When so-called Islamic State destroyed historic sites in Iraq, I was wary of making judgments of other cultures, and gave these exuberant young men the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps shattering the statues was mere high spirits, like when Greeks trample wedding crockery? Or perhaps it was the fault of MI5?

Of course, we also sacrifice our heritage to ideology. Say goodbye to Paolozzi’s Tottenham Court Road murals, trashed by terrorists of Transport for London; to Oxford’s ancient Port Meadow horizon, occluded by death-cult developers; and perhaps to the BBC, the greatest cultural achievement of any 20th-century democracy, soon to be poleaxed by free-market fundamentalists as pernicious as the statue-smashers of so-called Islamic State.

Admittedly, the BBC has not been good at preserving its history. In 1990, when I first visited White City’s iconic doughnut, since sold off to a “Luxembourg-based consortium”, I saw Hamble from Play School abandoned in a skip, Del Boy’s van rusting under an awning, and the decomposing body of Lord Reith propped up in a mobile toilet.

The BBC mislaid much of its finest footage: the moon landings; the Beatles on Top of the Pops; and the Troughton-era Doctor Who serial, “Embarrassment of the Inseminoids”, where Doctor Who lands on Mars with a sign on his Tardis saying “Martian Benders” and punches Jamie in the sporran when his tea arrrives cold.

In the wake of the licence freeze, the BBC plans to move the youth channel BBC3 online and halve its budget. As a middle-aged, middle-class man, I hate pretty much everything on BBC3. Snog Marry Avoid is just one of many BBC3 show titles that resist parody. The channel has the creepy vibe of a sleazy art teacher trying to coax sixth-form girls into the pub. But BBC3 isn’t aimed at me. And it shouldn’t be.

That said, it has its evangelical supporters, prepared to do anything to preserve it. In January, my 90s manager, Jon Thoday of Avalon, maker of Russell Howard’s Good News, and Jimmy Mulville of Hat Trick Productions, which has an impressive record of critical hits, floated a philanthropic proposal to buy the channel for the nation, a bit like when those nice Greeks sent those Trojans that lovely wooden horse which worked out so well for everyone.

In a piece authored for public broadcasting enthusiasts the Sunday Times, the sages described as “talented” the BBC3 controller who contracted Avalon to make Live at the Electric, for which the channel intended to “assemble the hottest acts on the brink of breaking through to the public consciousness”. A demonstrable majority of these hot acts were managed by the management wing (Avalon Management) of the production company (Avalon Productions) making the show, their journey into public consciousness smoothed by their management’s control of the BBC3’s public consciousness gateway. It’s like a pig farmer being paid to make a publicly funded prize pig programme featuring his own pigs, when he owns the podiums on which the prize pigs are appraised. And it’s a fabulous taster of how the Avalon-Hat Trick BBC3 might work.

A crucial part of this jörmungandrian cycle is that companies that manage acts need to persuade TV execs to pay them to make shows featuring these acts. But if you could buy your own ready-made channel, you could broadcast your own acts whenever you liked, ramping up profiles, and coining in your percentage of subsequent live work. In its client Al Murray, who has now formed a genuine political party, Avalon might even have parliamentary presence as well as its own TV channel. Perhaps one day our political and media scene will be as respected as Italy’s.

Outlining his hopes on Radio 4 last month, Mulville, anxious to emphasise the importance of a BBC3 that he “happens to believe in”, skirted the fact that BBC1 was enjoyed by 10 times more young people than BBC3, saying, “I happen to have young children in that demographic”, and dismissed BBC4 as “basically BBC2 for Oxbridge people”. But I happen to have an immediate family who never experienced the privileges of further education, and they love BBC4. As an Oxbridge snob myself, I find the channel a bit lowbrow, but it calms me after reading Old Norse and playing chess against cyborgs of my former professors.

Mulville, who happens to have attended Cambridge, is typical of a certain kind of media magnate who, despite enjoying the benefits of a liberal education himself, sees the proletariat as pigs to be farmed, leaning over the balcony like some Groucho Club Marie Antoinette, dismissing the peasants’ demands for more Lucy Worsley with a cry of “Let them watch Hotter Than My Daughter.”

The main obstacle to the duo’s buying a bargain-priced BBC3 appears to be acquiring the frequency it is broadcast on. The easily accessible channel 7 of the EPG spectrum is reserved for public broadcasters. “We would need the help of the BBC to convince the government to allow that,” they conceded on Radio 4. I thought of the emergent oligarchs of collapsing communist Russia, snaffling the ideologically dismantled infrastructure, the BBC an ailing hog, drawing out marks on its own back for butchers, who maintain they only wanted to preserve its meat for the nation. “We happen to love bacon.” The 300,000 signatories wanting to save BBC3 weren’t necessarily signing up for the carve-up.

Lawyers love loopholes, and prey on a precedent. If the BBC3 frequency is, unprecedentedly, reallocated, then public broadcasting is holed below the waterline, the whole thing is up for grabs and we’ll lose the very idea of public broadcasting to the free-market fundamentalists within a decade, as surely and shoddily as we lost the Post Office. Maybe BBC3’s would-be buyers and the BBC Trust don’t realise this. Maybe they realise this all too well. Maybe, fundamentalists of the free market, that’s what they want?

And if I went to talk to someone at the BBC Trust about this, would I find myself faced with another government-friendly, west London billionaire, and end up floating face down in a £5m sub-basement swimming pool?

We need a BBC Trust that comprises communicators who have pursued ideas for their own sake, not necessarily for gain. Grayson Perry, Lenny Henry, Mary Beard, Brian Cox, Caitlin Moran, Jarvis Cocker, Meera Syal, Victoria Wood, Rowan Williams and Tinky Winky. And yes, this is my proposed shortlist for the next Doctor Who, that curious, questing, idealistic creature who embodies everything we so want to believe should also define the BBC.