It's always tempting when someone defends the profession that they are in to call it self-preservation.
So my attempts to defend the BBC should come with two footnotes: I am disagreeing with the chief executive of the company which employs me (I hope he's not reading this) and the BBC has rejected all of the applications I have ever made to it. Even when I was asking for work experience.
Not only that, but the closest thing to a rival my newspaper has comes from the BBC. I try and catch the 8am news headlines on BBC Cambridgeshire every weekday morning to hear if they have something that we don't.
So why am I very defensive about the BBC? It's because I use it's website almost every day, whether to read the news, sport or check the weather forecast.
I have listened to Forest on the radio for more than a dozen years. I listen to TMS, I occasionally listen to Radio 1 and I even found myself enjoying a good debate on the future of supermarkets on Radio 4 yesterday as I drove home, proving once and for all how sad and easily pleased I am.
The BBC has lost almost of its sporting portfolio, but there's still Match of the Day, the FA Cup, Six Nations, big snooker events and Wimbledon. If there's a choice between Sky or BBC for the final two days of the Masters, I'm going with the BBC.
Having been put off history by my uni degree, I've found my enthusiasm start to return. This is largely due to the BBC and some excellent documentaries it has put on recently.
Think back to The Apprentice before the candidates became boring. Only Fools And Horses, Hustle, Little Britain, to name a few shows I used to love.
It still has Have I Got News For You, Pointless and Andrew Neil grilling weak politicians in between discussing the late-night shows he likes to watch.
What annoys me is the talk that the BBC is too big and needs to be brought down to size. We even have suggestions that it should not produce commercially popular shows like Strictly.
Yeah, because why would a TV company want to make shows which people actually enjoy watching...
The BBC has also been criticised for taking people away from local and national newspaper websites. For which I say, don't blame the BBC if you're not good enough. When you see some of the sensationalism which newspapers use, you can't be surprised when people turn away to an organisation which they trust.
However, this does not mean that the BBC does not need to change. It needs to consider whether it is paying salaries which are too big.
Before being removed from Top Gear it was fair to pay Jeremy Clarkson well because he was bringing millions of pounds in. But Gary Lineker? I'm a fan and recognise he is good at what he does, but I doubt people watch sport because of the person hosting it.
Not only that, but the BBC will not tell us who is getting paid big salaries and how much they are worth which is bad judgement. Licence fee payers deserve some honesty.
And how can it justify sending 25 times more journalists to a Lib Dem conference than the number of MPs the party has?
It also spent £200 million moving to Salford, and let's not even go into the pay-offs some of its executives received.
How anyone in the public sector, outside the medical profession at least, can receive over £1 million when leaving his/her job is absurd.
These are just a few examples of which appear to be many of the BBC not spending the public's purse wisely and this is what grates when staff lose their jobs or another sporting event is taken over by Sky who can't reach anywhere near the same audience.
So when I hear the BBC plead poverty I don't take it very seriously. But when I hear politicians telling the BBC that it's too big I remember that I find it hard to go more than a week without watching, listening to and reading BBC content.
Speaking of waste
Complaints about MP pay increases miss the point. Their actual salary for the importance of the work they do and hours they put in is fair.
MPs will spend their weekends attending events in their constituencies when many of us would rather be watching the Test match, re-arranging our many leather-bound books or getting spanked at pool (better luck next time Travell haha).
What is wrong is the expenses system which just throws money at them.
We have MPs claiming rent allowances for their property while renting out another property they own, and we have MPs claiming for a poppy wreath.
Over 100 MPs are said to be employing their partner or family member as well.
But none of this annoys me anything like what the Speaker John Bercow has claimed.
To spend £172 on a 0.7-mile chauffeur-driven journey is possibly the most absurd thing I've ever heard.
He gets paid nearly £142,000 a year and lives rent-free but is claiming travel and accommodation costs of £31,400 and charging more than £1,000 for alcohol as well.
It's a complete cliché, but you have to consider how many doctors, nurses, teachers, front-line emergency staff (delete as appropriate) you could fund if not for this waste of money and the millions of pounds of waste you get everywhere. Or maybe they could get a bigger pay rise than one per cent.
I had a third of a tin of tuna fall into the sink yesterday and I was pissed. But then I have to pay for it.
Signs you're no longer a child
School of Rock was one of my favourite childhood films. So I was looking forward to watching it again recently when I saw it was on TV.
But instead of enjoying it I just spent nearly the entire film wondering how on earth a class can play really loud music for weeks at a time and almost nobody seems to hear them. It just seemed completely ridiculous.
The only saving grace was that I watched Beauty and the Beast as well and thought it was brilliant, so there's some hope yet that I'm not a completely miserable cockwomble yet.
