BBC 7 / BBC Heaven

It's annual report time for the Beeb, and just like every year, there's a kerfuffle over the licence fees. According to this report from American Public Media's Marketplace, the the networks take in $6 billion -- 6 thousand million. And the bulk of that money still comes from the license fee.

The license fee is a mandatory fee for anyone in the UK with a television set, and it's been going on for decades. Instead of fund drives, the authorities have developed all kinds of technologies for
detecting if a given household has a telly and they cross reference that to make sure they're not freeloaders.

It's amazing to me, in the age of Sky TV and cable and dishes and Internet that this is still going on. But they must be doing something right. Just off the top of my head, look at what they've produced over the last few decades -- and this isn't even mentioning the news:
Doctor Who
Monty Python
Upstairs Downstairs
Red Dwarf
As Time Goes By
French and Saunders
The Vicar of Dibley
Coupling
... I could keep going for pages ...

Yet, today, when I've been lucky enough to get to somewhere carrying BBC America (my local cable company doesn't carry it and I can't get the dish) it's all been reality shows and games shows -- not my cup of tea.

And don't they get money from BBC America and the exports of all the great shows over here (I'm including the documentaries that they co-produce with the Discovery Channel and PBS)? I guess not enough, not if they want to keep making the amazing documentaries and other expensive programming that rarely makes it across the pond.

Red Dwarf memories

Podcasting has to be the biggest boon to Aglophiliacs since PBS started importing Britcoms. Today is Saturday, so a new Jonathan Ross radio show is up. I suggest you subscribe in iTunes immediately.

Ross has been on a roll lately ... a few weeks ago he had David Tenent, then Paul Weller. This week he had Patsy Kensit (ex-wife of both Jim Kerr and Liam Gallagher!) But last week was a real cracker. You can listen to it here.

The show features both Noman Lovett and Hattie Heyridge -- the two "Holly"s from Red Dwarf. Now, as "Wossie" (said with love) describes it, the average Red Dwarf fan is somewhere between the age of 12 and 14 1/2. But what he doesn't realize is that so many of us stateside didn't discover this amazing show until we were proper adults and we still loved it.

For those of you who don't know about it, you're a smeghead (that's meant to be funny to fans of the show). Red Dwarf was an inventive comedy set 3 million years in the future and it follows the adventures of the last human left alive -- a 22nd-century curry-loving Liverpudlian who's been in stasis as the millenia past by.

And since it is Saturday, many of you have seen last night's Doctor Who by now, which was a real cracker, wasn't it?