Normally when you clock up a century you get a telegram from the monarch and a pink birthday cake with tonnes of candles on it. Oh, and a bunch of stupid questions from reporters. Like: ‘What’s the secret to a long life?’. To that one you answer ‘lunchtime drinking’ or ‘multiple sexual partners’ or ‘the failure by successive Tory governments to dismantle the NHS’, depending on whether you want to make a political point or just get on the local news at tea-time. Which, for a centenarian, is pretty close to bedtime.

The British Broadcasting Corporation – aka the Beeb, the Corporation, Auntie or just the BBC – turned 100 last October. Did you feel the love? Me neither. Can we feel it now? Nope.

If there was a 100th birthday telegram from anyone in the royal family it will have been curt and grudging. And if current Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Michelle Donelan stumped up for a cake you can only imagine what kind of message she ordered piped onto it in Tory blue. ‘Happy Birthday, from your admiring friends at the DCMS. PS: See your licence fee? It’s toast.’

Some of that will have been misspelled because it’s traditional on birthday cakes, even ones ordered by a Secretary of State. The threat, though, will have been rendered perfectly clearly. In 2019, two years before Donelan was appointed to her role by Liz Truss (remember her?), the then-education minister wrote: “I think the licence fee is an unfair tax and should be scrapped all together”. Like most members of her political party, it’s fair to say the woman with overall responsibility for the BBC is no fan of it.

Then again, who is and why should she be? The BBC is not a twinkle-eyed, potty-mouthed, G&T-toting great-grandmother in a wheelchair. There is no requirement for deference or tact. In fact the BBC is a near £4 billion broadcasting behemoth with bureaux around the world, muscular commercial arms, massive and enviable brand visibility and reach, executives pulling in six figure sums and an archive to kill for (though it’s a shame about those 97 early episodes of Doctor Who they scrubbed. See also: Z-Cars, Dad’s Army, The Wednesday Play, Till Death Us Do Part, Not Only … But Also, Steptoe And Son etc.).

Essentially, then, the BBC is all things to all people – which is just another way of saying everybody can find something to hate. And they do.

Those on the political right view the Beeb as a nest of left-wing sympathisers. Left-wing sympathisers view it as a nest of over-paid, over-privileged Oxbridge-educated types, some of whom are probably in the pay of MI5, which is ultimately on the side of the political right.

Rupert Murdoch sees the BBC’s well-funded and free-of-charge online presence as a hindrance to the domination of his News Corp titles and their paywall websites. Gary Lineker sees the Beeb as the suckers prepared to pay him £1,350,000 for turning up to talk about football once a week.

There’s more. Thanks to its position as UK state broadcaster, supporters of Scottish independence see the BBC as (at best) a compromised and self-interested proponent of the status quo and (at worst) a defender of vested interests and an active partner in the unionist cause. Brexiteers (those who haven’t now recanted anyway) think it’s stuffed full of Remoaners, as they call them. On other hand, those still miffed at being dragged out of the EU by a rogue’s gallery of xenophobes, zealots, liars and idiots led by a couple of Old Etonian goofballs with a big bus (hiya Boris! Hello Jacob!) think the BBC never gives the full picture of the historical, economic and cultural car crash that is Brexit.

Former Sex Pistols guitarist Glen Matlock is very much in that second camp. He was trending on Twitter on Tuesday, the third anniversary of Brexit, when he called out the Beeb for “pushing the government line” on the subject during a live studio interview on BBC Breakfast. Awkward. He has a point, though, and it’s one that Twitter users were quick to endorse. You only have to watch Sky News or Al Jazeera for half an hour to realise how un-neutral the BBC can feel on certain subjects, and how unprepared to rock the boat on others.

The Herald:

Talking of rocking boats, let’s not forget that on May 31, 1977, the BBC banned from the airwaves the Sex Pistols’ anti-establishment anthem God Save The Queen, citing as the reason its “gross bad taste”. Nothing at all to do with its being released just ahead of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Bank Holiday celebrations on June 7, then?

This week’s various other BBC stushies concern the axing of Autumnwatch (pure cuckoo, that), BBC Radio Scotland losing a fifth of its listeners in a year (some achievement) and the ongoing fiasco surrounding filthy rich Richard Sharp, the ex-Goldman Sachs man who helped Boris Johnson secure a massive loan and was then appointed BBC chairman by – guess who?

There’s also the shake-up of the BBC news offering and the imminent launch of a new, streamlined channel. It seems to have resulted in a sloughing off of old skin – specifically that which is attached to current news presenters such as Martine Croxall, Jane Hill, Annita McVeigh and Geeta Guru-Murthy. A BBC source told the Guardian newspaper that “eyebrows had been raised about the age of the women who had not been chosen” for roles on the new channel. Which is another way of saying there’s the mother of all rows about ageism brewing.

The Herald:

Croxall and the others are departing as part of a (cough) revamp which will merge the current BBC News and BBC World News channels and create one fresh, sparkling entity called BBC News, to be launched in April. Confused? Don’t be. Or do. Either way, it’s all in the name of progress – and in the name of saving £285 million a year. Can that be used to buy back some listeners for BBC Radio Scotland? Let’s hope so, though re-instating the slew of recently axed music programmes might be a cheaper way of going about it.

So when the music stopped, who did have a presenter’s chair on the new look BBC News? Sitting comfortably in the ergonomic swivel seats are Matthew Amroliwala, Christian Fraser, Yalda Hakim, Lucy Hockings and Maryam Moshiri, recruited (says the Beeb) through means of “a competitive interview process in accordance with BBC HR procedures.” Meanwhile recruitment is ongoing for eight on-air reporters and two on-air presenters to be based in Washington DC.

The channel itself will be anchored from London during the day (our day that is) and from Washington and Singapore overnight. There may also be a shift in focus to incorporate more international news, which is handy as the BBC is allowed to charge for advertising in overseas territories.

The Herald:

I’ll miss the sardonic, laconic Martine Croxall and her mischievous smirk. She has a special place in my heart, not just for winning an episode of Celebrity Mastermind but also for her reaction during the newspaper review on the night Boris Johnson pulled out of the Tory leadership race last October. This after having jetted back from the Caribbean to play the Great Tory Saviour. Clearly enjoying herself, she mused aloud if she was “allowed to be this gleeful”, to which the answer was a sharp rap over the knuckles and an internal BBC inquiry. It concluded that her “remarks and reactions … caused a significant risk the audience could believe opinions were being expressed on the Conservative leadership contest.”

Well, yeah. And to that I say: Go Martine! The BBC just says: go, Martine.

Still, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, only some of the people some of the time. Haters gonna hate, and all that. And I suppose if the brickbats come from all sides there are some in the Corporation who will view it as proof that they’re doing something right.

Maybe they are. I mean we’re all loving Happy Valley, right?