TV Licence Super Thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ken
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Billies Bangers said:
Why are people so bloody tight? The BBC is absolutely chock fully of the most wonderful documentaries - real mind blowing stuff, yet people would rather watch mind numbing programmes from the likes of Murdoch i.e. pond life programmes?

Someone asked me yesterday if I'd watched 'nude blind date'. My first reaction was shoot me now! There really is little hope for society.
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The thing is though you need a license even if you don't watch BBC. Yet all the licensing does is fund the BBC.

What are all these mind blowing documentaries? Are there no equivalents on Discovery, Animal Planet, Channel 4, Syfy, Netflix, etc.

I watch a handful of shows: Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, True Detective, Vikings. The only ones on BBC are Luther and Peaky Blinders, but I could easily wait for them to come on Netflix/Prime.

I don't watch Eastenders, TOWIE, Big Brother, Jungle Celebrity, Britains got Talent, etc. Not everyone who has Sky watches those kinds of shows.

Also nude blind date actually sounds like a laugh not something I would watch regularly but having never seen it I should not judge it, just like yourself, judging a book by it's cover. Your slating a show you have never seen. Put it this way lets say your on a train. 2 Males in their 30's sit down in front of you. They start talking about video games. You think to yourself wow these guys need to grow up. However they are just chatting about some common ground they have. What you don't know is one of them is a heart surgeon who saves peoples lives on a daily basis the other helps victims of abuse. Yet you judged them because you had one tiny insight into their lives which happened to be something you don't like (video games).

Now think about that before you start bleating on about everyone that has sky is a brain dead window licker.
 
Cancelled mine about 2 years ago too as I barely turned on the Virgin box. It was slow and painful to browse with crappy content filled with ads. Don't miss it one bit.

I'll be deleting my iPlayer app from every device, though I've no idea how they will enforce it. Shame but again, for the amount I watch it's not worth the money.

Netflix alone is plenty for the limited time I have to watch TV these days.
 
Billies Bangers said:
Since when has it been permissible to use the words 'decent' 'American' and 'dramas' in the same sentence?
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I can't give you an exact date but I imagine it's been a few decades, at least.

Billies Bangers said:
Have you ever wondered why lots of other countries co-fund BBC documentaries, especially the Americans? It's because the BBC are recognised world wide as masters of their craft when it comes to making documentaries.
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Yes, BBC's documentaries are good, that was an omission on my part but there's more to TV than just learning about what's going on outside. Often I just want to switch off a bit and watch something that has no real relation to the actual world I live in and a few episodes of a programme that's completely fictional and entertaining provides just that.

But by all means, continue being a **removed**
 
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Werewolf said:
It's worth noting that the BBC will get very good rates on most hotel bookings as they'll be doing it in bulk and at business rates (so might be paying far less than the headline rate).
So a "fancy" hotel might actually have been cheaper than other options, especially if they were booking for cast and crew*.

IIRC the BBC typically pays it's staff well under the commercial rates, with the disparity increasing as you go up the ladder.

So for a low level staffer the rate might be the same/slightly lower than say ITV or Sky, but by the time you get to the senior posts you might be getting paid a fraction of it (IIRC the top 10 or 20 BBC staff between them get paid less than ITV's top guy, less than the Daily Mail editor, and you'd probably need the top 50 staff to reach the same salary as the head of Sky).
They are also far more stringent on expenses than other broadcasters, IIRC they tend to really tight on a lot of things.

It may have been different in decades gone by, but certainly the last 10 years or so at least they've been really tight fisted.



*The mail made a big thing about one such hotel where the BBC had booked beds at a "£150 a night hotel", it turned out that they'd booked rooms at a B&B at the non peak bulk advance rate of about £40 or £50 a night as it was the nearest suitable place to where they were filming (saving on travel costs and meaning more time could be spent filming).
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Perhaps they have, it was 2004 when she did that job.
 
Glaucus said:
BBC documentaries are good, still cheaper to either buy them out right or wait for them on Netflix though. Its not like there's new documentaries worth watching every week. There's a couple a year on BBC.
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Yeah, I tend to buy the outstanding stuff like Planet Earth on BluRay. More and more BBC content is on Netflix these days - I imagine they make money from licencing the content out to streaming services so why pay twice...
 
