BBC good value!

Been speaking to a couple of people on Twitter about the BBC licence fee and it struck me that it is something that I do actually feel very strongly about. There's not too many of those things, so I figured I'd say my piece.

The TV licence is currently about £12 per month, or if you work it out, just 40p per day. That pays for ALL the BBC TV channels, all the national BBC radio, digital BBC radio, the bbc.co.uk web site, world service, etc. I think that's pretty good value considering we have five people in the house and each and every one of us use at least one of those services every day.

But it seems that when asked, only 30% of the public are happy with the way this is all funded. Alternatives include subscription or advertising funding. These alternatives have a pretty even split when the public is polled. So in my understanding, about 35% of the public are quite happy to pay Sky or Virgin for their shows AND have advertising pumped at them (after all, we currently pay for Sky One, etc, and they still have adverts), or to relinquish control and decision making on the shows we watch, to the advertisers.

Now I can see the argument for subscription. I am more than happy to pay extra for the BBC channels to subsidise their lost revenue from people that don't want to pay. BUT I am not happy paying subscriptions AND receiving adverts. The reason I hate adverts is very simple - TV shows are made solely to attract advertisers to attract income. They are NOT made for the viewing public.

It's great that X-Factor is watched by a billion people every Saturday night. That's good. That's a billion happy people. But don't ever kid yourself that it's made to make the viewers happy - that is a by-product. It's made because the advertisers know there's a lot of people watching it and they pay top dollar to advertise there. It's made to keep the advertisers happy.

Now the advertisers, of course, want to advertise in shows watched by the majority. If all TV went advertising funded, then all shows would be made for the majority. The majority of people wouldn't mind this. But think about cars.

The biggest selling cars are always the Vauxhall Astra and Ford Focus. The majority buy these. What a very, very dull and uninspiring place the UK would be to drive in, is Ford and Vauxhall decided that they would only make these cars.

What a very, very horrible place the UK would be if all TV was SKY1 and ITV.