The Media Column: 'Please, Mr Dyke, don't kill my baby'

There's still no announcement about when the BBC will kill my baby, my first-born. As lingering deaths go, this one ranks with one of those execution sagas from the Southern states, in which a teenager is convicted of killing a garage owner in 1958, and is finally injected to death 40 years later.

In 1988 I was the first editor of the BBC's new politics programme, On The Record. I had come over from London Weekend Television where a new boss – following John Birt's departure for the BBC – was (or so I feared) about to take an axe to the unique current affairs and features regime that then existed. Sure enough, within a year LWT's Weekend World, the cerebral weekly show invented by Birt, had disappeared. It was replaced by a succession of programmes designed – it was said – to appeal to a wider cross-section of viewers, calculated to make current affairs more interesting to the young.

I watched them from the safety of the Corporation, as On The Record was launched. I looked on as Sun journalists, clever blondes and blokes with modern haircuts and Liverpool accents, took the place of men in ties, and wandered around the country talking about crime. As they became more desperate, so the contents moved further away from current affairs and further into tabloid storyland. I saw them fail, as they have always failed.

And I decided that – while it was possible to do current affairs well, and to try to entertain your audience – youth current affairs was a chimera. Young people just don't watch current affairs. I didn't, not even when I was President of the National Union of Students.

Preparing for my first interview for a job with Weekend World in 1982, I realised that – though I was well aware of the programme's reputation – I had never actually seen it before.

When rumours of BBC plans to cut down on political coverage first hit parliament, the chairmen of both the Labour and Conservative parties wrote to the new chairman, Gavyn Davies. "We will not," he reassured them, "be reducing the volume of political programming or the amount of money we spend on them... no one at the BBC has any desire to reduce or 'dumb down' our political coverage."

Really? Things have changed a lot in the last seven years then, because I recall a continual struggle against channel controllers to keep current affairs anywhere in the schedules – and that was in the days of the serious John Birt. So Mr Davies's subsequent warning that the style of coverage might change in order to attract "new" viewers, should be treated with reserve.

There is no greater weasel phrase in TV than "current affairs doesn't have to be boring" – usually followed by an encomium to programmes like MacIntyre Undercover which, whatever their other virtues, simply aren't current affairs. Consumer programmes on dodgy car dealers aren't current affairs either, though the BBC now classifies them as such. The BBC cannot claim to have "popularised" current affairs, if what it has really done is to refuse to address any issue of complexity.

For a long time now BBC politics staff (some of whom have indeed been over-immersed in the trivia of Westminster gossip) have known that their programmes are about to be axed. What neither they or we yet know, despite the passage of time, is what is to replace them.

I hope that we are not in for a short-lived gimmicky, youth-obsessed, ironic (and therefore cynical) set of shows, which will eventually die to be replaced by nothing. I think that what a Corporation, which collects the licence fee and is dedicated to the public service, ought to do is pretty straightforward. Instead of all this bollocks about apathy and demographics and youth, the BBC ought to get its best journalists together, commission them to produce an excellent weekly current affairs show, resource it properly, give it a good slot and an excellent presenter, and tell them to do the best journalistic job they can and not worry about the ratings.

The audience, of whatever size, would be grateful.