Why did the BBC decide to drop BBC Parliament from Freeview for three weeks in August, in favour of Olympics coverage? The Guardian's website reckons it's designed to bump up ratings to BBC Parliament on the back of all the Games viewers. Not so. It would be madness for us to claim soaring ratings one summer only to see them vanish again, the next.

Ratings to BBC Parliament have come along very nicely without any such tricks. The channel has been averaging a monthly reach of 1.3 million so far this year. It was only last year that we reached an average of one million for the first time.

By taking BBC Parliament off air on Freeview for three weeks the BBC will be able deliver a sports service on Freeview that is much closer to the service being offered on the other platforms. It makes complete sense from the viewer's point of view to bring the service on Freeview, where bandwidth is most scarce, up to strength and to have as many interactive streams, showing as many different sports, as possible.

Freeview viewers will get BBC Parliament back in time for the Democratic National Convention in Denver, starting 25 August, when we'll be showing C-SPAN's gavel to gavel coverage of the conventions through the night, with daytime repeats. The conventions roll on into the TUC and the party conference season.

BBC Parliament has a tiered approach to the schedules when Westminster is in recess. Some recess weeks allow us to show live the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies. At Easter, we had all three.

In Whit Week we will have two specials: Permissive Night on 26 May with Joan Bakewell marking the big social and legal changes sweeping through Britain 40 years ago, and on 30 May a broadcast of the 1983 general election night programme coming up to its 25th anniversary. Look out for changes in accents and manners, even over that time span.

In the long recesses we show a loop of highlights from the term just gone, mixed in with documentaries and landmark speeches. It is not realistic to expect big audiences to BBC Parliament in August and it would be a bit odd to pour resources into this part of the schedule. If Parliament were recalled in the event of a national crisis, of course the channel would be back on air on Freeview, straight away. The loop will continue to run on all other platforms (Sky, Freesat, cable, Tiscali, online) throughout the summer.

Strange to tell, the idea for the sharing of the bandwidth for the Olympics actually came from BBC Parliament, when we started thinking about the prospects for the London Olympics. The BBC is trying to get away from thinking in terms of departments (what used to be described as output 'baronies') and to start working as one organisation. The idea is simply to do the best we can by the licence payer.

The BBC is hosting three lectures in a series about the role of public service broadcasting and first up was Sir David Attenborough, in a speech delivered on the evening of 1 May in London.

BBC Parliament has developed a two hour slot in its schedules - 2100 Saturday evening - for speeches and lectures of a broadly political and historical nature. This one fits the bill. But, to be honest, if it had been David Attenborough reading out loud from a plant catalogue, I would probably have gone with that. Next in the series are lectures from Stephen Fry and Will Hutton.

Sir David spent some time describing the physical characteristics of the early TV studios in Alexandra Palace, when short stories were declaimed to camera by men in comfy armchairs. Having knocked the microphone off his lapel, the first three minutes of the lecture found us unexpectedly re-enacting some of the limitations of those early years.

David Attenborough gave a very short definition of public service broadcasting in the modern era: "programmes with small audiences".

Sir David fears the effect of reducing the habitat of a genre to just one or two occasional programmes and makes the point that the world-beating units - the Natural History Unit in Bristol being the prime example - have size and continuity on their side. His dislike of faddish popular genres, such as the makeover shows, is expressed clearly and was picked up in news coverage of the lecture:

He argues that niche channels haven't done too well for audiences and that they therefore miss the point of broadcasting.

So I'm not entirely sure whether the broadcast of this lecture on BBC Parliament 'counts' as public service broadcasting, by Sir David's definition. We're showing it (or hiding it, depending on your point of view) on a channel which reaches more than a million viewers a month. But not, as you may have guessed, all at the same time.

Sir David's vision of public service broadcasting is that it must be appropriately funded and played out on a whole and coherent network dedicated to the purpose. And it must have a healthy audience.

He describes what he sees as the toxic effect of foisting publicly funded public service programming onto a commercial schedule where, inevitably, the programme would be treated as a pariah by the scheduler.

