‘How much did you say the TV licence cost?’ asks my American friend.
‘£145.50,’ I reply.
‘One hundred and forty-five pounds,’ she repeats, with astonishment. ‘And everyone has to pay it?’
‘Yep. Every home with a TV.’
‘That’s a lot of money.’
My friend is an economist, with the ability to be as precise about the US’s federal budget as I am about what I’ve just spent at the supermarket. She made me stop and think. If you multiply £145.50 by 26.4 million households, that is for sure a huge amount of money. Is it worth it?
It’s the obvious question, to which the answer has to be yes, if the alternative is a commercially driven network, and especially when it comes to News. More divisive a question, and perhaps therefore more important, would be, what in particular is worth it?
This week we’ve had the chance to listen, for free, to Verdi, live from the Met, an adaptation of Trollope by the novelist Rose Tremain, two plays by Michael Frayn starring Simon Russell Beale, Greta Scacchi and Benedict Cumberbatch, and live commentary from the Australian Open.
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