FITTINGLY for a channel that screens The X-Files, the BBC is consumed by a conspiracy theory. After viewing figures showed that BBC1 had again been knocked for six by Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? bosses quickly put it about that the show is a fix.

The BBC is right. ITV has systematically, and with malice aforethought, created a show that people want to watch. That goes against a long tradition that saw BBC1 and ITV agree to screen only the most witless tosh.

But the Beeb went further. It believes the timing of Judith Keppel's £1 million win, the first in British quiz history, was more than coincidence.

She was calmly scooping the loot just as Victor Meldrew was meeting Hannah Gordon and his Maker in quick succession in the last episode of One Foot In The Grave (which should have been called Both Feet In The Grave).

The result? ITV gained three million more viewers than BBC.

To be fair to the Beeb, there is more than a whiff of rat about this ratings stitch-up. This is not the first time Millionaire has delivered a major prize winner on a big night for the BBC. When The Weakest Link, Auntie's lame alternative to the Chris Tarrant quiz, went prime-time, the other side handed £500,000 to an out-of-work solicitor.

And Monday's questions did seem to suit the well-travelled pseudo-aristocrat Miss Keppel.

Queries about the patron saint of Spain, and about the squab (which is a baby pigeon, a delicacy with which Miss K was immediately familiar) were right up her tree-lined avenue.

Strangely, however, there was not a single reference to popular culture.

To the rest of us, a question about Henry II's wife would be a tough prospect.

To Miss Keppel, a descendant of the mistress of King Edward VII, it was keeping it in the family. But would she know her Dingles from her Battersbys? I'm not so sure.

More sinister still was the fact that Tarrant exclaimed "I don't believe it!" after the million pound jackpot was claimed. (For those of you in possession of a life, that is Victor Meldrew's catchphrase).

Furthermore, they say that the words "I don't want to give you that" can be rearranged to make the chilling slogan "Greg Dyke is the devil".

That is the case against ITV. The channel's defence rests solely on the winner herself.

If the Millionaire makers were going to engineer a winner, it surely wouldn't be Camilla Parker-Bowles's cousin who once lived in a mansion complete with servants. Add in a cut-glass accent that could dead-head dahlias at 100 yards, and you have a template for unpopularity.

And so it proved. "Typical, you wait two years for a winner and she's a right royal", said The Sun (still seething from being booted out as show sponsor). "Who wants to be a toff?" asked The Daily Mail (which, incidentally, loves toffs, or why else would it run Nigel Dempster's tedious high society column?)

If ITV bosses decided to create a winner, they would have made him or her a working class hero in the mould of Fred Housego, the cab driver who became Mastermind champion.

The backlash to Miss Keppel's victory proves that we are still a bunch of inverted snobs with a dislike of anyone posher than Posh Spice (ie not very posh at all). That is certainly true for me.

When Chris Tarrant asked his jackpot winner what she would do with the money, I answered for her. "It'll come in handy for kennelling the dogs while we're holidaying in Cloisters..."

We are a nation of bitter class warriors.

The BBC should realise that. After all, it is largely made up of a bunch of public school ponces...