Today along with the other exciting brown envelopes in my letter box I received the annual "demand" for £145 of my hard earned cash. When you consider that this money isn't to watch tv in generally but only the ones contacted with the BBC I don't think I'm getting value for money.
Once I go back to work again I will be back to watching TV roughly for 4 hours/day (Mon - Fri) and mayb 8 hours or so at the weekend. Out of this I can hand on heart say I rarely watch bbc1,2,3 programmes. I don't watch Eastenders (dreary london life - er no thank you), I find their news reporting bias and in last few years they seem to have lost out on most of the major sporting events to sky or other rival companies. I did like the Jonathan Ross chat show (but if reports that Graham Norton is taking over as new host - sorry not my thing!)
Yes there are some programmes produced by the "beeb" that I like - Spooks is a fav, I dip into Strictly come dancing" and currently "mistresses" but that's about all that floats my boat.
Then there is the radio stations - and here I probably get more value. I admit to listening to the Radio 1 breakfast show for the drive into work since the Chris Evans Days, and like Scott Miles for drive home but really is there need for all the "jollies" DJ's from the show seem to be on - trips by moyles few yrs back to Germany for football, the trips to New york, Ibiza , Anya Napa every year - Value for money? Hardly.
We as consumers have the right to choose the addidtional stations we want to purchase -sky, virgin media, the now de funked Setana so why can't we have the same choice with the BBC? And by the way they aren't particularly cheap either but at least I can choose if I want to pay the money.
Surely in 2010 its time for BBC to ditch the license and go down the ad route same as the other stations and u never know their viewing figures just might go up!
Interesting points you male there, Paula.
ReplyDeleteStrangely enough, I only had this debate with some friends a number of nights ago. We're all living in Dublin, and our television licence fee goes to RTÉ.
RTÉ, our national broadcaster as you know, is "50%" funded by the licence fee. An Post get some cash from the fee, 5% goes to the Broadcasting Association of Ireland (BAI) (for community broadcasting documentaries, for example). Quite frankly, I believe that the BBC is a superb broadcaster.
The BBC is the largest broadcaster in the world, bigger than any company in the States, any Eastern nation; anywhere. And, in my opinion- the BEST broadcaster in the world. I regularly find it baffling to think that people don't all like the BBC, and openly complain about it and criticise it. I would kill to have a national broadcaster of the same calibre and quality as you have, with respect to your point.
The BBC has 8+ TV channels (excluding regional services and switch-overs) and 10 Radio channels (excluding local stations). RTÉ has two TV channels, and one non-directly linked small Irish language channel, and 2 radio stations (with 6 "digital only" radio stations, with a tiny amount of listeners, as we've not adopted digital in the Republic- less than 20k radios sold). We've not even adopted High Definition programming! As you can clearly see, the BBC offer a wide variety of choice, unlike the BBC.
The BBC invest heavily in emerging talent, new programming and have a strong sense of professionalism. The BBC are at the forefront of quality television and radio. Their website too is excellent and I have not come across any poor service of theirs.
Our licence fee is €160. It's required by law, and if you don't pay people will knock on your door and slap you with a prosecution and/or fine. Frankly, I have absolutely no problem funding the BAI for their work, nor any other independent broadcaster (to which a small portion goes to), however I don't like the expense being wasted, as it seems to be in RTÉ.
The quality of broadcasting isn't up to scratch- as we still remain with no groundbreaking programming (from the home-grown content, that is), we stick to the same content and presenters and we don't invest in new talent sufficiently.
In short, I would prefer to give my licence money to the BBC, as they cater for all the material I want, be it from pop music to new artists (Radio 1 to Radio 2 or 6), 24 hour news (any BBC news channel), to entertainment (BBC Three) or fantastic documentaries and arts programmes (BBC Four)- all in HD if I like.
Sure, it can't be easy for RTÉ to do as much with a small population- but we can do a lot, lot better.
Hi david,
ReplyDeletesorry for late reply. I hear what you're saying about quality of BBC programmes however, I dont see BBC as being better quality than the commercial ones. Maybe Im not their target audience but i tend to watch the other digital channels more.