an IT commentator, the computer is converging with television in just the same way as the railway converged with the horse and carriage.

Even a hesitant and moderate libertarian must then ask what business the government has in controlling what we access on our PCs and charging us for the privilege, once terrestrial transmissions are obsolete. It is no different, essentially, from licensing every printing press and bookshop and taxing every reader.

And even if the government continued to try, how would it enforce it? Unless it licensed every PC and laptop (and every mobile phone and BlackBerry for that matter), every user could claim they were not watching, and never watched, the BBC.