Well I, at least, had a pretty good idea that it would happen – those recently-announced BBC cuts to the regions.

More high-handedness from Your Increasingly Desperate BBC. For those of you who’ve not been keeping up, here’s the news wherever you are.

Especially since ‘wherever you are’ is now regarded as any wind-riven straggle of terraces located outside of Big Important London.

BBC regional radio stations, many of which are already pared down to a state skinnier than skeletal, are to be subjected to further ‘efficiencies’.

This means that local radio programmes in the future, probably won’t be much better than those provided by your average Radio Double-Glazing franchise.

Under the new pathos (sorry, that should have read ‘plans’) 39 regional radio stations in England will have the same 18 programmes after 2pm on weekdays.

After 6pm, there will only be 10 programmes. Local programmes at weekends will also be severely reduced. In short, the BBC will be sacking hundreds of people and cutting regional content right, left and centre. Welcome to Why Bother Radio.

As you may imagine, many people are upset by these changes. The listeners receiving the thinnest gruel, however, will be the over-50s.

Ironically, this group comprises the very people most likely to listen to, or even, depend upon regional broadcasting.

Why is it happening? Briefly, there are people in BBC Londonshire, who, despite their much-vaunted lack of political bias, seem not to approve of our current rulers.

Many listeners will already have deduced it to be the case. The thing is, however, that whether they like it or not, the BBC doesn’t run the country. The Government does.

It often seems to me that covertly or overtly, some of our broadcasters cannot wait to bring down certain politicians. The politicians concerned, quite naturally, don’t like it.

Mostly, however, for some time now they seem to have gamely shrugged off the attacks. Somewhere in Westminster, though, someone has been plotting a long-expected take-down of the BBC. It began with the freezing of the licence fee.

This seems to be the opening shot of a longer-term plan to get rid of the fee altogether.

Unfortunately, our regional stations have been the first casualties. The BBC’s abacus monkies have hit all the soft targets first: the regional stations and the arts programmes.

So far, so predictable. And there’ll be more. What they should really be doing, is getting rid of all the expensive rent-a-gobs, pundits and trouble junkies in London and Salford.

How much more in-depth news analysis do we really need? What good does it do, trumpeting one doomsday scenario after another? Does any of the BBC’s misery-mining actually solve any of the problems, which they seem to devour with such relish? How much does it all cost to feed, this soul-corroding, depressing grey mastodon which we call The News?

Hands up now. Who’d prefer more entertainment, drama and educational programmes? So, why don’t we cut the Today Programme, say, down from its present stultifying three-hour waffle to one dull half-hour?

After all, if the ersatz crusaders at the Beeb really believe that they can run the UK better than the politicians whom the voters actually appointed, maybe they should go up for election themselves. Let’s see how long they last.

Why doesn’t the BBC ditch a few of their self-important news editors, instead of making perfectly good and well-loved regional presenters redundant?

And while I’m BBC-bashing, what’s the problem with Radio 2 nowadays? Half of its daytime jocks now act as if they’re fronting children’s programmes: yelling, talking over each other, gushing on about celebs and behaving generally as if they were at a teenage sleepover. Whisper this but one or two of them are now in their 50s.

The BBC is sitting on about a century’s worth of the world’s finest pop music. It’s an unrivalled archive. Why, therefore, do they only ever air a tiny fraction of it? Most of what we hear is the dross that record companies push at us.

And most of that, as we know, consists of low attention-span nursery rhymes, chanted over pile-driver drumbeats, compressed out of all existence, in the vain hope that cloth-eared listeners will carry on shouting “Choon!” at the radio. The BBC are always banging on about diversity. Their daytime music output seems completely devoid of it.

Radio 3, where I still take occasional refuge, remains quite good much of the time. Sunday mornings, for instance, are great. Their late-night shows can be challenging and delightful in equal measure.

Even they’ve been subjected to cuts – especially to their experimental and jazz outputs. I wish they hadn’t cut the Late Junction down to one night a week, just before Lockdown. That was truly great radio.

On the bright side, BBC’s TV programming doesn’t bother me at all nowadays. Because I cancelled my licence months ago in order to watch DVDs instead. I mean, how many ‘sophisticated’ boxed sets about murderers can you take? Don’t answer that.