The TV Licence Swindle

So I want to buy a TV licence and pay for it monthly. Simples right? Wrong. It is Jan 20th 2010, so my £142.50 licence will run until Jan 20th 2011 right? Wrong. It will run out on 31st Dec 2010 because they backdate payment to the 1st of the month! I am paying per month, so that will be £11.88 per month for twelve months right? Wrong! It's £28.50 per month for five months. And guess what happens then? You start paying for NEXT YEAR'S LICENCE! WHAT. THE. FUCK?

UPDATE I am now (9 Feb 2010) trying again, this time without the direct debit complication, and yet it's still saying valid until 31 Dec! It's not even backdating it to the 1st Feb.

The Lowest Common Denominator

I don't often catch BBC TV news, but when I do I am often struck by pointless on-scene reporting and presenters who almost reconstruct events for you, just in case you can't imagine it from their overly emotional language. I prefer the BBC website as it seems less sensationalist, more impartial and removed, but recently there seems to have been a slow slide to more emotive language and articles. For instance, a recent article on the royal harpist convicted of handling stolen goods described her as "hooked on heroin" and "in the grip of drugs", what's wrong with "addicted"? And today I read a story entitled Who was Arthur McElhill? I didn't know who Arthur McElhill was, so I read the story. Having read the article I have no idea as to why it was written and published on the BBC news site. It's a sensationalist horror story that is reminiscent of those cheap glossy mags that have exclamation marks in their titles and that has no useful conclusion.

Something That Sucks About news.bbc.co.uk

I really like the BBC News site, but there is one aspect that completely sucks: search. First you type in your search terms, so far so good. Now press enter or click "Search". What's this? A random list of results from the entire BBC site. But I was on the news site, blatantly I want news results only. So click on "News & Sport". Now I want the most recent result, so I click "Order by date". But I'm not getting the video I want. Oh, videos are separate, of course, on the right. So I click "more like this" under the videos, but it's not there. Now how do I get back to the normal results? How many clicks is that? I don't know, I've lost the will to live.

Eventually I gave up and found the video I was after on YouTube. Albeit in worse quality.

Another thing they could do would be to provide links to new stories from previous articles on the same story, currently they only do it in the opposite direction.

Recommended Listening

Radio 4 schedules its comedies at 6:30 weekday evenings. Usually the best are on Monday and Friday (The Now Show, The News Quiz, Just a Minute) while the midweek shows are decidedly mixed. Some of the less humorous examples include the occasionally amusing Milton Jones, a large collection of one liners loosely connected by some absurd plot; the baffling, as in, why/how the hell did that get on air? Count Arthur Strong, a series of gags relating to an old man's mishearing, with predictably non-hilarious results; and those that are so banal that they merge into each other: Hut 33; Double Science; Clare in the Community; Fags, Mags And Bags; etc. But now Radio 4 have rebelled, putting the last series of literary quiz show (boring!) The Write Stuff on Mondays, followed by the new series of Milton Jones, while leaving the genuinely funny Listen Against to Tuesdays. So that's my recommendation, sorry it took so long. While I'm here I might as well say that Screenwipe is the best program on TV at the moment.