Huckleberries Online

Do you have a license to turn that thing on?

Posted by Cindy

Dec. 30, 2009 9:45 a.m. • 14 comments

Marmitetoasty says,”Everyone that owns a telly here in Britain, irrespective of if you have cable or sky, HAS to have a ‘telly license’ its about £140 ($280) a year and even if where you live just has a tiny portable telly or you have 4 or 5 big widescreens the price is the same…..its not on how many tellys you have…. you can have 1 or 10, you just have to have one license….. ” Full comment here.

In an earth-shattering HBO moment Larry Spencer and Spookelooneh are in complete agreement and advocate no TV at all. You know, I could watch “Lost” on my computer, so I’m kinda leaning to the no-TV camp.

How about you? If you had to pay for a TV license would you, or would you just say “no” to television?

14 comments on this post so far. Add yours!

Megan_B on December 30 at 9:57 a.m.
I won’t even pay for cable/dish. Free or none. Besides, except for public television and Family Guy, it’s all a waste of time. ;-)

However, I do <3 hulu. I hope it sticks around after Comcast (a terrible company with terrible customer service) take it over.
PatrickH on December 30 at 10:07 a.m.
If I could get the BBC in its entirity today I would fork over the cash right now.
Charlie on December 30 at 10:29 a.m.
I’d pay only if ALL commercials were banned!
LukeB on December 30 at 10:58 a.m.
It’s not a coincidence that the best programs on TV are publicly funded - Jim Lehrer NewsHour, NOVA, Frontline, and BBC News among others.
Fixer on December 30 at 11:57 a.m.
In the last couple of years my English colleagues have introduced me to classic BBC programs like “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum” and “Still Game.” There’s very little on American television that compares.

Incidentally, they also introduced me to Marmite on toast (as opposed to Marmitetoasty). Good stuff!

I’d rather pay for a telly license that funds worthwhile programming than finance the load of bollocks that is Comcast.
JeanieSpokane on December 30 at 12:22 p.m.
I would gladly pay for no commercials. Otherwise, I’d just do without the idiot box, thank you very much.
ejs on December 30 at 12:42 p.m.
Sheeesh no wonder people left jolly old England.
spokelooneh on December 30 at 2:08 p.m.
Quite a bit of the free programming available in the UK is commercial free.

-“septic”, i.e. yank.
marmitetoasty on December 30 at 3:34 p.m.
The telly license dosh just funds BBC1 and BBC2…..ITV1 and ITV2 and Channel 5 (these are the only 5 stations on normal telly) the last 3 channels having adverts every 15-20 minutes, which pays for the programmes so our license fee just funds both BBC channels……

ok, question……. do you not get all our British Channels on your cable/sky boxes? - cos we have loads and loads of doodle programmes over here, maybe thats why I can do such a great doodle accent LOL

And please DONT take this as a slur or the wrong way, but the 3 times Ive been to the states and watched a bit of doodle news on the telly, why do the news readers have such high pitched squeekie voices especially the ladies? and I will add, jebus some of your adverts are right proper corny lmfao

Fixer, aint marmite on toast just about the bestest food in the world :) try it some mornings with crunchy peanut butter spread on top of the marmite :)

x
PatrickH on December 30 at 4:06 p.m.
Marmitetoasty,

We get BBC America, but it carries only a small portion of the BBC programming, and most of it is delayed weeks if not sometimes months. The list of shows I have to search BitTorrent and try to find proxy servers to watch is to long to list here.
Fixer on December 30 at 4:23 p.m.
Crunchy peanut butter, eh? Got to give it a try.

Speaking of BBC, the people I worked with (Americans, British, Aussies, Kiwis and others) all found BBC World News to be far superior to any of the U.S. news agencies because of BBC’s efforts to report the news in an accurate and unbiased fashion.
hmoffsuite on December 30 at 4:33 p.m.
I have no interest in knowing who Donna Noble is and think PatrickH is using too much white space with his charade.
Cindy_H on December 30 at 5:35 p.m.
Now, hmo, don’t be getting cranky over other people’s screen names, otherwise I’ll think Arch is getting to you ;-)
spokelooneh on December 31 at 12:39 a.m.
I listen to an hour of BBC World Today on Spokane Falls Community College NPR affiliated KSFC radio station most nights They usually have an hour of Australian public radio news, in fact I’m listening to a very long piece right now about how an anti-corruption program in Queensland is forming the basis for a worldwide program to combat public corruption, which is estimated to cost $1 TRILLION worldwide.
They’re talking about the huge public corruption problem in the state of New Jersey right now.

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D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.