On 2/26/01 9:34 AM, "Christian M. M. Brady" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 2/26/01 11:25 AM, "Peter Boisseau" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>> From: "Christian M. M. Brady" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>
>>> On 2/26/01 9:09 AM, "Gary" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Again, pa shaw! Pa shaw to the paranoiacs who think that some white van
>>>> outside is "reading the flux" on their monitors.
>>>
>>> Well, I don't know about reading the flux, but in England there are white
>>> vans that go around "reading" whether or not you have a TV in your house
>>> (via signals of some sort I assume) and, if you have not paid your TV
>>> license, they will then send you a fine.
>>
>> You're referring to those nice people who work out of Bristol called TV
>> Licensing. And yes, they can read your TV - tell you which channel you're
>> watching, the whole nine yards - while parked outside in a van. The BBC
>> (British Broadcasting Corporation) doesn't carry advertising, but is funded
>> via a license fee, which all TV owners have to pay. This, and the method of
>> detection, has been standard in the UK since time forgot.
>
> And seemed mildly unfair to a struggling graduate student just trying to get
> a bit of telly! ;-) The license seemed cheaper than the fine in the end...
> ;>)
>
I lived in Britain for 20 years. I would _gladly_ go back to paying the
license fee (it was about £60 or so a year when I left 7 years ago) to get
the quality of BBC TV and radio - all without ads. The BBC one of the two
things I miss most about leaving England. The 60-odd channels I get instead
are a wasteland compared to the two BBC channels. Even the ads on the 2
(probably more now) UK commercial channels had to be very witty and
entertaining to hold on to the audience, who could always flip over to BBC -
sometimes they were better than the programmes.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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