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So Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, wants to shut down the 6 Music and Asian Network radio stations. He couldn’t even give a consistent and coherent reason why.

I have a fierce affection for 6 Music – its innovation, its constant ability to surprise and delight, the laughs it’s given me and the fine records it’s put in my colllection – and as a consumer of very little else of what the BBC produces, I’m feeling quite hard done by today.

Now, maybe you don’t listen to those stations or maybe even actively dislike them. But if you have any regard or affection for the BBC, you should be fighting for those stations’ survival nonetheless.

Thompson, once again, has shown himself today to be a shabby and craven managerialist with a cloth ear for what the BBC is supposed to be about (and what a section of his salary-payers want). He’s bowed before corporate interests rather than those who fund the BBC and pay his corpulent wages.

Like I said, he couldn’t even do it coherently. ‘There can be no turning back on our digital journey,’ he said. So closing two digital radio stations isn’t turning back? ‘Some critics… will never stop in trying to further erode the BBC,’ he went on. Some critics don’t need to erode the BBC when they’ve got an inside man doing it for them. It’s the abasement and the lack of fight and the willingness to please entirely the wrong people that’s hard to stomach.

As in most things, one finds oneself in agreement with Anton Vowl…

I’ve said before, personally 6Music never really troubles me at all, and I can’t stand George ‘Sacrificial’ Lamb. But on the other hand, I spent a pleasant morning listening to live cricket on Radio 4 from Bangladesh, and I’d be mightily pissed off if that sort of thing got chucked out of the window.

Anton uses a tortured movie metaphor (6 Music is the limping Richard Harris being slotted by Richard Burton – played in this metaphor by Mark Thompson – at the end of Wild Geese to prevent him suffering an even worse fate). So here’s one of my own. We’ll call it the Hans Gruber Defence.

Those with no interest in 6 Music or the Asian Network should still defend against their closure and the closing in of those with no love for the BBC. To paraphrase Hans when he threatens Bruce Willis after shooting a hostage in Die Hard: sooner or later they might get to someone you do care about. Don’t think for one minute that the hyenas of the Tory party and Murdoch’s and Paul Dacre‘s slavering bands of vandals are going to be satisfied and stop with the deaths of just two radio stations. They are merely the hors d’oeuvres.

I, conversely, couldn’t give a toss about the cricket from Bangladesh that so pleases Anton Vowl (for example) but I see the pleasure it gives many people and I so know for a fact that if the BBC were to sacrifice Test Match Special to appease the howls of corporate predators like Rupert Murdoch and his princeling son, that would be a very bad thing.

This isn’t just about defending two radio stations with minority audiences it’s about defending the ethos of what the BBC stands for. 6 Music and the Asian Network provide services that simply cannot be found in the commercial sector (please don’t suggest I go and listen to offal like XFM). It’s what the BBC does best and what it was created for.

If you love the BBC then you must realise that in the years ahead you’re going to have to fight for it. So, please, campaign for 6 Music and the Asian Network. And the next time Mark Thompson bends his knee before critics far less talented and innovative and brave than his staff, and sacrifices more of the BBC to the gods of cultural barbarism, I’ll write letters defending Test Match Special or whatever it is you want to save.

(The decision to close 6 Music and the Asian Network is not final. It must be approved by the BBC Trust which is holding a public consulatation. You can email your contribution to them at srconsultation@bbc.co.uk and complete the online survey here. J Hunt has an excellent post on how best to campaign. There are signs that we’re being heard. )