Watching the web

How much is £140? These days, that’s only one really big ‘family-shop’. Or a month of household heating and lighting. It’s only £2.70 a week for a year. But if you hand it over every week for ten years it soon adds up. That’s what most of us do when we pay our BBC licence fee.

In the past, we cheerfully forked out the money, since BBC was the only provider of TV and radio. But as the commercial sector grew, the huddled masses began to say, ‘Hey, what are you doing with our money, when we get ITV for nothing?’. The BBC hired the likes of John Cleese and Julie Walters to deftly reassure us that they spent the money properly, and for them not to do so would be unthinkable. They produced polished self-publicising commercials, showcasing their glittering array of other minor BBC institutions like David Attenborough, Richie Benaud, Michael Fish, Terry Wogan and Noel Edmonds (in those days, Noel Edmonds was considered a plus).

Somehow, the BBC lost this knack for self-assured self-promotion. Or we stopped believing them. Christians are very suspicious of the BBC, which is often the butt of too many jokes and too many ‘investigative’ documentaries. While this may be true, the BBC has a lot to shout about.