BBC licence fee which has just gone up by £3 a year is and has always been in the news for a long time. Now the political opinion is that it should be scrapped by 2025 if not earlier. The main reason put forward is that younger generation hardly watches BBC, instead preferring to watch subscription channels that provide much of the sports, whether it is Premier division football, world cup, international cricket, F1 Motor racing and such major sporting events youngsters are addicted to.
Personally I think BBC licence fee is worth every penny. Once this very fair licence fee is paid, there is no extra charge, no matter how big sporting event may be. In sharp contrast most of us pay from £100 to £150 in monthly subscription to Sky, BT and Virgin, that may include sports and movies, besides land line telephone, broad band and mobile phones, even though they get substantial income from online advertising as well. Yet some sporting events like prominent heavyweight boxing attract additional pay as you watch charges of up to £30 per event!
If BBC is obliged to go subscription view only channel, especially if not allowed to take advertising revenue, this reasonable yearly fee of under £160 will increase tenfold, putting it out of reach for most of OAPs who will also lose free entitlement for over 75!
My only complaint is that few of their so called stars are overpaid and under employed, as well as BBC is so often politically biased, some of its in-depth political programmes are under researched or deliberately omitting historical truths which may not fit with their political profiling! But this is an age old deficiency in BBC’s political thinking that may never change; it may even get worse if licence fee is scraped and BBC has to depend on petro dollar for their existence!
Kumudini Valambia
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