The Licence Fee, Pardon my French!

I watch far more of the BBC than any other channel. We have freeview after I realised that I watch far more there than I ever did on Sky. However ITV1 should show people what the BBC could become. It's job is to provide something for everyone. To be fair I would pay for the license fee for Doctor Who, QI, a good chunk of their comedy and the news (yes, not a fan of the new news website). I understand that people object to paying a flat rate tax for a service that they may not use - personally it would be nice if it could be on a sliding scale according to income but that would be hell to organise. However what it does produce compared to the alternatives far outweigh the costs. If the government funded it directly you'd probably never notice the difference but it would leave the BBC under the control of the government and we have enough of that with the press. I can't think of anything on ITV1 that people watch apart from reality TV, which cost little as people already pay a tax to watch that in order to vote and of course Coronation Street.

We are the envy of the world! Have you ever watched TV in other countries? It's either rubbish or our stuff. America produces some good stuff but the population is huge so the income is huge. And they have adverts in some programmes every 3 minutes that last longer!

Yes, they could tighten up their act and we should ensure that they're running efficiently but to do without them and rely on advertisers to judge what they're prepared to support would leave us with unchallenging, non-controversial programming.

And it's worth remembering the commercial channels produce what they do to compete with the BBC. It drags up the quality of TV accross the board. Without it quality would sag like a set of Primark knickers after some heavy washing and would be as interesting to see.

So do you want saggy Primark knickers? Do you?