I was struck by a detail in a report of an attack with a sledgehammer on the statue of Prospero and Ariel above the door of Broadcasting House last week. “With every loud smash,” said a BBC witness, “there’d be a moan or a shout of ‘stop’ from someone in the gathering crowd below.”

The sculpture is, of course, by Eric Gill (1882-1940), the Catholic arts and craftsman. Nikolaus Pevsner, who hated Broadcasting House as formless, admired the sculpture as “especially noble”. The idea of making it had been put to Gill by Herbert Read, the influential writer on art, working at the time at the V&A. He was, incidentally, if more importantly, the father of the novelist Piers Paul Read.

Gill accepted, but did not care for, the commission’s theme from The Tempest. “I took it upon me,” he wrote, “to portray God the Father and God the Son. For even if that were not Shakespeare’s meaning it ought to be the BBC’s.” A preparatory drawing and model show the Son with stigmata. One can see that the Word has application to broadcasting, and Broadcasting House was, after all, built with a chapel.