The BBC is running on fumes and owes its continued existence to a sense of nostalgia for ‘Auntie’ which is rapidly evaporating.

Now the Labour Government is preparing to launch a raft of proposals aimed at keeping the corporation afloat in troubled times.

Recognising that the licence fee regime – effectively a tax on television – is heading for the scrapheap, ministers are looking at a series of alternatives billed as ‘radical’.

These include Netflix-style subscriptions or higher licence fee charges for the rich. Though exactly how that might be defined is anyone’s guess – and presumably it would involve costly means-testing.

There are even bonkers suggestions that it could be linked to the value of your home.

Also being considered is a move towards a model involving a fee and advertising, which would bring the UK into line with Ireland’s public broadcaster, RTE.

The consultation comes amid a decline in the number of people paying the £174.50 licence fee, from 25.2million in 2020 to 23.8million this year – estimated to be costing the BBC about £1billion a year as a result.

Around £3.8billion was generated from the licence fee last year, and £2.2billion from BBC Studios, its production division.

The BBC charter is up for renewal in 2027 – and the funding model is a key aspect of that – hence Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s survival plan for the corporation.

The problem for the BBC is that it has painted a giant target on its back after a prolonged period of self- inflicted harm.

There are almost too many scandals to list, but most recently Michael Prescott, an independent adviser, examined the corporation’s news output and laid out his concerns about bias in a leaked dossier. 

Among its explosive revelations was that footage was edited in a Panorama documentary to exaggerate Donald Trump’s role in the 2021 Capitol riot, sparking a threat from the President to sue the BBC for £745million.

The publication of the memo plunged the BBC into crisis and led to the resignations of Tim Davie, the director general, and the broadcaster’s head of news, Deborah Turness.

Add to that controversies over newsreader Huw Edwards, convicted of three charges of making indecent images of children, and former Masterchef host Gregg Wallace, who quit the show over claims of sexual harassment, and you have an organisation in disarray.

Jimmy Savile died in 2011 but his long history of child sex offending, some of it on BBC premises, including rapes and sexual assaults, continues to reverberate 14 years on.

Then there was Martin Bashir’s 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana, in which the princess famously declared ‘there are three of us in this marriage’ – referring to Camilla.

It later emerged that Bashir had shown Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, forged bank statements to make Diana think her inner circle was selling her secrets.

An inquiry by Lord Dyson concluded that the BBC had covered up Bashir’s deceit.

Earlier this month, the corporation featured two former asylum seekers, who entered the UK illegally on small boats, on Question Time.

So it’s not hard to see why so many have stopped paying the licence fee – a decline accelerated in Scotland by the fallout from the 2014 independence referendum, when the BBC was accused of bias (though those allegations tended to come from both sides).

The BBC’s new boss in Scotland, Hayley Valentine, has blamed the cost of living crisis and the wide choice of programmes across streaming services for the decline of the licence fee.

Of course that’s true, but many viewers will have been angered by the huge sums squandered on the white elephant of the BBC Scotland digital channel.

Fewer than one in eight adults watched it each week last year, despite it having cost licence-payers more than £200million since its launch in 2019.

The digital channel reached only 13 per cent of the population – the same figure as the previous year – and was watched for only an hour and 33 minutes a week by the average viewer.

BBC Scotland’s flagship news show, Reporting Scotland: News at Seven, was launched on the digital channel, replacing The Nine, which was axed after a row over low viewer numbers and too many repeats – though News at Seven attracted fewer than 30,000 viewers for its first episode.

The BBC’s fear of losing the licence fee is so acute that it is now displaying a slate between programmes on live television that shows the logos of each service it offers.

The message says: ‘Everything across the BBC is funded by you. Thank you.’

But it will take more than a campaign to restore trust in the BBC, which is ebbing away just as it battles to keep its generous funding in place.

The disconnect between this liberal bastion and the people who bankroll it is growing ever-more pronounced – from stories of its staff sobbing over the Brexit result back in 2016 to the decision to keep paying Left-wing football pundit Gary Lineker more than £1million a year.

After years of pumping out political vitriol on his social media feed, he quit in May this year, after sharing a post about Zionism that included an illustration of a rat – historically used as an anti- Semitic insult.

Meanwhile, John Simpson, the broadcaster’s World Affairs Editor, posting on X, claimed that the BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack’, linking through to an article in – you guessed it – The Guardian, in response to the Prescott memo.

Amid the navel-gazing, more and more households have abandoned watching live television in favour of downloading streamed content (which is exempt from the licensing system).

Furthermore, since the Covid epidemic, licence fee enforcement has become much more difficult.

Prosecution numbers have tumbled, evasion has soared, whilst the cost of managing the system has steadily risen.

The BBC claims that its 229 enforcers make 2 million home visits every year, implying that each one visits five suspected evading households per hour: a number that is hard to credit.

Even within the BBC, there is a growing feeling that the days of the licence fee are numbered.

One corporation source came up with a potentially explosive proposal.

They told me: ‘Is there a need for Radio 1 and 2? Could you drop the BBC branding, run them commercially at arm’s length, then use the profits to help fund other BBC services?

‘The problem is some would see this as a Trojan horse.’

Doubtless they would, but time is running out for the BBC in its current form – and the tragedy is that ‘Auntie’ will have only herself to blame for her downfall.