These are not good times for the BBC.  The once venerable institution seems to be lurching from crisis to crisis and the sad thing is that most of its current difficulties are undoubtedly of its own making.

The scandalous withdrawal of the Savile expose by the Newsnight programme a few weeks back and then the subsequent outrageous allegations of paedophilia made against an innocent public figure on the same programme were quite mind-blowing. The first was at the very least an act of gross incompetence by management and the second was an extremely poor piece of “investigative” journalism that quite simply beggared belief.

Any decent journalist – in fact any trainee journalist – knows that you should always check out your source and investigate fully all aspects of your scoop to avoid not just claims of libel or slander but also the possible destruction of an innocent man’s reputation. The fact that the innocent victim in this case, Lord McAlpine, has settled quietly rather than destroy the BBC in court is to his credit. However, no matter how the settlement has been reached, let’s not forget the other innocents in this story, those responsible for forking out the damages for the Corporation’s incompetence, namely us, the BBC licence payers.

This week saw the 90th anniversary of the first BBC radio broadcast and one cannot help but think of the early aims of the BBC to “inform, educate and entertain”. The BBC still does an awful lot right and is much respected both in this country and in many parts of the world. Many of the BBC’s dramas, documentaries and current affairs programmes are of the highest quality and the fact that the beleaguered director-general of the BBC, George Entwistle, was forced to resign following a savage grilling by his employee, John Humphrys, on the Radio 4 Today programme, is to the eternal credit of the BBC’s ethos. Can you imagine such a thing happening in China, Russia or in fact almost anywhere else in the world?

What is needed for the BBC is a weeding out of the incompetent, complacent, arrogant and politically correct management who have led the Corporation to this sad state of affairs. Replace them with a determined, focused, disciplined and responsible management hierarchy capable of leading a team of good quality enthusiastic  journalists and within a short period the recent disasters will be consigned to history. Don’t  let’s give up on Auntie just yet, she just needs a bit of a clean-up and face lift and all will be well once more.