Remember a while ago when ITV went on strike? Oh, it was awful. Hit Me Baby One More Time had to move studios and everything.

Not to be outdone, the BBC is planning on taking strike action.

Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson has claimed he will have to lose around 20% of the workforce to justify the publicly-funded nature of the corporation. And in retaliation, the BBC journalists and technical workers will strike at the end of the month, with a plan to shut live programming down.

They’re avoiding Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final and the Chelsea Flower Show, though. That’s good news for the large section of the country that like tennis, football and herbaceous borders.

Instead, the strikers will focus on "having the biggest affect across the BBC", according to the General Secretary of the Journalists Union, Jeremy Dear.

We’re fans of things going wrong here, so the news that Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, Today and Newsnight might be worst hit makes us genuinely quite excited. What will the BBC do?

Obviously, they’ll do something boring like show old repeats of Dad’s Army (CDs). But think of the opportunity. We want to see Newsnight filmed with a shaky camcorder and starring a red-faced, abusive, solvent-addicted tramp yelling obscenities at high-ranking politicians.

And the filming of Eastenders might be disrupted by the strike. The BBC could cover this up by getting the makers of Pingu (DVDs) to animate a few episodes of Penguin Eastenders. Nobody would notice the difference.

Fans of the free market economy cannot abide unions, unlike communists, who tend to join unions. But tails should not wag dogs, and particularly not when the dog is paid for in its entirely by British licence payers.

This is undoubtedly another slap in the face to a British public, which have put up with shoddy BBC antics (and scripts) for many a year. Compulsory licence fees are ridiculous in these multichannel times. Rise up, ye proles, and demand a licence fee rebate!

In fact why not just stop paying altogether? Viewers have a surfeit of choice these days when it comes to watching TV – why should we all be commanded to pay a chunk to the BBC, given changes in media consumption trends? Proportional representation this ain’t.

Do Sky subscribers rely on the Beeb to deliver programming? Should they be forced to a licence fee on top of the £500 per year they send to Sky? Does the BBC merit its licence fee? Probably not. Is media consumed in the same way as it was a decade ago? No.

This will make hard reading for those employees affected, but the times are constantly a-changin and the BBC is having a stay of execution with regards to the licence fee… it could be a lot worse in 2005 than it actually is.

News just in: Channel Five workers have just announced that they have been on strike for three months. Nobody’s noticed.