Well. it's nearly a month since I last posted anything, and now I'm going to post about the trivia of television. But it is August, so I'm sure you'll be understanding.
There seems to be a murmuring from time to time about the BBC; it's wasteful, biassed, dominated by a liberal clique etc. Well, maybe I'm just showing my true socialist tendencies or something, but I think the BBC is great.
Sherlock was a fantastic series - witty, clever, suspense-full, modernising an old text without ruining it. And Rev provided amusement on a Monday evening, was well researched and observed, and seemed to take faith itself with an unusual degree of seriousness for a sitcom (see Johnny's review here).
But for me the beauty of the BBC isn't even in programmes like these; it's in the simple pleasure of watching without advertisments, of not being bombarded by the market every 15 minutes. Yes, the TV License is basically a tax. But at least you see what you're getting for it. And it's a demonstration that there are ways of funding quality other than by market forces. I'm not naive, of course the BBC is under pressure to become more commercial; product placement no doubt still happens in some way, shape or form (I got perhaps alarmingly excited by the fact that in episode 2 Sherlock was using the same BlackBerry as me). But, even if there is waste at the BBC too, perhaps that should remind us of part of its significance - as a symbol of a world where the financial cost of something doesn't necessarily determine it's value. If that's part of what the BBC and it's funding system is all about, long may it continue!
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