Don't forget your TV licence ! lol

[mickcant]

[QUOTE=johncar54;387036]Another reason to live in Spain, No TV licences

Or live in Sheltered Housing!
I have a ground floor 1 bedroom flat that is a good one compared to other places I have lived in.
Am left completely alone except for an intercom call every Monday morning (to check still alive)
and pay £7.50 per year TV Licence
Mick.

[Iani]

Bullying by the BBC aside, I'm torn between two camps here. Surely like in Oz we should be way past the poll tax of a tv license, just to be able to watch OTHER channels.

However, there is the mantra often churned out by those in favour, you know the old stuck record "think of the wildlife programmes, the specialist programming, the world class news, the quality we would miss etc etc.
They are correct.

The same people often say how TV has gone down and that if the BBC was commercial, it would also end up showing American imports and "Big Brother Naked", or "Husband Swap" type stuff.

There though is the lesson. TV USED to be in the UK literally the worlds finest. They always seem to bring up the series "Jewel In The Crown" for some reason, but there are many others, but the reason such series don't happen really anymore is really simple. Until the mid 80's, there were only 3 channels, and two of them were BBC - so there was ONE commercial channel. Add to that more people seemed to watch tv a few years ago, and you don't have to be an accountant to work out the potential of 100% TV advertising revenue pouring into one channel.

This is why regional TV stations even like Anglia, could produce award winning series like "Survival", being able to afford to send crews all over the world to produce wildlife shows.

More channels though = revenue spread thinner = crappier tv. Simple as that.

So these people can smugly say we should have the license because it enables one channel to still produce quality tv.

Great, until you analyse what the BBC is up to. Spending huge amounts on new digital channels, and instead of trying to aim for quality, instead competing with commerical tv to produce reality tv style tat.

Go figure

ps reason I don't watch tv, isn't due to quality issues or anything like that - I just don't have time I've been trying to watch one dvd for the last 6 weeks alone, I'm a quarter of the way through it