How I fell out of love with the BBC

One of the many technological things I don’t understand is, how come I’m paying to watch television?

I know why I used to pay. I used to switch on a box in the corner of the room and marvel at the choice of three quite interesting programmes and something slightly racy on Channel 4. It was all reassuringly underwhelming, with everyone doing as well as could be expected given the circumstances. The cardboard sets on a lot of the shows wobbled and we were happier for it, one could argue.

There was an obvious balance of earnestly attempted light entertainment and archly presented informative content and I for one didn’t mind paying a fee to the BBC for this arrangement because the BBC was providing precisely 50 per cent of it.

At some point, however, all of this changed. The channels multiplied into a seemingly infinite number and I managed to get myself into a situation whereby Sky started charging me £39.99