The BBC has had a rough few years, and deserved them. It has been rocked by the Savile affair, the overpayment of talent, and of course at every turn its political bias is rightly called into question. The latter is why I didn’t hesitate, about a third of the way into last week’s televised leaders’ debate, to comment on the make-up of the audience in the room at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster.

Early on in the debate, the subject of housing came up, and I seized the opportunity to challenge the other panel members. Would any of them take up, as even my nine-year-old daughter can, the challenge to admit that mass migration into the UK has worsened the housing crisis? Would any of them say, ‘Yes, Nigel, five million immigrants to Britain since 1998 probably has increased the demand for housing’?

Of course they wouldn’t. And the audience clearly agreed with them – that this was nothing to do with immigration, and it’s just coincidental that a massive population boom in this country has coincided with a housing shortage. Fingers in ears: ‘La-la-la. We can’t hear you, Nigel.’

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MAN ALONE: Ukip leader Nigel Farage after the debated organised by the BBC at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster

Well they heard me all right, after I gauged the reactions in the crowd to my own comments, and those of the other leaders on stage. I knew the audience was far from the ‘balanced’ and ‘representative’ sample of people that we had been promised by the event organisers, the BBC.

I was firm, but polite. I said: ‘There seems to be a total lack of comprehension on this panel, and indeed among this audience, which is a remarkable audience even by the Left-wing standard of the BBC. This lot’s pretty Left-wing, believe me.’

IT WAS important, I felt, for the audience at home to realise what was going on in that room.

‘Nigel, it’s never a good idea to attack the audience,’ crowed Miliband, smug as you like. He didn’t get it, and I bet he still doesn’t. Why should he? While he’s no stranger to a rough ride by the media, he’s not under the persistent assault that Ukip is – he doesn’t have to stand up for his party and its members on an almost hourly basis, against one smear or another. But I do, and I’ll continue to. Taking the BBC to task for their biased audience was a legitimate extension of that.

I said: ‘The real audience is at home.’ And it was true. The 200 people in the room were overwhelmingly anti-Ukip. After all, we know the BBC recruited most of them from ‘nearby geographical areas’. Given that the debate was slap-bang in the middle of Westminster, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that I, as an anti-establishment politician, was not going to be their favourite choice on stage. But I was talking to the millions of people viewing at home.

I was talking to the people who know what it is like to struggle to book a GP appointment, or who have had members of their family in the military, or who struggle to buy a house, or get help from their council to get an appropriate home. I was talking to real people, which the BBC often forgets to do.

Sometimes the Corporation is guilty of basically talking to itself, with news coverage and TV programmes that suit the tastes of its six-figure-salary directors and their mates in Islington.

And Miliband continued to play to the room.

Farage said the 200 people in the room for the TV debate were overwhelmingly anti-Ukip

To be fair to him, he made a decent job of his performance on Thursday night, even though his persistent lies about Ukip’s position on the NHS are dreadfully tiresome. I said it then, and I’ve said it a million times before: Ukip is committed to an NHS free at the point of use, with a costed £3billion extra a year, with no privatisation, no hospital car parking charges, and hundreds of millions more for dementia research. But I digress.

The point is that almost immediately after I had questioned the audience make-up, commentators and even Conservative MPs were agreeing with me on Twitter. It seems I had touched on something they were already thinking.

David Dimbleby, the host of the programme, insisted that an independent, reputable polling company had hand-picked the audience, and there was no bias. But just 12 hours after the debate, we found out that the polling company in question was the same company that has consistently underestimated Ukip’s positions in national polls, and even put us in third place just days ahead of the 2014 European elections. For those who don’t recall: we won, and with 27 per cent of the national vote share.

BUT this alone wasn’t the problem with the audience on Thursday night. After some investigation, journalists managed to convince the BBC – who initially promised ‘transparency’, then tried to suppress the information – to reveal the details of how they formed the audience.

They used a ratio, they said, to break the audience up according to which political party they supported.

The ratio was 5:5:4:3:2:2:1, with the Conservatives and Labour getting the 5s, the Lib Dems on 4, Ukip on 3, the SNP and Greens on 2, and Plaid Cymru on 1. This meant that roughly, in an audience of 200, only about 50 people were not of a Left-wing persuasion. Some people remarked that I knew how to ‘lose friends and alienate people’ – but they didn’t know what I knew.

'Most of the people in the audience had made up their minds, and were dead against me,' writes Nigel Farage

Most of the people in the audience had made up their minds, and were dead against me. I wasn’t trying to make friends in that room. I was trying to represent the views of ordinary Britons whose lives haven’t improved during the tenures of successive Labour and Conservative governments.

I was there to represent those who believe in a sovereign, independent Britain, with lower taxes, a better-funded military, a National, not international, Health Service, and controlled immigration. And I think on those points I did all right.

The BBC has a great history and does some good public service broadcasting. But the truth of the matter is, it is currently not fit for purpose. It rarely even tries to hide its political bias any more. Despite spending millions of our pounds on its Salford hub, it is still massively London-centric, and it still relies on criminalising people who don’t pay for the pleasure of experiencing its biases to fund it.