Thinking out the box about public service television

ISUPPOSE that, with celebrations of the birth of the baby Jesus imminent, I should get my televisual arrangements sorted. I don’t really have anything at the moment. Televisually, I’ve becomes a lost soul. I haven’t kept up. That said, I mustn’t do myself down, pretending to be some fogey whom life is passing by. If life ever tries passing me by, I boot it up the bahookey and tell it to get back in line.

For starters, I’ve a huge telly that was the latest thing 10 years. I’ve had Netflix twice. I think I’ve got Amazon Prime, though it never connects. I’ve had Sky and BT TV in the past, and certainly wouldn’t touch the former with a bargepole again.

If folk don’t keep an eye on these things, they can easily find themselves paying 80 or 90 quid a month – over 100 if you include the compulsory state licence. All to watch telly and find “there’s nothing on”.

There’s been talk in the public prints this week of Netflix getting taxpayers’ money to create public service programmes, after the BBC became a niche outlet for special interest groups. But do taxpayers get free access to Netflix for these programmes? Or are they taxed again, the second time by the private sector?

I had Netflix twice after signing up to watch Ricky Gervais’s two After Life series. At first, I thought it great: a whole world of televisual possibility. But, eventually, you notice it’s just the same handful of series and films being flagged up. Months later, you take another look, and it still hasn’t changed.

Meanwhile, the state-run

BBC has become a woke joke, with even The Vicar of Dibley infected. Speaking of which, never mind the PC homework shoehorned into the forthcoming Xmas specials, star Dawn French revealed she’d smuggled rude jokes into the original, supposedly innocent tales of life in rural Middle

England.

But it was ever thus. Folk point to old shows and say they never had smut, but there was plenty if you looked hard enough for it. Take Dad’s Army. When, for example, Private Fraser interrupts a lecture by Captain Mainwaring with a shout of “Rowlocks!”, it’s clear that he is meaning testicles. I don’t need to tell you what these are.

Oh, I do? Well, here’s the Oxford English Dictionary: “Two ellipsoid glandular bodies, constituting the sperm-secreting organs in male mammals, and usually enclosed in a scrotum.” Usually?

At any rate, it remains my view that there’s no place for scrotums on our screens. Is the plural scrota incidentally? Any classical scholars specialising in testicles out there?

Crivvens, who side-tracked us into discussing scrotal grammar? What was I talking about? Oh, yes, the BBC. Essentially, state control is like monarchical control: fine if you’ve the right people in, hellish otherwise.

The BBC has been actively recruiting the wrong people – activists based on identity rather than talent – for some time. And once recruited, these same people recruit more wrong people. So it’s now dominated by a middle-class, metropolitan elite, far removed from yonder real world.

You say: “Whit aboot cable an’ a’ that, ken?” Whit, I mean what, about them? Cable channels have more adverts than programmes. It’s what happens when you let the market run things. It all goes tawdry.

I can’t even get cable channels anyway. I don’t have an aerial for Freeview and can’t afford to put one up (BT said they’d do it for 30 quid but their contractors confessed they didn’t cover my part of Scotland; er, aren’t they contractually obliged to cover the whole UK?).

There’s a BBC iPlayer on my “smart” Blu-ray player but you can’t watch, for example, live footer games on that. I engage it every week to watch the highlights on Sportscene and Match of the Day. Just for that, I pay 13 quid a month.

I’ll be candid with you, readers. I feel left out. At Xmas, the whole country will gather round their screens, laughing heartily at homely comedies explaining how the baby Jesus was the prototype for Mr Burns from the Simpsons, and Herod a much misunderstood progressive ruler. Come to think of it, maybe I’m better off out of it.

You don’t sleigh

SOME ne’er-do-well mentioned the free market – so called because it charges for everything – and it’s fair to say the market both makes and mars Christmas.

On the one hand, look at all the presents you can buy yourself.

On the other hand, oh, the tawdriness. One Covid-governed “drive-thru Christmas” in Manchester charged £25 to encounter two bewildered reindeer (extra £95 if you wanted to feed them) and a skinny Santa who didn’t even have a white beard. Maybe yon Faithir Christmas will join the new Union of Santas which has applied for federation with the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas in yonder United States.

One British member said being a Santa opened up “a lot of worries”, particularly in these viral times, while a US representative said it wasn’t easy keeping the magic alive.

Ain’t that the truth? We wish the new union season’s greetings, and trust its constitution will include a socialist commitment to Claus IV.