GW: Everyone accepts that in cultural matters there has to be some control of the market. Over obscenity clearly. But that's not my point. 

Let me give you three names: Peter Bazalgette, David Elstein, Dawn Airey — all of them privately educated and Oxbridge people. Bully for them. All of them too are now big speechifiers about the values of the media and so on. All of them made millions out of the lowest form of trash. I'm not condemning these people. I'm just observing that this doesn't seem to be a particularly healthy society when you have an elite who, far from standing up for what you might portentously call higher values, actually have their noses in the smelliest trough. 

NC: I agree with Stephen Fry on Peter Bazalgette. His great-grandfather was a great engineer and devised London's sewer system to pump the shit out of people's houses and his great-grandson is now pumping it back in. Is your objection to Peter Bazalgette that he's had this great education and privilege but produced nothing worthwhile? An objection which I would entirely agree with. Or is your objection that he's had this great education, had all these advantages and done nothing with his life but is still honoured? What seems odd (and you notice it at the BBC a bit — though there are more good people at the BBC than Conservatives sometimes realise) is that on the one hand they want to say, we've got to abandon any sense of higher culture, morality and difficulty and just churn out any old stuff to keep the ratings, while on the other hand they want to be respected and treated as moral, serious people. You see that quite a bit in Britain. But I come back: if you are not prepared — I will be elitist about this — to direct BBC arts funding and say you've got to go upmarket, I don't quite understand. If you're not criticising the market, what are you doing? 

GW: You asked whether I was condemning these people because they are well-educated and haven't done anything. No, I am not. These people are totally free to use their education to become Marxists or go and run a brothel. What I do object to is people who camouflage their not very salubrious cultural activity under a veil of anti-elitism. That seems to me to be positively obnoxious. They are helping to condition adversely the culture of people on the lowest levels of society by feeding them crap. I think there's a very strong streak of phoniness running through our society. 

NC: I agree with that.

GW: Let me give you two examples just from the last few days. Stella Rimington, the former MI5 chief and this year's chairman of the Booker Prize jury, said that novels ought to be enjoyable and we know what she means. She means they should be jolly. That rules out people like Dostoevsky. Not very jolly but rather a good novelist. This is condescension. Radio 3 is another example, because it too is quite clearly aiming downwards. It's not just on the bottom levels where the main damage is done. The same disease is present at higher levels.

DJ: Can I just broaden it out a bit? Some might say, what if Britain does dumb down in this way? Who cares? But some would say, for example the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in Standpoint and elsewhere, that actually this is very important, that it's an example of the West abandoning its core values and that when that happens for any length of time, an entire civilisation collapses and is replaced by something more dynamic. We don't have to look very far to see India and China forging ahead. There's the Islamic world, and so on. How do we compare with other countries in this respect? Are we uniquely decadent or not?