TV licence dodgers may no longer face prosecution

What is decent on the BBC? I can't remember the last time I really viewed BBC unless it was 2009 when BBC obtained the F1 again and the days of the 90s with F1. Even today the meerkat and David Coulthard is too much to take. Red Bull pom poms.

Remember the good old days on Saturdays? Big Break? Noels House Party? Going Live? Gladiators? Bullseye? Blockbuster? The A-Team after Blockbuster.. Knightrider… then the Dukes of Hazzard on BBC1. Saturday morning cartoons from the 80s and 90s. Can't remember what else.

I rarely watch BBC1 unless it's Question Time, Graham Norton Show and it depends who's on for me to watch it like big movie stars and certain British people. Wimbledon and Olympics seems about it… Oh of course the World Cup.

All it seems to be full of is cheap trash, talent shows, game shows, soaps/omnibus and other mind numbing stuff. BBC2 is the same, well, except one. Newsnight and thats rare. ITV, laugh. It's just as bad. Talk shows, god. Who watches that crap. Only time it's worth watching is if there's football on and it depends who it is. Channel 4 can only be sometimes decent in the mornings. US Comedy shows. Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier and such… At night the same but depends on what movies are on. Channel 5, is pretty much all of ITV and CH4. It's rare for a decent movie on there. I barely even look anymore.

Then iPlayer, I don't catch up on anything from there. It's been so long since I've last looked.
 
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Glaucus said:
:rolleyes:
The easiest and best thing is to just take it out if central tax. Overall it probably wouldn't cost anyone any extra. Think how much is wasted in administration, courts, enforcement etc. And we can keep the charter.
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That's the worst idea for how to fund it. Not everybody wants it, it isn't an essential service to everyday life like the NHS so why should everybody pay for it?
 
krisboats said:
That's the worst idea for how to fund it. Not everybody wants it, it isn't an essential service to everyday life like the NHS so why should everybody pay for it?
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The amount of people who dint need a license is absolutely tiny. And that's before you consider the people who watch BBC on demand who dint need a license. Something which will change at some point, due to the law being out dated by technology.

Then it very much is a government scheme due to the BBC charter and is nothing like other channels. The license is also a tax.
 
krisboats said:
That's the worst idea for how to fund it. Not everybody wants it, it isn't an essential service to everyday life like the NHS so why should everybody pay for it?
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I don't have kids, but I still have to pay a fortune to have the text speaking, dribbling spawn of other people's loins educated (or an attempt made).
I also have to fork out for all those prats who fall out of aeroplanes and break their necks, or kick off during a weekend drinking binge, or who smoke or eat too much. In fact I pay a lot to subsidie the lifestyles of a lot of blinking idiots.


It is an essential service if you want to promote a certain level of culture in the UK.
Everything I know about the world's animals came from BBC documentaries.
Most of what I know about physics and space came from BBC Horizon programmes. It's prompted most of my interest in history and art too.
I grew up avidly watching Tommorow's World and Doctor Who, so that pretty much defines what I was interested in in later life.

One look at the dismal culture of other countries where they don't have the BBC says a lot. Most of the world is just one big sandy toilet full of stupid peasants killing each other over goats and raping their sisters. This is entirely a result of not having decent telly to watch.

I don't have a TV, but I still regard its benefits for other people as easy to justify. If only in a vague hope that they derive the same education from it all as I did
 
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Since most people have some sort of Sky, Virgin, Freeview etc. I don't see why they dont offer a service to block BBC channels in the same way they block the channels you dont subscribe to (i.e. movies and sports etc). That way there would be no doubt that you dont use the BBC's 'services' and you could rest assured any pestering letters from the TV licensing people could be binned.

Its shocking that the TV (BBC) license costs practically the same as having a subscription to both Netflix and Lovefilm...
 
The way the license works is that you don't actually pay the license for the BBC. You pay the license to receive tv signals, it is a license to receive tv signals, not too watch bbc. They just so happen to use the license money to fund the bbc. They could get rid of the bbc completely and still charge people a license fee to watch tv and just put the money in to something more constructive.
 
Lima said:
Since most people have some sort of Sky, Virgin, Freeview etc. I don't see why they dont offer a service to block BBC channels in the same way they block the channels you dont subscribe to (i.e. movies and sports etc). That way there would be no doubt that you dont use the BBC's 'services' and you could rest assured any pestering letters from the TV licensing people could be binned.

Its shocking that the TV (BBC) license costs practically the same as having a subscription to both Netflix and Lovefilm...
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Because it's not a BBC subscription, it's a TV license.
 
