Stephen Fry gives speech about the BBC

Stephen Fry has made a speech giving his support to the BBC and warning against giving the licence fee to other broadcasters, but also criticising the corporation's attitude to the iPlayer.

Fry criticised Ofcom's recent proposal of 'Top-slicing' the licence fee and giving it to other channels such as Channel 4, which claims to have a funding gap. Fry claims that it was only because of its funding that the BBC is able to keep in touch with the entire population, citing programmes featuring himself, such as Blackadder and Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive as examples.

He said, "I genuinely cannot see that the nation would benefit from a diminution of any part of the BBC's great whole... a ghetto-ised, balkanised electronic bookshop of the home; no stations, no network, just a narrowcast provider spitting out content on channels that fulfil some ghastly and wholly insulting demographic profile."

However, he said his plea was, "Personal, not professional," and went on to say, "Yes, I want to see Channel 4 secure, but I don't believe that the only way to save it is to reduce the BBC. We can afford what we decide we can afford." He called for a new remit for Channel 4 saying it was, "finding it hard not to descend to freak show documentaries."

Fry also talked about the BBC's online catch-up service and attacked the broadcaster's laid-back attitude to online programme distribution. He claimed that one of the problems was that people are able to bypass the software protecting on the programmes and thus able to download them permanently to their computers. Fry, himself a big technophile with his own technology column in The Guardian, admitted that he had bypassing copy protection programmes and had managed to transfer programmes to his iPhone. He said, "The BBC is throwing out really valuable content for free. It shows an incredible naivety about how the internet and digital devices work."

Fry also went onto sat that the iPlayer is hurting its commercial rivals, saying, "The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to monetise; at the moment it's relying on the fact you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer; but, believe me, that will change. It will soon be the work of a moment for my mother to get an iPlayer programme off her computer and on to her iPod, iPhone, or whatever device she chooses." Fry's recent documentary on the Gutenberg printing press, Stephen Fry and the Machine the Made Us, was one of the most popular programmes on the iPlayer service.

Fry's speech is one of a series of speeches organised by the BBC about the future of public service broadcasting. Other speakers have included Sir David Attenborough.

Fry is currently in the middle of recording the sixth series of QI, with two episodes covering topics beginning with 'F' having been recorded so far, with another 10 to be recorded between now and mid-June. He has also finished filming a documentary covering the 50 states of America and is also recording a series of podcasts or 'Podgrams', which are available from his website.