Here's my plan for a BBC that you would allow your wives and servants to watch

FRANK JOHNSON

DAr Charles Moore, the former Daily Telegraph editor, denouncing the BBC in that paper last week in the light of the Hutton report, observed: 'It seems to me that the BBC today is the enemy of conservative culture in Britain.' The 'It seems to me' is the sort of phrase which suggests that a writer has but tentatively arrived at a conclusion, and even then only after weighing the alternatives. But some of us remember it 'seeming' to Mr Moore for some time. In the months before he left the Daily Telegraph editorship last summer, he ran an entertaining series, Beebwatch'. Its purpose was to monitor what the Daily Telegraph saw as the Corporation's delinquencies. So rather than 'It seems to me', 'As I've been saying for years' might have been more apt.

Mr Moore's piece of last week continued: 'How does the BBC approach subjects such as American power, organised religion, marriage, the EU, the actions of the armed forces, the rights of householders to defend their property against burglars, choice of schools or any perceived inequality? . . . If someone appears on a programme described as a "property developer" with someone described as a "green activist", who will get the rougher ride? If a detective drama features a feisty lesbian and a chilly aristocrat, which is more likely to be the murderer?'

No one could disagree with Mr Moore on any of that. The issue, for those of us whose disposition is conservative, with either sized c,' is whether we would wish it otherwise, For us, the broad lib-leftwingery of BBC current affairs and drama adds savour to life. It is something by which we measure our Conservatism or conservatism. We positively enjoy pointing out the sublimely ignorant one-sidedness of the BBC's employees and contributors about almost anything political, either when they talk of the present or of the past.

We listened rapt to a recent radio series about the 1945 Labour government, which was actually called, apparently without irony, something like The New Jerusalem. Hardly any room was given to the possibility that that government's lumbering NHS, vast housing estates, nationalisations and taxation might have stored up trouble for decades to come. We did not hear, for example, that the Attlee government's hospital building compared unfavourably with that before the war. Nor did the programme dwell on Aneurin Bevan's forecast that, because of his health service and because people would be healthier in general under successive Labour governments, the cost of the NHS would fall. It was bliss for us. We contentedly mocked or fumed for days, until it was replaced by a discussion of the Spanish civil war by experts, none of whom mentioned any Republican wickedness — only Franco's.

As a fellow employee of the Telegraph group, I have been Mr Moore's comrade-inarms in many a war against many a feisty lesbian in support of many a chilly aristocrat. But three quarters of the thrill of battle was the knowledge that the BBC had the heroes and villains the other way around. We had some sort of media establishment against us. It would not be so exhilarating if we in fact were part of the media establishment.

But what would the dramas and current affairs be like from this BBC which would be sympathetic to Mr Moore's world view?

8pm. BBC1: First in a new series of the award-winning Green Murders. Genial Master of Foxhounds Lord Grenville HotToddy, the most popular figure in the village, is found dead with a hunt saboteur's placard buried in his skull. But the issue is: which environmentalist did it?

9 p.m. BBC2: Canadian Dreyfus; How Tweedy Browne framed Conrad Black. A disturbing documentary.

11 p.m.: BBC1: A People's History of Eton (repeat): This is the episode in which presenter Charles Moore ignores the scholarship winners and puts in a good word for the boys who got there by dint of sheer, hard lineage.

Midnight. BBC2: Couples. Sexually inexplicit scenes, in context of stable marriage. Warning: no nudity.

There would be nothing to fulminate against. I like the BBC just as it is.

!This month is the centenary of, to me, the .I. greatest creative artist born in the 20th century: the classical choreographer George Balanchine (deceased 1983); Georgian by origin, St Petersburg-trained, Manhattandomiciled during his most creative years.

But calling him the 20th century's 'greatest creative artist' is not as big a claim as it might at first sound. I mean he is a creator who would, in his field, have been considered among the greatest had he lived in any century. By general consent, in no other field did the 20th century produce creators who, compared with previous centuries, were among the greatest creators.

Stravinsky is not great in the way that Mozart or Beethoven were. Picasso was not great in the way of El Greco, Rembrandt or Michelangelo. Some would argue that Proust or Joyce were not excelled in previous centuries. But the generality of mankind seems to have decided that Stendhal, Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were greater. Poets and playwrights? No one would say that the 20th century's compare with Dante or Shakespeare. Sadly, classical choreographers are not as universally thought about as composers, painters and novelists are, because far more people hate classical ballet than love it. Nonetheless, in the eyes of the dispensers of arts subsidies, it survives as one of the high arts, though much of officialdom probably wishes that it did not; the cost of opera giving enough trouble already.

Balanchine, unlike those other 20th-century creators, is the greatest in his field of whom we have much knowledge. That formula is carefully chosen. The 19th-century Franco-Russian Marius Petipa is often assumed to be the greatest of choreographers. But ballets were not then written down in the way that operas were. There is notation of Petipa's work; but, in relation to his vast output, comparatively little of it. He choreographed the great Tchaikovsky ballet scores. But of those only his Sleeping Beauty is anything like complete.

But Balanchine, whom Petipa vastly influenced, lived in the age of good notation and of the camera. We can know him well. To do so is an experience comparable to knowing one of the greatest composers, painters or writers. Knowing him is also comparatively easy. Few of his ballets have stories, or even any 'meaning', any more than most symphonies or piano concertos do. His ballets should be thought of as a form of visual music.

Three of his works are on in one bill at Covent Garden now. The uninitiated should go and see if I am right.