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UK TV Broadcasting – Is the Licence Fee an Anachronism or an Essential ?

The short answer to this question is that, for the BBC at least, it’s both an anachronism and an essential…. The licence fee was originally introduced to fund public broadcasting way back in the 1940s after the enforced break in transmissions caused by WW2. It worked reasonably well while the number of channels was small, TV broadcasting was still analogue, and radio retained a significant audience share. While still reasonably priced, it was probably a fair way of funding public broadcasting. Since the dawn of digital TV in the early 2000s, with its plethora of new commercial channels, the BBC’s ‘market share’ of viewer attention has steadily dwindled, while the licence fee has risen nearly 20-fold, from the princely sum of £10 p.a. for a colour licence in 1968 to the current £180 in 2026.It has fought back to an extent, with introductions of new channels, both on TV an radio, but as we'll see later, these have added to its cost burden considerably. Unsurprisingly perh...
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Advanced Search Query Builder: The Easy and Quick Way to do Selective Internet Searches

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  Ever wanted to get rid of those pesky AI summaries that seem to appear nowadays every time you do any kind of internet search ?  Want to bypass AI and 'do your own thing' with a more focussed advanced online search ? Or switch the search engine you're using at the touch of a button ?  Fed up with following up links that turn out to have expired years ago ? Now you can tailor your searches efficiently - and without needing to remember the exact query syntax to use....or even opening a new window. To find out how, just read on….. Background Internet searching has changed a lot over the last few years, due largely to the automatic insinuation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents into everything but the most basic searches by the all the major search engine providers. There is no doubt that those AI summaries which now appear in response to most of our queries can be very useful, particularly for those who know little about a particular subject to start with, and...
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On Having Kids…

  I first published this rather amusing, but somewhat scathing, anecdote on the subject of having and bringing up kids last April.... However, since then the issue has become a rather more serious one for our country's future, with some interesting, and quite chilling, findings recently brought to light. These would tend to confirm a marked unwillingness to embark upon the 'reproductive journey' amongst our indigenous population (i.e. those who were actually born here). Perchance our potential parents have looked at their ever-dwindling bank balances and rocketing tax bills...and seen the light.  And who could blame them, given the prospect of even worse to come, over the next 2 years at least? Recently announced birthrate statistics are a chilling read, and have shown a marked downward trend in the course of the last 3 years, with the overall tally for 2024 down to 1.41 births per woman in England and Wales, a record low for the 3rd year in a row. This is of course well b...
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