Lima said:
Its shocking that the TV (BBC) license costs practically the same as having a subscription to both Netflix and Lovefilm...
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For the third time in this thread, yes it is shocking. For the cost of the license fee we get:
  • Several live TV channels, many in HD
  • 24 hour BBC news channel (BBC News is the largest broadcast news gathering operation in the world)
  • 16 national radio stations
  • 40 local radio stations
  • iplayer with many shows available
  • BBC world service - good soft power abroad and useful when on holiday :p

Netflix doesn't come close in value for money!
 
joeyjojo said:
For the third time in this thread, yes it is shocking. For the cost of the license fee we get:
  • Several live TV channels, many in HD
  • 24 hour BBC news channel (BBC News is the largest broadcast news gathering operation in the world)
  • 16 national radio stations
  • 40 local radio stations
  • iplayer with many shows available
  • BBC world service - good soft power abroad and useful when on holiday :p
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1 - Most of live channels are load of crap. Hardly anything decent to watch. I'll be happy to see all of them to go.
2 - Can live with out BBC channel. In fact its a load of rubbish. Along with Sky.
3 - Don't care about radio station.
4 - As above
5 - Iplayer is not all that. If you really want to watch when you want. Then there are other methods.
6 - Erm no. If you're on holiday, why would you give a crap about UK. Enjoy the bloody holiday then worry about UK once you're back.
 
Iplayer is free without a licence though not to watch live TV (states on site) and when it launched there was not live TV on it.

Ok I has to be paid for by the same money but I do not even watch that.
 
Glaucus said:
The amount of people who dint need a license is absolutely tiny. And that's before you consider the people who watch BBC on demand who dint need a license. Something which will change at some point, due to the law being out dated by technology.
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Do you have any figures to back that up or is it an assumption?

From what i can gather from the figures, there would be around 2 million households that would be paying for a tv license through tax, even though they don't watch tv. That doesn't include the people that don't even have a tv, or the fact that it's based on households so the number of people paying extra in tax would be higher than 2 million.

Most people have a phone line, but we don't have that incorporated as a tax.

At the end of the day, it is an ENTERTAINMENT service. It should be optional as opposed to mandatory.

bitslice said:
I don't have kids, but I still have to pay a fortune to have the text speaking, dribbling spawn of other people's loins educated (or an attempt made).
I also have to fork out for all those prats who fall out of aeroplanes and break their necks, or kick off during a weekend drinking binge, or who smoke or eat too much. In fact I pay a lot to subsidie the lifestyles of a lot of blinking idiots.


It is an essential service if you want to promote a certain level of culture in the UK.
Everything I know about the world's animals came from BBC documentaries.
Most of what I know about physics and space came from BBC Horizon programmes. It's prompted most of my interest in history and art too.
I grew up avidly watching Tommorow's World and Doctor Who, so that pretty much defines what I was interested in in later life.

One look at the dismal culture of other countries where they don't have the BBC says a lot. Most of the world is just one big sandy toilet full of stupid peasants killing each other over goats and raping their sisters. This is entirely a result of not having decent telly to watch.

I don't have a TV, but I still regard its benefits for other people as easy to justify. If only in a vague hope that they derive the same education from it all as I did
Click to expand...

:p

I sincerely hope that was meant jokingly.
 
joeyjojo said:
For the third time in this thread, yes it is shocking. For the cost of the license fee we get:
  • Several live TV channels, many in HD
  • 24 hour BBC news channel (BBC News is the largest broadcast news gathering operation in the world)
  • 16 national radio stations
  • 40 local radio stations
  • iplayer with many shows available
  • BBC world service - good soft power abroad and useful when on holiday :p

Netflix doesn't come close in value for money!
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1. I only watch 4 programmes across 2 channels, the rest are wasted on me
2. Why the hell would i watch news 24 hours?
3. I don't use any of them and the last time i heard Radio one was probably 10+ years ago
4. Absolute rubbish
5. Which is probably is the best part of the BBC but the encoding is horrible, i end up torrenting the episodes i want to watch in HD anyway
6. Don't think i've ever used

A vast majority of people would probably not use more than half of the BBC output and represents poor value to a vast majority of people. It's a jack of all trades and master of none.

I'd rather they half the number of radio stations, close BBC 3 and 4

And get rid of the rubbish celebs they have on there payroll and have more quality programming
 
krisboats said:
At the end of the day, it is an ENTERTAINMENT service. It should be optional as opposed to mandatory.



:p

I sincerely hope that was meant jokingly.
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It is nit just entertainment. Go read the BBC charter. It is education and has to cater for what commercial channels can't afford. It makes absolute sense to take it out of general tax. And is not even remotely comparable to phones.

Where's your figures and how many of them should have a TV license. Most people who claim not to need one do need one.

25 million TV license
Estimated 26.8million households own a TV
Estimated 27.6 households in the uk

So yes a tiny percentage, especially when evasion rate is considered 5.2%, leaving just 1.3million homes that don't need a license. Out of 27.6million. That is a tiny amount.
 
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jh30uk said:
And Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter supporters.
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What's that Skippy?
It's the sound of a barrel being scraped....

Especially given that Savile did most of his stuff at non BBC institutions by all accounts, including places that should have (by common sense) had far more stringent protection for minors than the BBC actually had in place*, and that Glitter was a pop star not ever from memory a BBC employee.


*It's worrying that it seems the BBC had better protection for minors in place at the time than the NHS and schools.
IIRC they had a policy that no one under 16 was meant to be at things like TOTP, and any under 16's at other events had to have a parent, guardian, or registered chaperone (unlike say the hospitals Jimmy went to and had unrestricted, unsupervised access to people who couldn't even get away from him).
 
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