It had to reconceive itself in the antithetical culture of the 1990s. But then, as now, a pugnacious non-conformism, sometimes passionate, sometimes purely enjoyable, has characterised its programmes.Television cannot be reactionary, and public service television consigns itself to irrelevance if it chooses to stand back with a puritan high mindedness from the culture and society that feeds it. C4’s curiosity, candour and exploration of the contemporary define its difference. But this difference should be at one with a core belief that, in a democracy, people are prepared to be serious and responsible when they have to be, to engage in the issues and moments that shape our world, but otherwise should be free to enjoy their lives.Public service television has been the greatest influence of democratic accountability in our lifetime.

It has welded the wit and relaxation of entertainment to the interrogative and imaginative individualism that is the best guarantor of all our freedoms. In the end, the future of public service broadcasting is a test of whether our social cohesion in a democracy can survive in a global market economy, especially as that market wakes up to a world slipping into ever darker uncertainty.We are 10 years on from the end of the Cold War. Ten years after 1919 came the Great Crash; 10 years after that 1939. The next decade may show up the feckless innocence, some might say arrogance, of the past 10 years It may look back on them with affection and regret.

But, whatever it brings, we will need the public-service values of television as much as ever.. Sue MacGregor has stopped being cross or bitter about it She will take her revenge when she publishes her memoirs But she knows it happens. “If there is a major political interview on the programme, it will not go to me,” she told me. “It will go to John or Jim.”MacGregor’s sense that her beloved Today programme treats her as the token female in a show dominated by those big, testosterone-charged talents, John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie, is not paranoid, and nor is it unprovable.