yo, british stoners

What is the deal with this television license. Like I always thought it was like an extra tax on buying a TV to collect funding. But I just looked it up and it's a yearly tax on any house with a TV, and it's like $250 a year. Is this on top of having to pay for cable/satellite? Damn that would cause riots in this country, hell you guys should know, we all know what happened with that tea tax.

 

hahahahahaha... maybe more than enough people in england are too dumb to own a TV and must first pass a test to see if they may own one..

 

TV license basically funds the BBC- who have tv channels, radio stations, websites, news, education schemes, all that basically. A public service provider. TV license means you don't have any adverts on your programming and the standard of broadcasting the BBC produces is actually pretty damn good if not the best mainstream outlet. BBC has two channels and you can pick up a further 3 (or 2 depending on where you live) not run by BBC but these other channels have advertising so are not covered by your TV license...

The majority of people over here only have 5 (or 4) channels so yes, if you wanted cable/satellite you would have to pay a subscription seperately. Freeview is becoming more popular which is a little box you pay £20-30 for and it gives you 30 or 40 channels and you never have to pay a subscription or anything- though the quality of the channels is debateable like cable/satellite.

People, especially from outside the UK, criticise the BBC as it receives government funding but it is not biased imo. I mean, the government sued the BBC because the BBC showed news programmes saying the government had acted illegaly in going into Iraq and exposed things from the David Kelly affair. The BBC won in court so it can't be that pro government...

 

Lol they dont force us to support PBS.

 

I dunno, Auntie Beeb looks after us well enough- it's more than just a couple of TV channels and radio stations, it's a proper british institution, like the National Health Service, cheap tea, talking about the weather and late trains.

I'd rather have a few channels with intelligent programming and advert free instead of 10,000 channels of repeats and constant adverts owned by some real bastards showing foreign programming nonstop- ie cable.

 

Don't knock our PBS, its got some great stuff. Ya some ads.. But it is funded by personal donations.

 

great channel turkey. I <3 Nova!

 

Like Arthur!

 

there just tryna take our money and keep us in babylon

 

Man forget 4 or 5 really good channel, I get like around 60 channels, and alot of them are stupid, and a good deal only have a few good shows on them, but all together I have so many good TV shows to choose from. I've always heard Europeans say Americans are spoiled by choice, and we so are lol. And I have less the your common suburban household, this is just extended basic cable which cost taxes and such included about $53 a month here, but most people have super duper cable boxes or satellite with oddles and noodles of chanels.

But for my cable package me alone on any given day I can find something good on either:
Animal Planet
History Channel
Travel Planet
Discovery Channel
Comedy Central
FX
USA
A&E
TNT
Cartoon network
YES(if it's baseball season)
FOX
ABC
PBS
Sci-Fi
Spike
NBC
ABC
the 24 hour news networks
ABC-Family(yes, all those stupid shows we watched as kids are still good lol)

And that's just what I like lol

But yes, I guess the commercials can drive you mad if you're not use to them, but to most of us I think it's just bathroom or snack break.

 

PBS would be better if it didn't run solely by private donations. my dad watches "mexico one plate at a time" and i remember watching "yan can cook and so can you!" and i think "the frugal gourmet" used to be on there too. mmmm food shows.

my favorite channels (we ditched the movie channels, i miss Real time and penn and tellers bullshit) are:

food network
history channel
discovery science
national geographic
history international
discovery
home and garden (HGTV)
PBS
shopping channels (for ideas)
and the weather channel

history international ran all of the "young Indiana Jones" but I only caught about half of them. now i must buy them! the consumer within has been released!

 

Lol, out of the 4 or 5 there's really only 1 or 2 good channels- the rest is crap.. BBC1 & 2 get half a point each for only being good half the time, Channel 4 gets a point but the rest are rubbish..

Lots of people do have cable or whatever but definitely not the majority...

More of a radio man myself- Radio 4 all the way..

 

which is why we have to suffer through those god-awful fund drives a couple times a year for public television and public radio


btw, "nova" is a great show. so is the bbc series "horizon." they are essentially the same program, covering the same types of issues. they will even share episodes....horizon programs are occasionally converted into nova programs for us viewers, and nova programs are sometimes turned into horizon programs for british viewers. even episodes which aren't converted to the other program often feature the same few key scientists giving explanations of the topic (figures such as neil degrasse tyson, for instance)



(actually, according to wikipedia, the format of horizon has changed several times over the years, but as i understand things, it is currently most like nova...i've only seen a few episodes. one on psychedelics in science, one on time travel, and another about temporal lobe epilepsy and religious visions)

 

yea nova is an awesome show. i would like to see that psychedelics one. youtube?

i used to get 3 channels at my parents'.

now i get like 12 channels for 10 bucks/month. i barely watch it. i watch more shows on my computer.

and i like how the americans have hijacked the thread.
it's fucked that you brits have to pay that kinda tax to have a tv.
a lot of stuff over here is fucked too, so....................fuck it
:cheers2:

 

BBC Horizon productions are heaven in an awesome documentary package. I live for that shit

 

i dont know if its on youtube or not....i might look, but it was actually far less interesting than some of the other stuff i had available at the time, and in fact also the least interesting of the horizon programs...the time travel and religious experience shows were far more interesting, and higher quality copies of the show, too.

also, the psychedelics had annoying subtitles in another language in addition to a low visual and audio quality. swedish subs or something i think.


anyway it was in this massive treasure trove of media (some good, some bad) of this torrent i downloaded:

http://www.btmon.com/Other/Other/Psychedelic_Torrent.torrent.html

(ps the advertisements in the page following the link are explicit enough it would be illegal to visit the site underage, and also the contents of the torrent may or may not be copyrighted and may be illegal for you to download, if you care)

it isnt compressed at all. took a few weeks to finish downloading.

i recently had to reformat my computer, and had no way of backing up all this info. now i'm at school and can't download all that stuff.

if you can safely download said torrent, i highly recommend it. hours of entertainment. much of it i'd already seen, much i hadn't, a lot that was cool but irrelevant...only a very tiny portion i took exception to in one way or another.

 

yep, youtube has it. heres part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHIec_zQFx0

i still recommend the other shows more. in terms of psychedelics themselves, there are MUCH more interesting items in that torrent file

 

here's part 1 of the much cooler time travel episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFlo_vbrqP8

 

two words. levar burton...

 

come February they will.. since analog will be discontinued.. so no more free TV in the US