I hope you find the time to watch the whole thing at 2100 BST on BBC Parliament and then on iPlayer. If you feel that your Saturday nights have, for too long, been given over to hedonism, you can follow it with a lecture by Baroness James of Holland Park on Police And The Public In The 21st Century (2135 BST) and round off the evening at 2215 BST in the company of the Archbishop of Canterbury, lecturing on Religious Faith And Human Rights to the London School of Economics.

All three lectures were delivered this week and they offer first-rate public discourse that you won't find anywhere else. Saturday nights are never going to be the same again, are they?

Ten years on from the death of Princess Diana, BBC Parliament will show the original broadcast of the funeral service in Westminster Abbey. Prefaced by David Dimbleby, the programme will run through the day exactly as viewers followed the events of ten years ago, from the first movement of the cortege through to the gates of Althorp.

It was a remarkable day, whether you were in London among the crowds or watching on television. From the first distraught gasp as the coffin left Kensington Palace to the flower throwing along the motorway in London’s outskirts, there was no precedent for this. Commentators went back to the funeral of Admiral Nelson to make their comparisons.

The grief of the immediate family shared the stage with the pageantry of a ceremonial funeral. Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a reading, and family politics became state politics in the eulogy of Earl Spencer.

Sir Elton John’s performance of Candle in the Wind is being shown again, I think, for the first time in this broadcast.

We did think long and hard about whether such a deeply personal event as a young mother’s funeral could be treated as part of our shared television history, and broadcast again in this way. Given the other public events on this tenth anniversary, including the commemorative concert for Diana and the Service of Thanksgiving in the Guard’s Chapel (BBC One, 1100, Friday 31 August) we took the view that the re-broadcast could be part of that sequence of programming.

BBC Parliament has taken whole programmes from the television archive before, for national occasions. We showed the Queen’s Coronation on its 50th anniversary and the State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill on its 40th.

In contrast to the informality of most of present day life, BBC Parliament offers space for events which otherwise may only be witnessed in short clips. In the last few months we’ve shown contemporary speeches, in full, from the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Authenticity is a hallmark of this channel – stemming from our core remit to show parliamentary debate and political speeches in full and without commentary. In the broadcast of the funeral of Princess Diana, the channel will keep to the original format: showing the programme 4 by 3. This allows you to watch the whole picture, undistorted, as it was meant to be seen.

The programme begins at 0825 on Saturday 1 September and runs through until 1605.

On the face of it, BBC Parliament is the narrowest of niche channels. You’d have to travel down the channel listings as far as Discovery Ironing +1 before you’d find something more niche. What it says in the lid is very much what is inside: Parliament. This means committee hearings and debates from the devolved parliament and assemblies, as well as full coverage of the Westminster chambers. They occupy the bulk of the schedule.

But there is something in the character of these debates and hearings which is the source of an idea we’ve been exploring. We care about authenticity and speech, unmediated. It’s the opposite of soundbite television. There is a lot going on in the political world which is worth hearing in full and a lot of resources to be tapped into – by way of archive and material from other broadcasters – not available anywhere else.

So, over a bank holiday weekend where the weather was less than inspiring, the channel made use of some surprising resources.

From abroad, we broadcast the whole of the election debate between Sarkozy and Royal (Friday evening with translation – all two hours 40 minutes of it). From the election night itself, the channel took coverage from TF1 and France 2, in French, for those who wanted to experience the event direct and as an alternative to the high-powered special presented by Jon Sopel on BBC News 24, (who, rather conventionally, stuck to broadcasting in English). Earlier in the day, we heard from C-SPAN, with Angela Merkel on the transatlantic partnership.

From the archive, ten years on from New Labour coming to power, BBC Parliament showed in entirety the election night broadcast and this ran all day across the rainy bank holiday Monday. We’ve been told that many participants in the 1997 election stayed glued to their sets, throughout the day. (Next stop in our tour of the election archive:1987, which is showing 5 October).

