The coming switch over to all digital broadcasting offers the perfect time to do away with the licence fee altogether. If the Beeb thinks it's worth £140 pounds of anybody's money, let it charge that to subscribe to BBC1, BBC2 and BBCNews24. The rest of its output can pay for itself with adverts, like the other dross on digital, and if it means losing BBC3 and some of the 'community' radio channels, well that's a price I'm sure the average licence payer is prepared to pay.

And if the government feels it needs a taxpayer funded propaganda broadcasting arm to replace the BBC World Service, then let them justify it to Parliament and the taxpayer, and let us demand that at least it should put out propaganda for us rather than for our competitors/enemies in the world.

I appreciate there will be porblems with ownership issues but I'm sure they could be worked out, and meanwhile, we would be free of a truly odious tax whereby we are forced by law to pay for a service which many of us barely use and which more than a few of us find loathsome.

I think it should just be closed down and the assets sold off. Discussions of how else to fund it imply that it does something useful.

I meant to actually address the point of the post before going off on my barely on-topic rant above, but the subject of the Beeb and the licence fee is guaranteed to get me frothing at the mouth.

At least when my local council says it can't afford to fill in the potholes in my road, while advertising for a gay hobbit outreach co-ordinator for a six figure salary, I at least have a notional democratic way of punishing them.

Similarly, when I have to pay large sums of money to Putin's Russia, (and it still is Putin's Russia), to supply me with gas, and then the gubmint, on my behalf, contracts to pay Putin's Russia vast sums of my money if I actually use that gas to heat my house and cook my food, then they do so behind at least a fig-leaf of democratic accounability.

But when I watch some smug, patronising bastard lecturing me from my TV screen in the knowledge that I am paying his/her fucking wages and that there is nothing I can legally do to avoid that, then it is only my calm, unperturbable nature that avoids massive damage to my TV. (Well that and my poor aim with a remote.)

I'm not a Brit so this might be blindingly obvious, but why isn't someone manufacturing and selling a TV incapable of receiving a BBC signal?

Seems to me that you could sell it at a premium.

Jody, the pernicious thing about the licence fee is that whilst it goes almost entirely to pay for the bloated monstrosity that is the BBC, the licence itself is for the privilege of owning any Television or radio set regardless of whether or not you watch, or even can watch, the Beeb.

Indeed, even if you don't own a TV or radio, the thugs from the licensing authority will come knocking on your door and demanding that you prove it.

Jody, the pernicious thing about the licence fee is that whilst it goes almost entirely to pay for the bloated monstrosity that is the BBC, the licence itself is for the privilege of owning any Television or radio set regardless of whether or not you watch, or even can watch, the Beeb.

Indeed, even if you don't own a TV or radio, the thugs from the licensing authority will come knocking on your door and demanding that you prove it.

Although, apparently you don't have to pay if it's not actually tuned into any TV channels, i.e. if you only use it for DVDs/games consoles and such like. That could have changed, though.

A friend of mine went to Britain from the US and took his NTSC set with him to watch videotapes. He didn't have to pay the fee.

Kevin B at March 21, 2008 04:28 PM

Good words. At least during WWII we didn't have a tax to subsidize Lord Haw Haw.