One hundred and forty five pounds and fifty pence. That’s how much a television licence will set you back for one year of flickering light from your idiot box. So for that amount of cash you would probably expect at least something for it wouldn’t you. I mean, when you walk up to an ice cream van you pay a pound and you expect a 99 right? You don’t expect the ice cream man to take your quid, scarper to the driving seat and speed off towards the border do you? So why is it okay for the BBC to take £145.50 from you and do exactly that?
Now, recently the BBC Trust decided to put a freeze on the licence fee, so you will pay £145.50 for the next two years until it goes up again in 2012 where you should probably expect a bit of a hike thanks to the Olympics and of course the end of the world. So for now you can count yourselves lucky.
So where does all the money go? Well, according to the BBC Trust’s figures for 2009/10, 66% of it goes towards television, 17% on radio and just 6% online. The remaining money goes towards such things as investments in new technology and general running costs, not to mention the whole digital TV switchover malarkey.
As you can see then, the bulk of the money goes towards financing the television channels. These channels are: BBC One, Two, Three, and Four, BBC HD, CBBC, Cbeebies, BBC News 24, and BBC Parliament. Oh and BBC Alba for the Scottish, something else Scotland can have from the rest of the UK, I’m hoping we get a good Christmas present from them this year.
So obviously there’s a lot to pay for, hence the charging of extortionate amounts of money via the licence fee. Now I don’t mind the BBC too much, I just feel that they are ripping us off really. I just don’t feel we get very much back from it. Unfortunately the Beeb can’t please everyone. For example, I hate Radio One so therefore I don’t listen to it, but some thirteen year old girl might love Radio One so she will listen to it (and probably text in as well while she’s at it telling Jo Wiley how much fun she had at the weekend). I’ve been known to watch Match of the Day, but that very same thirteen year old girl probably doesn’t because she doesn’t understand what’s so enthralling about 22 blokes kicking a ball about a field. It’s okay she’ll learn.
But even taking that fact into consideration I still feel we’re being ripped off! Over the last few years all the BBC has really produced is Doctor Who and Sherlock which are decent enough shows, but they don’t really warrant the fee and Sherlock was only three episodes long and it was basically a Doctor Who spin off! Speaking of which they refuse to be original, all you’ll find on their channels are continuing shows such as Top Gear and repeats of BBC shows from yesteryear. Now this is all very nice but I can find these two things on Dave and UK Gold so for crying out loud do something else!
When they do finally find something else to do, they go and flog it to death. Take Mock the Week for example, which I managed to catch the other night in it’s new graveyard slot. Honestly this show should stop now, it used to be really funny and topical. But now it’s a platform for some of the worst new comedians to yell out some of the most pointless drivel you’ll ever hear. Dara O’Briain doesn’t do anything anymore, Frankie Boyle has gone now and it seems Russell Howard has too. Meaning Hugh Dennis is forced to carry it single-handedly. If I was him I’d be out of there by now, he is far too good for what that show’s become. I mean, what’s the point? You get the same thing on Radio 4 and that costs much less to produce. It needs putting down, it doesn’t know when to quit.
Speaking of not knowing when to quit. Harry and Paul was back on our screens last week. Cheap television: take one idea that’s kind of funny and run with it, and run with it, and run with it, and keep on running with it. Yes, unfortunately it wasn’t the best watch. The past two series were very funny and they were a good social commentary on modern Britain. However, the sketches they do are now redundant, they’ve done all they can with them. The ‘Seen you coming’ sketch, in which Harry Enfield plays a man running a shop in an upper class area selling tat to dim witted women, has now lost its appeal. It’s all been done now, so stop doing it. Instead they have created a rival for him across the road, played by, yes you’ve guessed it, Harry Enfield. There was a prolonged sketch about the Beatles that was terrible, it was literally a filler, they had 5 minutes to fill and did so with this. Lazy and just plain awful. And don’t even get me started on the weird bloke asking a woman if she’s a model sketch. Honestly, what was that about?
It wasn’t all bad, the Dragon’s Den sketches are still funny, but even that was dragged out too much. And Lenny Henry was in it briefly, along with Simon Greenall (Alan Partridge’s Geordie mate). This was the first episode of the series so it may get better. But I doubt it will. It’s the new Little Britain, only with less of the annoying catch phrases.
To be fair to the BBC, it’s not just them who are doing this. Look what ITV have on offer: X-factor, a show so tired Simon Cowell now wears dark glasses to cover up his mid-show snoozes; Family Fortunes, a show so ridiculous they might as well get that 'Rev' Terry Jones’ moustache to host it; and Emmerdale. Then there’s Channel 4: The Inbetweeners, which is what happens when you give E4 writers an 18 certificate, Deal or no Deal, so cheap to make the phone bill is the biggest expenditure, and everyone’s favourite time waste: Big Brother. They all do it. So, comparing them to all the other channels, BBCs television is far superior. But is it really worth £145.50? No, it’s not.
But what are the options? Abolish it completely and have them raise money through advertisements and such is one avenue but that will just create even worse tele than we’re watching right now. We could also have a subscription like service in which you only pay for the programme types you want to watch. Drama or sport for example. That might work. The problem you have really is that the BBC runs programmes and services for a whole range of demographics. It has to supply many things, such as news, sport, kids shows, drama, educational shows and parliament broadcasts for example. It’s not as easy as being say The Disney Channel where all you have to do is make shows to keep teenagers entertained for 20 minutes at a time.
What I would do is simply lower the fee and get rid of the dead wood. It’s not hard to see what they’re wasting money on. Remember the World Cup coverage? So much waste there. They had Chris Moyles and ‘Comedy’ Dave do commentary on a random group match. That was fun. More pundits and reporters than you can wave a red card at went to the tournament, as well as a massive studio for them all. But the worst was paying Emmanuel Adebayor money to be an analyst. Why? Why do this? He knows very little, he’s annoying, he brings nothing to the team and he cant even turn his phone off! Why was he there!?
What else can we bin? Well the whole of BBC Three for a start, Casualty, there’s one, do we really need Holby AND Casualty? How about Eastender’s budget, get that down, the same people would watch it if its budget were 50 pence a year anyway. Sack a few pointless people: Bruce Forsythe, Scott Mills, whoever writes Miranda. Before you know it we’ll have cut expenditure by half and hence we can cut the fee by half and we might even have better quality tele in the process.
It is highly unlikely that we wont have to pay a licence fee in the future though. It’s an effective way of generating cash, and Britain doesn’t have a society that would actually do anything about it anyway. If you look at the big European picture we don’t pay that much for the privilege of TV. Iceland for example have to fork out 32460 króna (£183) a year for it. And our mates over in Germany have to pay 204 euros (£178) a year. Yes, some pay a lot less than us (Ireland, France and Croatia for example) and some don’t even pay anything (Spain, Portugal, Hungary to name but a few) but that’s how their countries are run and they don’t share the same extensive service the Beeb provides. And hey, we could be like the Italians where they show adverts as well as charging for a licence. Well done Italy.
So looking at that it’s not a lot of money really considering what you get for it. But I think my main problem with it is the fact that a wealthy family with seven flat screen LED televisions pays the same amount for it as a much poorer family with only one basic television to all huddle around. Yet so many people of all social classes are always complaining about their money troubles in these hard times, surely it's harder to be poor right? You know some morning radio DJs only get paid £40,000 a month. Keep it in perspective people. Now, where’s my 99?
No comments:
Post a Comment