Drawing on the BBC’s wider resources, the channel showed BBC Scotland’s beautiful film by Ruaridh Nicoll. Patriot Games, examining the history of the Act of Union. And from our own archives, in a new documentary, Robert Orchard told the complex story of Tony Blair’s relationship with Parliament as he prepares to step down.

This morning, that extraordinary opening session of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Back to the Commons, this afternoon, and normal business.

The programming ‘specials’ do, I think, offer something of value and they get the channel noticed in newspaper articles and blogs. In turn, this helps us reach a wider audience for our normal parliamentary schedule. BBC Parliament is the only parliamentary channel, among dozens in the world, to have regular audience ratings (we reach around one million adults, per month) and I think these specials play their part.

We got used, over the years, to seeing Parliament from one perspective. Head and shoulders shots of speakers in debates, then Mr Speaker… and a wide shot, when desperation strikes.

After a while, the innovation of showing cutaways for people named in debates was introduced, and the world continued to spin in its usual course. We could (sometimes) see who was being talked about. But there was still no sense of interaction or of the flow of the debate.

This is more than a little odd because, compared with most other assemblies around the world, Westminster manages to "do" debate pretty well. Others - including the US Congress – restrict the broadcasters to mug-shots, for fear of showing how very few attendees there are. The result for the most part is absolutely stultifying, with speeches made not to contribute to a debate but rather to be "read into the record". Terrible television, every time, guaranteed.

But an experiment that started in the Lords has changed all that. This week the Speaker of the Commons, Michael Martin, has agreed to change the rules to allow the cameras to follow the normal flow of the action, and to show reactions from around the chamber. It’s not the same thing as being there yourself, but for the first time the outside world is getting a real sense of the place – of the intimacy of the Westminster chambers and the closeness of the protagonists, standing feet away from each other across the debating chamber.

Nothing can make an empty chamber look full, or cheer up a dull and poorly made speech. But our experience so far (the experiment came in at the start of term, and has now been made permanent) is that following the debate as the director sees it, and seeing MPs’ and Lords’ reactions, is going to make Parliament a lot more watchable.

We’re still some way from complete freedom to capture the whole picture. Protests in the public gallery are still "off limits" to the cameras. The cameras on the Despatch Box, where the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition square off to each other, are still so high up as to miss the "in your face" nature of the conflict that is Prime Minister’s Questions. But the million or so viewers to BBC Parliament, and the many more who watch it on the news and in political programming, are closer now to seeing Parliament as it really is than ever before.

Today, as every day, I got a viewer's letter pointing out that the picture on BBC Parliament, crammed illegibly into one quarter of the Freeview screen, is not good enough. They even sent me a photo, to show me. Our announcement that from the 13th November it will be a normal broadcast picture (just in time for the Queen's Speech on the 15th) has come not a moment too soon.

What was meant to be an improvement to the audio-only service offered in the days of ITV Digital was neither understood nor appreciated by anyone. Many viewers assumed that the 3/4 of a screen filled with (mainly) dead text was a whim on our part, a symptom of advanced mania for graphics. Others concluded that they were doing something wrong with their remote control and could we please tell them which button to push? Bandwidth constraints... nah, that didn’t wash.

After receiving thousands of angry and perplexed letters and emails, there’s one that sticks in my mind - “it’s like looking at a postage stamp while listening to the radio”. Quite.

Thanks to some brilliant work by the BBC's distribution department, the bandwidth issues finally got sorted and the channel on Freeview will look just like a proper one, as it already has done for years on cable and satellite. Sitting next to BBC News 24 on the EPG at channel 81, it makes that transition from the first part of a major statement or debate - which both channels are likely to carry - to the handover to BBC Parliament, both natural and easy.

BBC Parliament already reaches between three quarters of a million and a million viewers a month - this will go up with the growing success of that platform.

We’ve one more hurdle to cross. A lot of Freeview boxes are not very clever, and it means that many existing Freeview viewers will have to re-tune (from the 13th) to pick up the new full-screen channel. I think there may be one or two more letters and emails...