Dame Joan Bakewell, 86, sends furious tweet after BBC cancels her Radio 4 show

Dame Joan Bakewell today blasted the BBC as it axed her long-running Radio 4 show about death and dying and suggested the corporation is dumbing down.  

The veteran broadcaster revealed her popular programme ‘We need to talk about Death’ has been cancelled after three series in a seething social media post.

Baroness Bakewell also had a thinly-veiled dig at bosses who made the decision, telling fans: ‘Sorry, folks! You’ll have to find things out for yourselves’.

Fans including Nigella Lawson expressed their anger that the show was axed.

The celebrity chef said: ‘Hope you will find another way to continue the conversation. It’s the most important one’.

Baroness Bakewell also retweeted a message from one critic of the BBC who said: ‘We need to talk about death. But we need to talk about gardening, money, etc more, it seems. RIP a great series’.

The star was famous dubbed ‘the thinking-man’s crumpet’ when working at the BBC during the 60s and 70s. 

She was given a damehood in 2008 and made a Labour life peer as Baroness Bakewell in 2010.

After 65 years at the BBC she has previously been outspoken about how the media organisation ‘is not what it was’.

She has also accused the corporation’s bosses of banishing older women from its schedules.

The BBC has been asked to comment on why it has cancelled her ‘We need to talk about Death’ show.

The veteran broadcaster revealed her popular programme ‘We need to talk about Death’ has been cancelled after three series in this seething tweet

Star chef Nigella Lawson was among those unhappy that the BBC had axed the Radio 4 show about death

Baroness Bakewell has campaigned vigorously to ensure that elderly people are made to feel that they still had a role in society.

She said recently the worst aspect of getting older was ‘losing a sense of purpose’ after giving up work and children have ‘flown the nest’.

She called it ‘the most awful sense of deprivation’ but said pensioners needed to find new activities and interests to keep themselves busy.

Baroness Bakewell was famously dubbed ‘the thinking-man’s crumpet’ when working at the BBC during the 60s (pictured) and 70s

The former Late Night Line-Up presenter has been a passionate campaigner on age issues and was appointed the Government’s ‘tsar’ for the elderly in 2008.

She said: ‘Old age is a different country. It feels quite different. I’m on the frontier of old age and I know it’s a different place from where I used to live.

‘There’s loss. I deal with loss daily. I dread opening the papers because they contain obituaries about my friends. You lose your friends. You lose your relations. My sister, six years younger, died.

‘I’m always at memorial services. They’re the new party, by the way. They’re very jolly events because you celebrate somebody’s life.’

Dame Joan Bakewell has previously claimed the sex abuse scandal at the BBC went far beyond Jimmy Savile as ‘everyone was doing it’.

The veteran broadcaster said colleagues knew the Jim’ll Fix It star ‘was a creep’ but did nothing about it because it was part of the culture. 

Savile died in 2011 before it emerged that he was one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders having abused over 70 victims throughout his BBC career.

Baroness Bakewell said: ‘When the Jimmy Savile story broke, a whole load of indignant people said “How could the BBC let that happen? Everybody should have known and should have done something about it?” Well, I knew Jimmy Savile and he was a creep. We all knew he was a creep.

‘The culture at the time was universally that men would be predatory and women should self-defend. And so we grew up knowing that if you got into a lift with a man on his own, you kept your back to the side of the lift.

Baroness Bakewell was dubbed ‘the thinking-man’s crumpet’ when working at the BBC during the 60s and 70s.

But she has claimed the Corporation has declined, saying: ‘It is not what it was. It has changed thoroughly. Its values have shifted in able to accommodate the demands being made by government.

‘There is always a war to establish the BBC’s freedom and I feel the BBC had to marketise itself and the core values have not prevailed. When I was there at the start it was a factory that made programmes at TV centre.

‘The people who are making the programmes have all been outsourced. They don’t inhabit this wonderful place that used to be at TV Centre in Wood Lane.

‘Now, young people crave to work for the BBC and of course we don’t have mass employment now. The day after I was recruited they said “Now, we will discuss your pension”.’