Mr Kaufman, a man for fun and foregone conclusions

IT HAS been a strange strain of flu we have all had this year. For a week I have been shivering in bed, the radio perpetually on, drifting in and out of sleep. Dramas have merged with consumer programmes, news magazines with comedies, to create audio hallucinations, a black confusion of words and images, in which things sound like themselves but, on closer scrutiny, most decidedly are not. I now think it is unlikely, for instance, that Shaun Woodward and Michael Parkinson first met on Shackleton's last expedition to the South Pole and discovered a common interest in feng shui.

Today, almost recovered, I have had an experience that almost precisely mirrors the surreality of those flu-ridden afternoons: I have just read the report of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee into the future funding of the BBC. And I am now struggling to work out how it is that a group of MPs (person for person no less intelligent than the general run, and chaired by one of the sharpest, wittiest political figures of his day) should issue a report so biased, so capricious and so careless of the future.

I will come to the recommendations of the select committee in a moment, but a word first about its psychology, as revealed here in the transcripts of its interviews with leading figures in broadcasting, and with the Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith. Someone seems to have convinced the committee that, in previous lives, the panjandrums of the BBC worked for the thumbscrew section of the Spanish Inquisition or co-wrote scripts for Noel's House Party. I say this because - throughout - in cross-questioning all the BBC's figures were disputed, its claims dismissed, its achievements zeroed; while most of the statements, assessments, surveys and views of its commercial rivals were taken at face value - or even above.

That someone, we must suspect, was the committee's own chairman, Gerald Kaufman MP. I say that because the committee managed an interesting trick this autumn, which was to end up, after several months of taking evidence and grilling witnesses, issuing a report the conclusions of which were exactly the same as those reached by Mr Kaufman before any of the proceedings had even begun. Next time the committee conducts an inquiry, it could save itself and us a great deal of expense by merely asking Mr Kaufman at the outset what conclusions he would favour. But I can see that would have meant some committee members going without their fun: Alan Keen's exuberant flights of argument have to be read to be appreciated, as do Ronnie Fearn's attempts at schoolmasterly severity and Claire Ward's youthful imitations of Kavanagh QC.

But those are merely the highly attractive monkeys. What is the organ- grinder up to? Mr Kaufman, we know, is a highly cultured man. But his tenure at the committee has been like the progress of a Mongol horde around the effete cities of the plain. Mr Kaufman, it seems, cannot come across an opera house, a department for culture full of gentle, smiling secretaries of state or a broadcasting corporation without succumbing to the urge to tear it down, leaving in its place a pile of skulls. Is that just because he is fearless, or is he like those women in management who cannot bear to see other women succeed? Does he intuit that the mountain air of good culture would be even purer with only him there to savour it?

I am being impertinent. The motive matters far less than the argument, and it is to the argument that we must now attend. As we know, the Culture committee essentially took the recommendations of the Davies committee (that the BBC should receive a pounds 24-per-person digital levy) and the BBC's own arguments (for increased funding from whatever source) to help the BBC set up new services in the digital environment - and told them both to take a running jump.

Why? In the first place, it suggested, because the BBC had not sufficiently demonstrated its efficiency. Indeed the committee implied that the corporation might be very inefficient. It noted that so inefficient was the corporation's calculation of its own inefficiency that its efficiency savings over two years were much higher than it had itself predicted. No, I am not joking. It is the best example of turning good news into bad that I have seen this year.

Second, the BBC, the MPs argued, had wasted money on useless and unwanted services such as News 24. It was agonising to read the attempts of the BBC to persuade Ms Ward in particular that News 24 was a long-term investment for the day when most people would not get their news from a scheduled bulletin at 9pm. Ms Ward, apparently, thinks that when that day comes we will be happy to be left with only CNN and Sky.

In view of the row over the risks taken with News 24, the committee's main conclusion was characteristically eccentric. "The BBC," it argued, "has been a follower rather than a leader in the provision of digital channels. There are no grounds for accepting that this position will be reversed in future." But the BBC says it wants to take a leading role now, so why can the "position" not "be reversed"? The committee does not say.

The real reason, one suspects, is that the committee was somehow ideologically persuaded that such things were better done by the private sector. It thought that there could be very good education and children's channels (for example) run by purely commercial companies, without the need for an extra, electorally unpopular impost on licence payers. At one point in the report the committee states: "Much that is recognised as public service broadcasting is produced not by the BBC, but by other broadcasters."

Wrong. Not "much". Try "some". Or, even truer, "less". I will take Ms Ward or Mr Keen or Mr Fearn by the hand, lead them down the corridors of Granada or LWT and show them where the public service programmes once were made and are no longer. There are plenty of excellent shows still made, but none that will not turn a buck. This week, coincidentally, saw the last edition of LWT's Crosstalk political programme.

Let's return to the point about public service in a moment. The contention that the BBC is hopeless at doing new things is undermined, of course, by the extraordinary success of BBC Online. That, too, it should be recalled, was jeered at by the private sector when it was started: the BBC "had no place" on the Web and would lack any of the sufficient agility or resource. The experience blew a huge hole in that argument. But what does the committee say? That Online may "become stultified" and should be hived off to the BBC's commercial arm! Heads I win, tails you lose.

The House of Commons should take the report and ask the committee to try again. Certainly the secretary of state should point out what a flawed document it is. The rest of us should ask ourselves how important is it for us as a nation to have digital TV channels and services that are not wholly and entirely driven by commercial concerns. I want Walking with Dinosaurs for my kids, not just "Yarg, the Robot Avenger".