At the end of this year I should reach the ripe old age of seventy-five. After three quarters of a century, I don’t have much to show for my life but I was looking forward to one little bit of recognition. I would be entitled to a free television licence.

Huh! In their wisdom, the politically correct morons who run the BBC have decided that they can no longer afford the cost of supplying free licences to the elderly.

Now I rarely watch what I call ‘the idiot box’ but I know that for many people it is a lifeline. They live alone and the television gives them the illusion of company. One of my oldest – in both senses of the word – friends has her set on all the time and whenever I visit, she seems to be watching Western films. Good luck to her. It keeps her going and after a long life, she surely deserves it.

And many of the people affected by this crassly insensitive decision to stop one of their few perks are war veterans – those very same men and women who the BBC spent lavish amounts of money and time in praising only a couple of weeks ago when they covered the seventy-fifth anniversary of the D Day landings. How will those men and women feel? Have any of those overpaid BBC pen pushers thought about the hypocrisy of their action. Did those men and women fight and die so that modern BBC pratwinkles could cut off what little they do to thank them?

No commercial organisation on earth could possibly get away with operating like the BBC, and there are many examples of their profligacy in other fields to support this contention. Quite apart from the mind-boggling amounts they pay to a few preening individuals like Gary Lineker and the Winkleman woman, there is the one billion pound refurbishment of their London HQ, which was censured by the national spending watchdog and was more than £100million over budget. There is £34million spent on taxis and the £949,000 pay-off to say farewell to just ONE outgoing boss. There is another £17.8billion of internal pay rises as well yet they get away with it all. The unaccountabilty of this bloated absurdity is sickening. And I’ve not even touched on the 2,700 BBC staff who have been given pay rises of more than 10 per cent last year or the £87million for a new EastEnders set, which is little more than a vanity project. How can a ruddy SET cost that much damnit? Behind the facade, it will be little more than scaffold poles and all this for a show that has seen a near 70 percent drop in viewing figures from its peak in the 1980s.

In these times of division, the BBC has achieved the impossible. From the elderly who will be directly affected to the Netflix-viewing generation who will see this as an unjustified assault on their grandparents, a nation should come together to be outraged at this cash grab on the aged, which in a few months time will include myself damnit!

Years ago, the BBC enjoyed the nickname of Auntie, courtesy of its supposed family values and moderate tone. Now, it resembles a greedy relative trying to bump off Grandpa.

As a grandparent myself, I am definitely a wee bit peeved!