Glaucus said:
More freeman rantings, with no bases of reality. Again clueless.

Rather than believing nonsense on freeman websites, why don't you go talk to a professional and ask them to educate you.
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what professional would that be?

freeman stuff doesnt work, the courts, police and bailiffs ignore cry's of no contract.
 
no point making proper posts you wouldn't believe it anyway. you would rather gain knowledge from the cess pits of the web.
plenty of sites from teh government if you want to learn, instead you flock to freeman sites and lap it up without applying any cross checking.

everything you have said is so wrong, that it would take you seconds to find that out if you wanted to.

drs101 said:
what professional would that be?

.
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isn't that obvious, no point asking a professional brick layer about law and statue.
 
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Glaucus said:
no point making proper posts you wouldn't believe it anyway. you would rather gain knowledge from the cess pits of the web.
plenty of sites from teh government if you want to learn, instead you flock to freeman sites and lap it up without applying any cross checking.

everything you have said is so wrong, that it would take you seconds to find that out if you wanted to.



isn't that obvious, no point asking a professional brick layer about law and statue.
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so you have used freeman principles to not pay the tv licence?
 
I cancelled the TV license when I moved into my house four years ago. I don't watch live TV (or use iplayer). I remember receiving a letter confirming I'd cancelled my license and haven't heard from them since :)
 
Billies Bangers said:
Why are people so bloody tight? The BBC is absolutely chock fully of the most wonderful documentaries - real mind blowing stuff, yet people would rather watch mind numbing programmes from the likes of Murdoch i.e. pond life programmes?

Someone asked me yesterday if I'd watched 'nude blind date'. My first reaction was shoot me now! There really is little hope for society.
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Why am I tight? I stated I only watch Master Chef. I'm not paying £145/yr for that. It's not good value for money so it doesn't make me tight, just sensible and not wasting money.
 
Glaucus said:
no point making proper posts you wouldn't believe it anyway. you would rather gain knowledge from the cess pits of the web.
plenty of sites from teh government if you want to learn, instead you flock to freeman sites and lap it up without applying any cross checking.

everything you have said is so wrong, that it would take you seconds to find that out if you wanted to.



isn't that obvious, no point asking a professional brick layer about law and statue.
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proper posts? if it takes seconds then show me? you seems to think legislation was here since the beginning of man..it was not, research brehon law it was used around these lands way before legality, again a rule on a legal society nothing more nothing less
 
lol. we aren't talking about since the dawn of time. we dont live then. we live in the uk now. and your definition of legislation and law was well bizarre and freeman like.

again go live in your fairy land of wrong. if you ever get hauled to court, it'll be major ROFL for everyone who watches your defense.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
The thing is though you need a license even if you don't watch BBC. Yet all the licensing does is fund the BBC.

What are all these mind blowing documentaries? Are there no equivalents on Discovery, Animal Planet, Channel 4, Syfy, Netflix, etc.
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Actually the TVL goes to the government.

The government pay a set amount to the BBC keeping any and all excess over that amount (one of the reasons the BBC is in charge of collecting it is because they demonstrated they could do so more efficiently and cheaper than the post office who used to do it).

So if the BBC collect 4 billion in TVL, but the agreement is that the BBC gets 3.5 billion of funding, then the government keeps 500 million.

The TVL also from memory funds various things inclduing Broadband roll out, and various of the government's other projects (including the monitoring of foreign broadcasts for the home offices, and BBC World Service which used to be funded by the foreign office as part of their diplomatic obligations).

Re the documentaries, if you look at the likes of the Natural History unit's output, and the stuff on say BBC 4 you'll find that there isn't much there that is duplicated on the commercial channels in the same depth (Discovery and History have both been cutting back a lot and relying more and more on clip documentaries or re-voicing existing content).
I suspect you wouldn't find a newly shot documentary on say the history of UK centric subjects on Discovery these days as both they and History have all but given up on anything that isn't reality TV, aliens, WW1/WW2, or plane crashes and natural disasters (IE the cheap to make stuff that gets a lot of viewers).
 
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