It was a torrid summer for the BBC, one that peaked in the anathema pronounced on it by James Murdoch in a speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in late August. Murdoch’s hyperbolic intensity was worthy of the demented ranters on his father’s Fox News channel. Pressing George Orwell into service, News Corporation’s Europe and Asia chief forecast a totalitarian future ushered in by the BBC if it were not reduced to a fraction of its size. He also claimed that the “only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit”. Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, in his speech to the Royal Television Society in Cambridge last week, dissented from Murdoch’s view on profits but agreed that the BBC had grown great enough.

Bradshaw’s speech was reported as an attack: it wasn’t, but nor was it a root-and-branch defence, which, after Murdoch, is what was required. For the BBC is – must be – open to public debate, because it owes its operations to public money. And in a world in which most channels are crafted with a view only to profit – or worse, with a view to bolstering the given political power – this is not a small thing.

Profit-making television can be good but it’s the opposite of what Murdoch claims for it. It isn’t a reliable producer of anything. In the face of falling revenue, it’s presently cutting back both on its original drama and its residual public service commitments, while Michael Grade, the outgoing head of ITV, calls for it to be “set free to entertain”, and his putative successor, the former head of Sky TV, Tony Ball, seeks a £30m pay package over five years to succeed him – far more than the much-criticised BBC director-general.

Second, the BBC produces news, analysis and documentary of unrivalled quality and depth, far better than the profit-based channels of the US. Again, one can invert Murdoch’s contention: only a well-funded BBC, able to cover the local and the global and secure in the belief that the political classes will not suborn it to their ends, can be independent in the full sense of the word.

Two programmes this past week illustrate the matter, one of which was on ITV. The South Bank Show (Sunday evenings) is on its last season, its execution certain. The screen amiability of its host and producer Melvyn Bragg (pictured) can be cloying at times – you wish he would more often challenge his subjects rather than grin at them – but what you lose in clashes, you gain in a technique honed to tease out something of their essence. Last week the band Coldplay, rarely interviewed, turned out to be as amiable as their host, terribly polite for rock musicians, with an apparently unforced affection for each other and a sweet custom of having a group hug before each gig. For one who knew nothing of Coldplay and their music, it was an education – which is what SBS has ever been, and what it will be no more because ITV, which has long congratulated itself for keeping it on air, can afford it no longer. The BBC should take it over, lock stock and Bragg. It isn’t likely to, though, as its arts capo Alan Yentob has his own, often good, arts programme, Imagine.

The other programme was the most moving piece of television I have seen. Wounded (BBC1 Wednesday) followed the rehabilitation of two soldiers, Andy and Tom, who had been blown up in Afghanistan. Andy had lost both legs and his sight was severely damaged; Tom had lost both legs and an arm. Suddenly helpless, they faced a world in which, as Tom observed with grim humour, he was reduced to the height he was when he first thought of joining the army.

Andy, an Irish Ranger from Belfast, found the darkness in which he was immured often unbearable. He clung on, he said, to the things that mattered: to his family, his mates, his girlfriend who was soon to give birth to their child, and to the prospect of holding his child in his arms. Tom, a paratrooper, was a wonder: as soon as he was able to orient himself, he asked to be sent back to his unit in some capacity. Denied that, he threw himself into physiotherapy at a military rehabilitation centre. A small scene of him and other limbless men playing a kind of group tennis was at once inspiring and throat-catching, as was the determination not to give in to anger or a sense of futility. Both men drew deeply on family and comradeship to sustain them; both accepted – to a greater or lesser degree – the cruelty of their fates.

It was hard to watch at times, as the dismembered limbs and torn flesh were displayed, and the medics spelled out to the shattered men what had happened, and what would be their lives. It was the kind of thing a commercial broadcaster might shrink from scheduling, and a politically driven one would either ban as being unhelpful to a war effort or present as anti-war propaganda. Instead, it was both dispassionate and compassionate, a mirror held steadily up to part of our national life, and to the cost of defending a shaky freedom and a shakier democracy. It grabbed you in the gut, but your heart and mind followed.

It was what public service in television is at its best: independent, and reliable in its commitment to bringing off a study of such rich human courage.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd