NO news is good news - unless you are a public-funded broadcaster paid a public fortune to provide it.

The news mostly disappeared on Monday on the BBC, thanks to the strike. In the silence it was possible to wonder about news, and the way it has expanded to accommodate the busy expanse of modern life, especially on television and the radio.

Once there was only enough going on to fill a few sober bulletins, delivered with gravitas by a fellow who appeared to have wandered in from a funeral by mistake, and who spoke all sonorous and slow, as if his script were being chiselled out in slate by a dim-witted stone mason.

Nowadays there is more than enough news to fill a multitude of TV stations, with some, such as Sky News or BBC News 24, running round the clock, generally presented by scrubbed and perky people who are constantly pepped up, as if awash with caffeine and vitamin pills.

Modern news is shiny and slick, while old news was grainy and laborious - except, of course, it was no such thing. The essence of news hasn't changed, being concerned with tragedy and triumph, births and deaths, love and sex, politics and war, sport and gossip, and all the messy rest.

Here's what has changed: the presentation and the instant need to know. News is now and now is news, an endless rush of events in a world that never sleeps. Or something like that.

I like news, which is just as well, all things considered. The unfolding of events, the bickering exchanges of politicians, the analysis and the agony - all this is the sound of the world talking to itself. Anyone who is alive and ticking wants to be in on the debate, don't they?

Well, yes. But what if there were no news - nothing to report, no fortune or misfortune, no ups and downs, no tragedy and no triumph, just a happy flat line of nothing going on?

Thanks to Monday's strike, many BBC news shows were neutered. Radio 4's Today, where I usually start the day, was replaced by assorted programmes.

At 6.30am, instead of quarrelsome politicians or business talking-heads droning on about the latest Marks & Spencer/Sainsbury's profit disaster, there was a documentary about the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, presented by Kenneth Clarke MP, one of the better sort of Tories.

I rose from the breakfast sofa rested and interested, which is where the "no news" thought popped in. A world without news would be unnerving but listening to Dizzy made me wonder, especially after such a quietly seductive start to the day.

The BBC strikers are protesting against Director General Mark Thompson's plans to cut 4,000 jobs. Most strikes tend to be an admission of failure on all sides. In this instance, it is easy to appreciate why journalists and others are upset at the prospect of losing so many jobs at the hands of a macho boss wanting to make his mark. Yet Thompson is also charged with preserving the BBC, an institution worth saving. So he has to justify his public billions.

For all that, cuts so sweeping will see a smallish local outpost such as BBC Radio York losing 20 per cent of its staff, which hardly seems fair. That must hurt more than the losses in London. Incidentally, if Natasha Kaplinsky truly is paid £500,000 of our money a year, as reported this week, then the BBC has some peculiar values.

While I enjoyed the news-less interlude, too many strikes will weary public patience and risk handing viewers and listeners to the opposition. So thanks for Dizzy and his upturned trumpet. Now it is time again for John Humphrys, James Naughtie, Jeremy Paxman and their bothersome ilk to justify their existence by annoying politicians on our behalf.

That's a big part of why we pay a licence fee. By the way, I still think the fee represents good value, whatever the BBC-bashing letter writer from Stamford Bridge says every time I raise this issue.

Updated: 09:19 Thursday, May 26, 2005