That's a frood who knows where his trowel is.

I watched the first series and thought it was amazing, defo looking forward to the second series!

Because that would require a change in the charter, which requires the BBC to offer own-branded services unencrypted and accessible to anyone.

Before that Labour froze the licence fee to punish them for Hutton

• 20 years of below-inflation licence fee
• Transfer of S4C to licence fee funding
• Transfer of BBC World Service funding from the FCO to the licence fee.
• Upgrade of 12 BBC One english regions to HD, at around £20m each.
• Very expensive failed IT project
• £100m hole in pensions fund
• Increased cost of television, particularly drama.
• Top-slicing of the licence fee for whatever whim the government of the day leans to, e.g. rural fibre roll-out
• Exchange rate
• Brexit

The BBC currently makes around £2bn from its commercial activities, but that wouldn’t replace the licence fee. The goal has been to increase BBC Studios performance to contribute half the BBC budget but the market is not strong enough at present. The major international streamers are in consolidation mode, the great boom of spending is over. British productions no longer qualify for EU content origin quotas.

My 2c, the whole TV licence thing is stupid. Just pay tax and have services be provided from it - including public broadcasters.

Making public broadcast user-pays was mainly to prevent the BBC from relying on advertising and becoming more biased towards commercial interests. Corporate capture is exactly what would happen if it got pushed to compete directly with commercial streaming services. It would turn to shit, die, or both.

~$3.8bil raised per year on TV licences. UK budget: ~$1200bil. That's not much to pay for a public broadcaster of the quality of the BBC imo. Perfect? God no. Good, in comparison globally to places with and without public broadcasters? Yes.

I never understood why the BBC account that you need for iPlayer, isn't linked to a TV licence account. That would be a relatively simple way of ensuring at least iPlayer wasn't being watched without a licence.

I’ll be honest — I’d pay the $16/mo (£145.50/yr) for all that ad-free BBC content. But I don’t think I would pay $26/mo. I’m not paying that now for any other tv/music service.

I know there are people that pay $100 or more every month for cable TV in the US, but I’m not one of them.

They need to fill a £500m hole, and cutting linear channels removes a small number of playout staff, but also allows savings in transmitter costs and potentially the BBC being able to rent out multiplex space to commercial channels as they do with 5SELECT.

Opening bidding for another PSB is unrealistic. The problem is its expensive and there is no money.

The Scottish government could raise income tax and take over BBC Scotland if it wanted I guess?

The real problem is the license fee hasn't risen with inflation for many years for political reasons. I personally think the license fee should be abolished, alongside council tax, and a new property tax brought in that covers both local government and public service broadcasting. That would be a fairer system and gaurentee long term funding for the BBC and other PSB services.

Inflation and effective government cuts to the license fee.

BBC license fee in 2010 was £145.50, which is £233.72 in today's money.

The current license fee is £180. The license fee has risen well below inflation for years, and is £53.72 less than it should be. Thats an effective 23% cut in 16 years.

The BBC also had to take on the World Service budget from the foreign office, and provide free licenses to the elderly, plus other cost pressures.

This is what 14 years of Tory government got us, and Labour have no intention of increasing the license fee because any tax rises need to go elsewhere.

10 jobs? If it cost so little to run, why prune it at all?

Although I suspect that's probably true, the Tories also froze the licence fee for about ten years, which is a massive decrease in real terms.

I still don’t understand where all of the BBC money has gone. Any loss of local TV license fees should have been offset from selling programming to foreign streaming services.

She's great. Loved her in Mad Men and Bloodlines

I like both but this won't draw me to Netflix, yarr

Netflix has NOT been here the whole time

Game Changer ripoff

with challenges that make no sense

Taskmaster clone?

Humpty, Jemima, Big Ted, Little Ted and Hamble were the show’s resident toys. All were beloved – apart from Hamble. She was replaced in later series by a doll named Poppy.

I'm sad for Hamble 😿

A contemporary reimagining would be unlikely to describe Jemima the rag doll as an “empty-headed bimbette”, as Fred Harris, a presenter, referred to her.

Banging lines off Paul Hollywood's forearms

Flogging a dead horse

He was brilliant as Jamarcus in The Watch

“It's incredibly controlled, Evan. It's like he's threading a needle”

I'm excited for Richard Ayoade. He's just the right amount of awkward and silly, but intelligent. It will be fun to see him fail and succeed.

I've been quite enjoying Death Valley in the meantime. Quite a similar vibe to it.