OPENNESS. Isn’t it interesting, way from it? The Labour politician Tony Benn often talks, and gives talks, about how he personally records every interview he gives after long ago getting fed up with being misquoted and, more often than not, misrepresented.

He says that since he started plonking his own tape recorder on the table, the level of accuracy – if not the frequency –of his interviews, has gone up.

Openness, particularly in democracies, can be a real minefield in areas like commercial confidentiality and national security, but by and large most people support the need to control certain information at certain times for the greater good.

The real difficulties come when we get into the tricky area of accountability and scrutiny, something the media, quite rightly, sees as part of its legitimate role. And long may it continue. And in some cases, we can only hope they rediscover the virtue of hard news rather than scrutinising the shopping habits of the rich and infamous.

It was interesting this week, then, to find myself in yet another joust with my chums at the BBC, this time on Radio 4, who where suddenly excited by the fact that Robyn Archer had left the Culture Company with a pay-off; some people didn’t like something that happened in 2006; some people still felt left out and, amazingly, that Macca was playing Anfield, not the Salthouse Dock.

I kid you not.

In the true spirit of openness, I pointed out that this was a six- month-old story, bearing in mind that a week is a very long time in media, never mind politics, and most of the information they were after was in the public domain. Not just that, but given by me – to the BBC!

Nevertheless, they obviously scented something, so wanted to do their own thing and interview me, which I happily agreed to do provided, again in the spirit of openness, that I could bring my own TV cameras and record the interview for transmission, un-edited, on the Open Culture channel.

The representatives from our public service broadcaster, charged with a duty of fairness and impartiality then, well, ran for the hills.

They subsequently broadcast a programme in which they said I had imposed conditions that the BBC couldn’t accept.

What? That I simply wanted, like Tony Benn, to record that particular event and show it to people as an example of a cultural conversation?

No doubt some people may wonder why, if the BBC wished to conduct an open, fair and honest interview, they would have a problem with licence fee payers actually seeing how their money is spent. I’ve been pondering the same point of principle.

If the BBC wants openness, shouldn’t it also adopt openness?