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Signal lost
Sep. 30th, 2014 09:25 amI'm really disappointed that TheBox, the site that I used for getting hold of British shows, has gone down for good! Being able to get British television reliably was truly one of my lifelines for living here, because despite having a million channels, there are only five shows on American television:
- The docusoap, usually about a repulsive family notable only for having far too many children, or a bald pawn shop owner trapped in a sort of Groundhog Day scenario reliving exactly the same script every single week, or the thinly scripted adventures of three foot tall people in a modern-day gawking midget circus
- The vote-off-by-week competition about singing or baking or fashion designing or bloody hairdressing, where tensions rise as twelve Americans have to attempt to play a game for twelve weeks without shooting each other
- The small claims courtroom sham spectacle, which is like visiting a sort of zoo of stupidity where ethnic minorities are prodded to air their pettiness for the contemptuous entertainment of the nation
- The crime drama disguised as multiple programmes by slightly rearranging the letters in its acronym (CSI, CSI-NY, NCIS, NCIS-LA), all competing to show someone using a computer in the way that most insults the intelligence of the viewers
- Mythbusters
And I'm not saying Britain is free from having bad, bad programmes. But the difference is that it also has some good ones as well. I don't want to seem entitled - the BBC have no responsibility to make its content available to the rest of the world (apart from perhaps on humanitarian grounds) - but I would gladly pay some sort of overseas licence fee each year to receive what I want to watch without doing something slightly illegal. I can't believe people complain about £110 a year (is that still the price?) to receive things like QI, Have I Got News For You, Would I Lie To You, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and all those other unwieldily-titled shows - not to mention the gems of Radio 4 - while in America you have to pay that amount per month to pay for a cable to continuously vomit stupidity into your living room.
I've thought more than once about cheekily sending the licence fee in cash to the BBC in an envelope, with a note saying that this is doing my part to fund the continued existence of intelligent television, and hopefully raise some awareness that there's demand for it to be distributed overseas. In the age of the Internet, I don't really see how it wouldn't be feasible.
- The docusoap, usually about a repulsive family notable only for having far too many children, or a bald pawn shop owner trapped in a sort of Groundhog Day scenario reliving exactly the same script every single week, or the thinly scripted adventures of three foot tall people in a modern-day gawking midget circus
- The vote-off-by-week competition about singing or baking or fashion designing or bloody hairdressing, where tensions rise as twelve Americans have to attempt to play a game for twelve weeks without shooting each other
- The small claims courtroom sham spectacle, which is like visiting a sort of zoo of stupidity where ethnic minorities are prodded to air their pettiness for the contemptuous entertainment of the nation
- The crime drama disguised as multiple programmes by slightly rearranging the letters in its acronym (CSI, CSI-NY, NCIS, NCIS-LA), all competing to show someone using a computer in the way that most insults the intelligence of the viewers
- Mythbusters
And I'm not saying Britain is free from having bad, bad programmes. But the difference is that it also has some good ones as well. I don't want to seem entitled - the BBC have no responsibility to make its content available to the rest of the world (apart from perhaps on humanitarian grounds) - but I would gladly pay some sort of overseas licence fee each year to receive what I want to watch without doing something slightly illegal. I can't believe people complain about £110 a year (is that still the price?) to receive things like QI, Have I Got News For You, Would I Lie To You, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and all those other unwieldily-titled shows - not to mention the gems of Radio 4 - while in America you have to pay that amount per month to pay for a cable to continuously vomit stupidity into your living room.
I've thought more than once about cheekily sending the licence fee in cash to the BBC in an envelope, with a note saying that this is doing my part to fund the continued existence of intelligent television, and hopefully raise some awareness that there's demand for it to be distributed overseas. In the age of the Internet, I don't really see how it wouldn't be feasible.
