Television Centre, June 2011
Television Centre, that magical palace of tellydom. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

As buildings go, it's not even very nice to look at. A dowdy doughnut-shaped complex of studios and offices, with the utilitarian air of an unrefurbished school or a motorway service station from the 70s. It sits on Wood Lane in London, opposite an Esso garage and the Westfield Shopping Centre, with Wormwood Scrubs to the north and Shepherd's Bush to the south. No one, really, ought to give a shit. But last week's announcement that the BBC is putting Television Centre up for sale immediately prompted an angry, anguished howl from some, followed by a gentle mutter of bemusement from others.

I was one of the howlers. TVC, as it is known, was opened in 1960, 11 years before I was born. Which means that for as long as I've been alive, it's been visually synonymous with "telly", continually looming in the background, providing refreshingly non-glamorous incidental scenery for everything from Swap Shop to Strictly Come Dancing. It made countless appearances in children's programmes, light entertainment extravaganzas and comedy shows, from Python to Partridge (even making it into the opening titles of A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Alexei Sayle's Stuff).

The building is being sold to save money. But most of its value is purely symbolic. It's fair to say the vast majority of people working in television today will have at some point dreamed of working at TV Centre. Glaswegian comedy writer-performer Robert Florence (Burnistoun) wrote that telling an aspiring comedy writer that TV Centre won't be around any more is like telling a budding astronaut the moon has disappeared.

Some of those who actually use the building on a daily basis have had all the sentimentality ground out of them: the building itself is a higgledy-piggledy, curving-corridored pain in the arse, they'll tell you. But for anyone who merely drops by on an irregular basis, each and every visit provides a palpable buzz. Ooh, you think to yourself, ooh. I'm fulfilling a childhood fantasy. And that excitement, that sense of history, makes you think about what you're doing in a slightly different way.

Things change, of course. TV Centre has already changed. It's no longer exclusively the domain of the BBC, for one thing. Because it's so synonymous with the Beeb, it sometimes confuses people when they discover that its seven studios are routinely hired out for shows for other channels. For instance, when I was appearing on the first series of 10 O'Clock Live (Channel 4), I spent my Thursdays there; meanwhile, Harry Hill's TV Burp (ITV) was in the studio next door.

At the end of the day, it's just a building. So why feel so pained about its sell-off? Part of the answer can be found on the official website for the company managing the sale, which is enough to make anyone with one ounce of nostalgia about television want to weep.

On one page, alongside a photograph of Morecambe and Wise smiling in front of TV Centre, is the headline "Prime Time". Below this, the following words: "The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show was the essence of prime time . . . With high investor demand for commercial property in London and a lack of landmark sites available, now is the prime time to invest in the future of Television Centre."


On another page, a picture of the Tardis. "The Tardis is Doctor Who's time machine, synonymous with spaces that are larger than they appear at first," explains the accompanying blurb. "The BBC has created a vision for the repurposing and development of the Television Centre site, designed to be larger than the sum of its parts."


Below this is an artist's impression of how this "repurposing" might look. Since the most iconic sections of Television Centre – the main "doughnut" and Studio One – were granted listed status in 2009, they can't be demolished. So the "vision" depicts anonymous people milling around a sanitised outdoor "complex", looking for all the world like every shopping centre built since 2002, except with a great big chunk of TV Centre in the middle: a swallowed-up relic from a bygone era, just like the Statue of Liberty poking from the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes. Good old grotty TVC with a load of unimaginative "creative renewal space" bullshit smeared round it. Louis Barfe, author of Turned Out Nice Again: the Story of British Light Entertainment, accurately described it as "tantamount to vajazzling".

And that, I suppose, is what caused me to feel a twinge of psychic pain at the news of the proposed sale: the thought that this place, this familiar edifice from my formative years, which I saw more often than many local landmarks, although I'd never been to London – this magical palace of tellydom (as my over-excited head would have it) – will now become just another sterilised "hub".

The sole difference is that TV Centre was a landmark local to everyone, whose history sings and dances on tape. Or at least on the tapes the BBC didn't wipe to save money, as they routinely did until the early 80s.

In a desperate bid to make the "repurposed" TV Centre Urban Dawdling Precinct of the future look slightly less anodyne, the artist's impression includes a funky live stage near the front. Shorthand for: "Hey, it's fun!" And at first glance you do think: Oh well, at least there's a band playing – maybe it'll be a bit like the end of an old episode of Trumpton. Then you realise it's more likely to be an onstage promotion for Hyundai.

If that's the future, then sod sentimentality. Wipe that tape. Knock the whole thing down and flog the bricks on eBay. Just don't vajazzle our memories.