Old_Honky - 2:46 pm on Feb 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

<rant>This really annoys me. It is not a licence! It is a tax! Even if you only ever watch DVDs or you have a TV set that won't pick up the BBC channels you still have to pay this tax which is paid directly to and is the main source of funding for the BBC.

30 million homes at £135 per pop that's a staggering £4billion every year! What do they spend it all on?

It is long past the time when someone should have sorted out this inefficient and over manned quango. My solution; abandon the Tax, take advertising on all channels, allow sponsored programming and make some of the more specialist channels subscription only.

Before any bleeding heart Liberal BBC sympathiser bothers to tell me that advertising would ruin their fine programming can I answer by saying that they already have it! They are just advertising their own programs, their radio stations and a whole raft of BBC publications, CDs, DVDs etc. Their "station idents" are also becoming longer and more expensive to produce.

Consequently the ad breaks on BBC1 and BBC2 are usually longer than those on ITV1. Talk about unfair competition! If they had to pay for all this advertising I suppose they would be whinging for another huge increase in the "licence fee".</rant>