Watching the web

How much is £140? These days, that’s only one really big ‘family-shop’. Or a month of household heating and lighting. It’s only £2.70 a week for a year. But if you hand it over every week for ten years it soon adds up. That’s what most of us do when we pay our BBC licence fee.

In the past, we cheerfully forked out the money, since BBC was the only provider of TV and radio. But as the commercial sector grew, the huddled masses began to say, ‘Hey, what are you doing with our money, when we get ITV for nothing?’. The BBC hired the likes of John Cleese and Julie Walters to deftly reassure us that they spent the money properly, and for them not to do so would be unthinkable. They produced polished self-publicising commercials, showcasing their glittering array of other minor BBC institutions like David Attenborough, Richie Benaud, Michael Fish, Terry Wogan and Noel Edmonds (in those days, Noel Edmonds was considered a plus).

Somehow, the BBC lost this knack for self-assured self-promotion. Or we stopped believing them. Christians are very suspicious of the BBC, which is often the butt of too many jokes and too many ‘investigative’ documentaries. While this may be true, the BBC has a lot to shout about.

Their website is superb. It is the first port of call for hundreds of millions of people all over the world. And it’s free. Well, not free. But all part of the service. BBC Radio is also thrown in. Radio is a far more pervasive medium than television.

Millions of people have the radio on for eight to ten hours a day — and then sit for a couple of hours in front of the television. The moving image is undoubtedly more absorbing and powerful, but, for many, the radio is a daily companion.

Licence fee?

There are, or course, powerful arguments against the BBC licence fee. It is valid to say that giving away content for free means that the BBC has a huge unfair advantage, and that the commercial sector will never be truly viable, just as opening a pay-as-you-go hospital next to an NHS one will never be worth the bother. If the NHS will fix your knees for free (eventually), why pay?

However, the main argument against the BBC — and television in general — is, ‘There’s never anything on’. This is, of course, not true. There is plenty on that may not be to your taste. There is plenty on that is truly dreadful. But the BBC generates hours of decent television every week. When people say, ‘There’s never anything on’, they mean, ‘There’s never anything on when I flick on the telly at 8.17 pm’.

Watch something worthy

Let’s tiptoe around the fact that expecting something you want to watch to be starting the precise second you turn on the television is a little selfish. Let’s also ignore the fact that programmes are often written in the hope that you watch them from the beginning, rather than pick them up halfway. Anything that is so easy to ‘get into’ probably isn’t worth watching.

But let’s also note that the iPlayer completely knocks out this argument. Anything that’s been on in the last week is available whenever you like. You can even download and save it for later.

Now you can turn on whenever you want and see something worthy of your time and your licence fee: that interesting documentary by Ian Hislop; the rerun of Doctor Who; that new sitcom; and the latest installment of that period drama. The iPlayer is, I think, really something to shout about.

I play with iPlayer

Licence fee?

Watch something worthy

James Carey

James Cary

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