Paul Hollywood is named after a stupid place. And Mary Berry changed her surname to that of a popular cake ingredient in 1970, in a self-abasing quest for self-raising fame. We expect little moral guidance from either Hollywood or Berry, and we receive none in return.

But in refusing to follow The Great British Bake Off to Channel 4, the comedians Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins have shown that they are the beating heart of this delightful show which I have never watched. For Mel and Sue have done something no one does any more. They have taken a stand for something they believe in.

And in so doing, Mel and Sue will be remembered by today’s disenfranchised young people with the same significance older idealists idolise the unknown Chinese protester who single-handedly stopped the tanks of Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Having only read about The Great British Bake Off in the Daily Mail, I assumed the show was principally a racist assault on white people, aimed at promoting fundamentalist Islam by allowing Muslims to bake cakes.

But suddenly, in that same paper, The Great British Bake Off is a national treasure again, even though Amanda Platell had previously suggested the only way to win the corrupt politically correct cake-fest was by baking “a chocolate mosque”.

I speak now as an ex-BBC comedian, consistently frustrated by the organisation’s failure to recognise my genius

The Great British Bake Off’s Channel 4 transfer was a propaganda coup in waiting for Murdoch, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Conservatives, whatever its result. Free-market fundamentalists all, they see public broadcasting as an unacceptable intervention in the marketplace, and spurious reforms are nothing more than an attempt to end it.

By their own logic, the free-market fundamentalists should have been delighted that, having been outbid by Channel 4, the BBC passed on The Great British Bake Off. But instead, because discrediting the BBC is more important to these outlets than maintaining a consistent moral position, they lambasted it for doing exactly what they always previously insisted it should, the twats.

In his 2011 lecture, The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival, Noam Chomsky said: “That’s the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” But when he said this, Chomsky didn’t mean it as a manual to help the Conservatives dismantle the BBC, the NHS, schools, transport and the state generally.

(I am aware that I have quoted this Chomsky line before, but Noam’s name looms large in my life. We found an old stone gnome with a chipped face in our garden overgrowth, so we planted wild flowers in its wheelbarrow, and named it Gnome Chomsky. Now, when Noam Chomsky himself appears on TV, the children are as disappointed by his lack of a flower-filled wheelbarrow as they are by his bleak pronouncements on the future of late capitalism. They are 28 years old.)

It’s difficult for me, Stewart Lee the TV comedian, to make the case for the BBC, as the Observer’s below-the-line commentators, having first put my job title in inverted commas as if it were a lie, will maintain this column is an example of “special pleading”, a bit like when Keith Vaz spoke up for poppers in a parliamentary debate about criminalising them last January. Who knew?

Now even Bake Off is being used to stir the pot on immigration | Stewart Lee Read more

But I speak now as an ex-BBC comedian, consistently frustrated by the organisation’s opaque bureaucracy and failure to recognise my genius, and one who, despite winning multiple British Comedy and Bafta awards for the broadcaster, never saw my average annual fee nudge even the lower threshold of the new public disclosure level.

Mel and Sue have received blanket praise for their refusal to “follow the dough” to Channel 4, but I have always maintained a dignified silence about my own noble sacrifices. After the second series of my multiple British Comedy and Bafta award-winning BBC2 show, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Rupert Murdoch’s evil Sky offered me a larger fee than the BBC to do two more series with them.

(I don’t think it was me Sky wanted, so much as my audience. I expect very few of you reading this are Sky subscribers. But Sky advertisers want to reach the sort of ABC1s to whom they can sell cappuccino, beard-grooming kits and Milan Kundera novels. All that is advertised on Sky at the moment is masking tape, bin bags and chloroform.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

The reasons I didn’t take Sky’s generous offer are not out of principle. It would be difficult for a comedian whose material touches on the general wrongness of the world to be paid for it by Rupert Murdoch, widely regarded as being at the apex of world wrongness; and I would have risked losing the core live audience of judgmental Guardian readers that I have assiduously cultivated over three decades.

The live arena is the last work-sphere in which Amazon and Apple haven’t worked out how to defraud writers and performers. Sky’s tiny audience figures would be unlikely to increase my live audience in the way that playing to a million people on BBC2 for a decade probably has. On this occasion, naked self-interest overlapped with “doing the right thing”, a happy coincidence at best. I am not Mel and Sue.

At Tottenham Court Road tube station, where once one might have seen freely the visionary public art of Eduardo Paolozzi’s intricate murals, since largely removed by Transport for London, the very walls themselves are now fully monetised. On Thursday I did a double-take as one face leaped out from an escalator covered exclusively in celebrity endorsements of Calvin Klein underpants.

It was alterno-icon Henry Rollins, of 80s California hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag, tattooed and underpanted and totally sold-out, trashing my teenage dreams. To be fair, Rollins has pointed out that in a system that has removed most revenue for musicians, monetising your credibility is entirely legitimate. But somehow, the advert just didn’t seem very “punk rock”. And I left the station a little crestfallen.

And confused. Can it be that a notional resistance to the grinding forward motion of the government’s free-market doctrine has made two Bake Off presenters look a whole lot more “punk rock” than Henry Rollins, with Stooges lyrics tattooed all over his shoulder blades, and his impeccable back catalogue?

The mental image of Mel and Sue, heroes both, standing defiantly in the path of a vast column of money-filled cakes, though it never existed in reality, will soon be as iconic as Tank Man’s resistance to the totalitarian state of China. And God knows, nowadays we need our heroes more than ever.

• This article was amended on 19 September 2016 to correct the surnames of Mel and Sue.



Stewart Lee’s new show, Content Provider, is at Leicester Square theatre from 8 November and then touring. See stewartlee.co.uk for details