Bill Carmichael: Time to think outside the box

I WAS on my way to log on to my computer the other day when I noticed this peculiar object sitting in the corner of the front room.

It was covered in dust and had clearly been there for some time. It was strangely familiar but I just couldn't remember what it was for.

After staring at it for a few minutes, it suddenly came to me – the television set!

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Okay, this is slight exaggeration, but it is no embellishment to say I can't remember the last time I switched it on – probably Christmas Day for the Queen's speech.

This doesn't mean we are starved of all our favourite programmes – far from it. At the last count, our house contained no fewer than eight internet-enabled machines – smart phones, netbooks, laptops, games consoles, desktops – all working from a wireless hub.

From these, we can watch any shows we want, along with two 24-hour news channels, live sport, and listen to thousands of radio stations – all for nothing more than the cost of a monthly broadband subscription.

In fact, the only thing for which we pay extra – a 145.50 a year state-imposed tax known as the BBC licence fee – is for the one bit of

electronic kit that we hardly ever use.

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The children are even less likely to switch on the TV than I am. If they want to watch a show, they do so at a convenient time using the BBC's iPlayer or its commercial equivalents.

Technological advances are making the traditional TV redundant. In a few short years, the TV set will be confined to museums of social history, alongside gas mantles and the cat's whiskers radio set.

All of which means, of course, that like it or loathe it, the TV

licence fee in its present form is doomed.

How can a tax on television sets possibly work when people don't need televisions any more?

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Why pay 145.50 a year for a television you never use, when you can get all the content you can possibly want via the internet – for free?

No doubt many of the clever people in the BBC realise this, but they are so addicted to public subsidy that they are unable to think – if you'll excuse the pun – outside the box.

Thank heaven, then, for fresh thinkers such as former Panorama producer David Graham who has just published a new report on the BBC – Global Player or Subsidy Junkie? – for the Adam Smith Institute.

Graham argues that the licence fee should be scrapped, partly because it criminalises poor people and partly because broadband makes such an

idea obsolete.

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In its place, he says, there should be some subsidy for core public service content, such as news, with the rest being funded by voluntary subscription. So you pay for exactly what you watch – instead of an outdated tax on a piece of equipment.

This, says Graham, would make the BBC more internationally successful and outward looking. The alternative, he fears, is a slow decline by a thousand cuts.

If the BBC is half as good as its supporters say it is, it won't have any difficulty attracting sufficient subscription income to replace the licence fee subsidy.

Well, well...

So where did all the oil go?

After weeks of hyperventilating hysteria in the US, not least from President Barack Obama, who launched a vendetta against BP, it turns out the Gulf of Mexico oil spill wasn't anywhere near as bad as feared.

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Far from being "the worse ecological disaster in history", 75 per cent of the oil has disappeared, most of it either evaporating from the surface of the sea or broken down by waves and bacteria.

Our American friends could clearly do with a bit of British stiff upper lip. Perhaps we should send the White House some of those posters that proved so useful in wartime: "Keep Calm and Carry On".

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