@twopinplugvision Once you accept the idea that the broadcasting organisations like the BBC or Murdoch are basically similar , self -interested, then it follows that you cannot allow a monopoly to control them . We wouldn't accept a national newspaper so why should we accept a national broadcaster?
Honestly, I just think it's that people in Europe have less of an emotional investment in TV than we do in the UK because, at night, most of the year it's usually still warm enough to go out and socialise, whereas here we stay in almost all the time for all but maybe a few weeks in the summer.
@nakedmambo You are right to highlight government incompetence in hiring private companies. They just run rings around them. Who would have thought that government or state-run institutions would be stupid & corrupt enough to do it.
He couldn't be wronger on contending that TV in France is pap and crap (1.56>). It's vastly superior to what's available in the UK nowadays. The documentaries and reportage in particular are mostly free of patronizing simplifications and little jingle bells. In fact their quality is amazing (especially concerning the unearthing of incredible archive material). Overall many of the docs and reportage are of better quality than what was available from the BBC in it's halcyon days.
When I was a lad Mr Grimes brought us one TV programme a week. He'd drop it in yard with a sigh. Mam let us watch it after super. Dad was too embarrassed to join us, 'Nowt be havin' with this claptrap, lad' he'd say. Now it's multi-channel this and youtube that. It's how they like it these days. Thora said a country needs no more channels than a lady needs stockings, one for formal and one for gentleman callers. BBC 1 and BBC 2 do grand for that. Ha! I satirise you Alan Bennett! I am the best!
I got my entire education from BBC. From 1947 until about 1957 the BBC educated, informed and entertained. At four I saw Belsen and Shaw, Shakespeare and Muffin the Mule, Cricket,Football and 1948 Olympic Games. I was better educated than the 18 year old Irish nuns that my father had chosen for my education having gone to the best schools himself. What would I have done without the old BBC. Ballet opera, drama I knew the best by the age of ten and never looked back. I was rescued eventually!
@twopinplugvision : You do have a choice : Get what the establishment wants you to think then go for the British system . Get everything mostly rubbish and have a choice. The US system . I am reluctantly driven to the fact that I prefer the second .
I notice that the British critise television yet watch it obsessively like there is nothing else to do. Where I come from it's merely something that's watched occasionally, the last time I switched my television on was 3 weeks ago. But I'd still need a tv licence because of using a mobile phone
Alan didn't see Netflix coming. It *was* a real concern about 20 years ago that multiple channels would destroy quality in broadcasting, but nobody entertained the possiblity that the days of a "channel", as the sole means by which television would be delivered, were numbered.
thats why we should have more choice not less, look at the creation of bbc3 and four there are now more new writing, and clever documentaries than ever on the bbc because of the smaller channels that don't have to be main stream for that reason. Using the supermarket annalogy was silly because there is more choice of items there than tv channels.
@Boratlon :The success of the BNP arises because our government believed that it was right to allow unrestricted & unmonitored immigration to this country. Is it the government or the BNP which held an extremist viewpoint ?
@twopinplugvision The BBC was so frightened by Nick Griffin on Question Time that they packed the studio & loaded the questions against him . The BBC & Nu Labour thought that people who were worried about excessive immigration were "bigotted". Is that what you mean by impartiality?
@twopinplugvision And how can the BBC make a pretence of impartiality when it accepts loans from institutions like the European Bank set up to help european integration.
@twopinplugvision In 1922 not many people watched telly . Why do you think that people like Murdoch & his news services are self -interested and that the BBC composed of pretty similar human beings is not ?
@tincoffin Murdoch TV also follows trends, often the lowest common denominator; when was the last time Sky nurtured a new comedy talent or commissioned educational programmes that people talk about years afterwards? The BBC has been forced to get its hands dirty in trend following because of the pressures and threats of commercial TV feeding people a steady, lazy diet of sensationalism and mind-numbing drivel.
Well if you prefer a monopoly broadcasting system run by the government to a multiplicity then so be it .I am so sorry that you are so disappointed in it. I don't know what you do next as you have nowhere else to turn
@tincoffin 2.. " The very same people who make a fuss about the nation losing its identity in Europe are quite happy to see national television lose its identity and go the european route. " Well if national identity goes then of course national television will follow ." Why on earth are you saying this . has your brain gone soft?
@tincoffin The BBC doesn't take either 100 billion a year by force or loans from the European Bank. Look, it's up to you if like to watch empty-headed commercial TV, I don't. Maybe expend your energy criticising those organisations that actually run privately AND empty the public coffers at the same time. Right-wing paranoia bores me.
@twopinplugvision Murdoch news is biased so I make allowances .BBC claims to be impartial but isnt . Which is better ? US broadcasting where I can get multiple viewpoints or UK where I get one . Well I know which one I choose . I am fed up with being patronised even by Bennett whom I admire .
