‘I never apologise!” The philosophy of Major Sergius Saranoff stuck me as patently ridiculous even as I gave voice to it, aged 13, during what must have been a pretty hopeless attempt to portray the absurd romantic created by George Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man.

It was obvious to me in those long-ago days that saying sorry had definite advantages. A form of words, merely, uttered with easily feigned sincerity — an apology could buy instant forgiveness for whatever transgression had been committed.

We live today in the age of the apology, with politicians, especially, often to be seen pulling the same stunt that I did as a teenager. You do something outrageous — snobbily lay into policemen on duty at a Downing Street gate, say — then you get found out, then you say sorry. Finally, you tell everyone that it’s time to “move on”.

The strangest apology of recent weeks, I thought, was that offered by the BBC to the Queen. This arose from security correspondent Frank Gardner’s recounting details on Radio 4’s Today of a private conversation he’d had with Brenda in which she raised concern that radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri had not been arrested. The BBC said it and Gardner were sorry for the “breach of confidence”, which both “deeply regret”.

Actually, what was strange was not the apology itself but what followed it. This was the repetition, in subsequent news bulletins concerning the apology, of the precise details of what was judged to have offended the monarch.

Tuned to PM on my car radio as I drove to the theatre, I was astonished to hear Eddie Mair telling us not only that the Beeb had said sorry but exactly what it had said sorry for. In view of the greater prominence the story was now being given — it was the main item on the news, indeed — this had the effect of communicating the views of the Queen to a wider audience than ever.

The whole business was reminiscent of the practice, once widespread in Fleet Street, of holding up one’s hands in horror over what the foreign press was having the temerity to say about the royal family while simultaneously repeating the precise details of the offensive disclosures.

Remember the technique? “How dare Paris Match say that Princess Margaret [it was usually Princess Margaret] is conducting an affair with . . .”

If the BBC is in the mood for apologies, at present, there are, I would suggest, a number of failings over which it could show contrition.

One concerns the existence of a loophole that allowed Jeremy Clarkson to make a vast fortune from his work on Top Gear. The Daily Telegraph reported that BBC Worldwide’s buying him out of the deal would allow him to trouser a windfall of up to £15m.

Licence-fee payers are also entitled to question the BBC’s employment through decades of the late Sir Jimmy Savile, who this week stands accused of being a sexual predator who preyed on underage girls. The full details of what the old goat was up to were being revealed in an ITV documentary, The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, aired last night as The Oxford Times was going to press. The BBC will say, of course, that it had no evidence that Savile was an abuser. But could this have been because it never looked for it?

That the Jim’ll Fix It host had an unhealthy interest in youngsters was well known to people in the media. I certainly knew it.

The ChildLine founder and BBC star Esther Rantzen, who has seen the documentary, is certain that the corporation is at fault.

She said: “I feel that we in television, in his world, in some way colluded with him as a child abuser — because I now believe that’s what he was. We all blocked our ears to the gossip. There was gossip, there were rumours.”

Quite clearly, of course, Savile was protected to an extent by his saintly image as a charity worker. He was also known to have very powerful friends, including Margaret Thatcher.

One apology that I never expect to hear from the BBC — because it recognises no wrongdoing in the matter — concerns the free advertising it gives across the network to the commercial activities of the stars who guest on its programmes.

What a joy it would be if once — just once — we could hear from someone who did not have a new book, film, play, record or whatever, to promote.

The shameful thing is that these plugs are generally given to people famous enough to be able to flog their wares unaided.

A couple of Fridays ago, for instance, Chris Evans welcomed David Walliams (pictured) to his Radio 2 show for what was, in effect, an hour-long commercial for his book Ratburger. The two were destined to meet again later in the day when Walliams guested on Evans’s The One Show on BBC1.

Last week, with Chris away, his radio stand-in Zoe Ball greeted Jamie Oliver in the same slot. He is the writer (with a new cookery book just out) tipped to replace J.K. Rowling as the nation’s best-selling author.

Needless to say, Rowling herself, with her first adult novel just in the shops, was popping up across the Beeb. It went unmentioned that The Casual Vacancy has been judged by most critics to be not very good.