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posted by martyb on Thursday November 08 2018, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-don't-see-what-you-did-there dept.

BBC:

More than 7,000 people still watch TV in black and white more than half a century after colour broadcasts began.

London has the most TV licences for black and white sets at 1,768, followed by 431 in the West Midlands and 390 in Greater Manchester.

A total of 7,161 UK households have failed to start watching in colour despite transmissions starting in 1967.

BBC2 was the first channel to regularly broadcast in colour from July that year with the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

The number of black and white licences has almost halved in the past five years and is down from 212,000 in 2000.

Aha! Those must be the last Manichaeans.


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 08 2018, @10:48PM (6 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday November 08 2018, @10:48PM (#759590)

    BBC is basically state run premium programming, with an optional tax to receive it or not.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 08 2018, @11:45PM (5 children)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday November 08 2018, @11:45PM (#759611) Homepage

    BBC is basically state run

    It is quite specifically not state run.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 09 2018, @12:41AM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday November 09 2018, @12:41AM (#759625)

      Sorry, state funded, in the way that PBS is state funded in the US.

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      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @02:31AM (#759671)

        You are obviously not a PBS viewer.
        Otherwise, you would be very familiar with the corporate sponsors named before a show starts and those periodic weeks of public begging (er, pledge drives).
        PBS gets 80% of its funding from non-government sources.

        https://www.quora.com/What-portion-of-PBS-funding-comes-from-the-federal-government [quora.com]

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 10 2018, @12:44AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday November 10 2018, @12:44AM (#760173)

          True enough, however, what corporate sponsor supplies more than 20% of PBS' funding?

          Mr. Rogers made a very compelling case to Congress, and I'm sure over the years Congress has made a compelling case or two to PBS executives - whether that was made public or not.

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    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Friday November 09 2018, @03:08PM

      by Unixnut (5779) on Friday November 09 2018, @03:08PM (#759879)

      > It is quite specifically not state run.

      No, they leave the running bit to the private sector, but it is state approved, with indirect control by government.

      Personally, I don't particularly like paying for my own brainwashing, hence I have never paid for a TV licence. They do give you no end of hassle though, because they cannot believe there exist people who can survive without being glued to the idiot box.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @05:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @05:52PM (#759963)

      It is quite specifically not state run.

      A mere quibble.
      Technically it isn't state run, the British state realised that direct control would look 'communist/fascist' and would impair the BBC's usefulness to them as a propaganda machine, overt state control would immediately get the good old British public's backs up and lead them to question the words of wisdom spake unto them by the Beeb presenters in their best 'Queen's English'¹..the state can and does exert indirect executive 'puppetmaster' control at 'arms length' via multiple strings, and the BBC has always been under their (sometimes, not so) discreet heel.

      Exhibit 1 The Old Board of Governors [wikipedia.org]
      Exhibit 2 The BBC Trust [wikipedia.org]
      Scope out the names, the titles, the gongs awarded, the careers... oh so establishment...

      of course, this was the past, now we have

      Exhibit 3 The BBC Board [wikipedia.org]

      Oh look, more of the same...

      Basically, toe the unspoken and unwritten government line, get rewarded, go 'off message' no gongs for you...

      The grunts@theBBC have, historically, always been above a certain 'class' (minimum standard: lower middle) and enjoyed better pay than the rest of us, as the years went by, the staff 'diversity' widened out a bit, especially the further down the payscales you went (and the gruntier the work became..), but the wonks in charge were all still 'establishment' irrespective of creed, sexual foibles, overt political leanings or race, and knew full well which side their bread was buttered...(oh, and 'back in the day' when I had a peripheral involvement as technical support to some people involved in the wonderful world of entertainment, the 'gay mafia' ran the BBC in London, the 'teuchter mafia' in Scotland, I'm now a decade++ out of touch with the people I knew in the broadcasting world so don't know if this is still the case.)

      ¹That was then, and I used to hate them for being so fucking elitist, but now we have the horrors of barely comprehensible 'regional' presenters whose patois would be more at home on a mid-90's local pirate radio station than a national broadcaster. I've a reasonable ear for accents/dialect (worked for over 25 years with people whose first language wasn't english), but I've heard stuff on the BBC over the past couple of years that I've not been able to decipher...ah, diversity! the gift that keeps giving...maybe the BBC wonks of old had a valid point about 'received pronunciation'.