'Why am I trying to disturb the consciences and sense of justice of people who plainly have neither?'

Peter Hitchens is one of those people with a longstanding attachment to the BBC. Its a BBC of the past and his imagination, of his memories and hopes. He can't bring himself to call for its abolition because, as he says, he loves what it used to be, and what it ought to be. But, as of this week (as he writes in today's Mail on Sunday), he no longer feels any inclination to defend it.

Despite feeling that in the past two or three years "it has grown sharply worse" and that there has been "a crude slide into open partiality on so many things", the straw that finally broke his camel's back was an "insulting" reply from the BBC to his complaint about Christmas Day's Gavin & Stacey breaking BBC editorial guidelines by condoning the use of illegal drugs before the watershed:

I was wasting my breath. They ignored what I had said, and responded to different points I had not made.

(Ah yes, that's BBC Complaints in a nutshell!)

And I thought: 'Why am I trying to disturb the consciences and sense of justice of people who plainly have neither?'

So that's it. He simply "can't be bothered" to defend the corporation any longer.

Given that it's 'Peter Hitchens of The Daily Mail' (actually The Mail on Sunday, a different paper), I'm guessing many a BBC type will shrug this off. But they should beware: it's another straw in the wind.

"Christmas Day on BBC One brought the nation together"

BBC folk are absolutely cock-a-hoop today that the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special last night got 11.48m viewers, peaking at 12.3m - the biggest Christmas Day audience for a very long time, they say. 

They are so cock-a-hoop about it that it's been the BBC News website's second story tonight - i.e. the second most important news story in the world.

(Really, BBC?)

And the BBC report about it includes an 'Analysis' by BBC entertainment correspondent Lizo Mzimba, who says "[Gavin and Stacey] and the BBC will be thrilled".

(Breaking news Lizo from the BBC, they already are!)

I don't think anyone could fairly accuse the BBC of ever hiding their successes under a bushel these days.

The Daily Telegraph quotes the BBC's Director of Content Charlotte Moore saying: 

Christmas Day on BBC One brought the nation together and entertained them in their millions, with the much-anticipated return of Gavin And Stacey taking the top spot in 2019, and making it the biggest in a decade. We delivered something for everyone with the seven most-popular programmes that cap off an incredible year for BBC One celebrating British talent and creativity.

Reality Check: 11.48m/12.3m is less than one-fifth of the present UK population (67.53m by the latest UN estimates), so Charlotte is exaggerating by claiming that "BBC One brought the nation together". Well over four-fifths of the population didn't share the BBC moment.

And it's well below the 30.15m who watched Eastenders in 1986 or the 26.65m who watched Hilda Ogden leave Coronation Street a year later.

Still, it's a tidy figure for Gavin & Stacey, and even I watched it and rather enjoyed it.

Twitter, however, was characteristically full of 'woke' types raging about how their lives were being ruined by  Nessa and Bryn singing A Fairy Tale of New York and including the line "you cheap lousy faggot", and lefties rode on that and claimed it was symptomatic of Boris's Britain - and the BBC's 'support' for Boris's Britain.

A smattering of isolated social conservatives also accused the programme of normalising cannabis use (which it probably did).

So that's all I've got to say on that...

...except to confess that I did something I've never done before last night: I watched the Mrs Brown's Boys Christmas special on BBC One too.

Admittedly, I approached it with a mask and surgical gloves and, just to be on the safe side, garlic and a stake. All I know about it, from everything I've ever read about it on Twitter or on online newspaper/magazine sites, is that it's utter garbage and insulting to the intelligence and inexplicably popular. Nobody on my social media feeds can see why the BBC persists with it, except to appeal to idiots...

...except  that quite a few of my friends in 'the real world', who are far from being idiots, really, really, like it, love it even. It makes them laugh.

And they are far from alone. By present BBC standards, its ratings are high.

You're expecting a review? Well, go on then:

It's not something I'll be watching again, but I did laugh a few times and I can see why people might like it. It's an Are You Being Served?-style, old-fashioned comedy, overlaid with copious use of the f-word and a lack of plot coherence.

I did probably lose 13 IQ points while watching it, but I'll get over that.

In fact, I might now buy a box set of Mrs Brown's Boys in order to lower my IQ to such an extent that I might put in for Mastermind in the hope of getting an even lower score than David Lammy.

I could even make Mrs Brown's Boys my specialist subject and score no points.

I'd use the f-word in every answer and make John Humphrys faint...

...which would make a great anecdote for his second autobiography, A Day After Today.