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The sound of clucking you might have heard emanating from the BBC is the chickens coming home to roost.

The broadcaster, plagued by internal scandal and existing in a permanent state of crisis, finds itself up a gum tree as the number refusing to cough up for its propaganda grows daily.

At some point someone, somewhere, will have to put this bloated taxpayer-funded behemoth out of its misery. And it could come sooner than you think.

The BBC's royal charter is up for renewal and, as always, it has promised radical change. But only because it's in blind panic.

The trouble is we've heard it all before and from next month, at £180 a year, fewer and fewer people are prepared to pay the TV Tax. And that is all the fault of the BBC.

The broadcaster is desperate for a much higher licence fee, or additional funding from somewhere, to keep it going.

Put simply if the decline in the number paying the TV Tax continues at its current pace (evasion rates now stand at around 12.5% at a cost of £550m to the BBC while another 3.6 million households have said they don't need one costing it a further £617m) then it will no longer be able to afford much of its public-service output.

The conundrum is that more than nine in 10 people use BBC services each month, but fewer than 80% of households cough up the licence fee.

And why should they?

From Jimmy Savile to Huw Edwards, from its appalling airbrushing of the word Jew on Holocaust Memorial Day to the Left-leaning rants of Gary Lineker, the BBC promises fundamental reform in the aftermath of every regular scandal, yet never manages to deliver it.

The British public are so sick and fed up with the ailing state-run service, that few would complain if it was defunded.

And this has caused such a panic at the BBC that it has blinked first.

Every household that watches the broadcaster - including its on-demand iPlayer service - must cough up the licence fee.

But the number doing so is shrinking so fast "the current model cannot maintain the BBC's public service mission for the future", it says.

The current Royal Charter that sets out how the BBC is governed and funded expires at the end of next year.

One option open to the Government, whose consultation on the future of the broadcaster ends today, is to scrap the hated licence fee model and replace it with a subscription service or introduce commercial-style adverts.

Whatever, we are now witnessing in real-time the inevitable death of a corporation that has cried wolf once too often.

Former Reform UK and now Independent MP Rupert Lowe said: "The BBC is a foul stench, emanating across public discourse - it must now be immediately defunded and turned into a subscription service.

"It simply cannot be trusted to represent the interests and opinions of a large majority of patriotic Brits.

"If it's as brilliant as we're all told, the organisation should thrive under that model. I will not be signing up.

"Once a proud symbol of national identity, the BBC now arrogantly lectures its audience, treating traditional British culture with contempt. It must be defunded."

Few will disagree.