No Escape from The BBC

I came up with this silly prose after visiting the website of the British Broadcasting Corporation and learning it is the world's largest broadcaster.

If you are a citizen or expatriate of Great Britain, you already know it and are used to it. If you are an American like me, it may keep you up at night.

It's a terrifying thought. No matter where you go, to the remotest parts of Africa to the Antarctic subcontinent or to any far-flung part of the planet... there is no escape from the BBC.

That's right, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Beeb. Auntie.

The BBC is the taxpayer-financed public broadcasting company of Great Britain, and the world's largest broadcaster. And oh, how it loves to lord itself over Britain and everyplace else. Quite an achievement in lording itself when its nickname is Auntie.

I thought Clear Channel was a big broadcaster, but the BBC is so beastly huge that it makes Clear Channel by comparison look like a 99-cent college radio station operating out of a converted broom closet.

Ten national radio networks. Umpteen national TV networks. BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBCDEFG... how and why can a nation of 65 million people need so many national channels?

Generations of Brits remember the spinning globe, its reverse mirror image, and the time clock at the top of each hour that served as BBC1 and BBC2's station ID's from the 1960's to the 1980's. Some even found the resurrected time clock on the BBC website as strangely kind, warm and reassuring.

An annual television license fee helps fund the BBC's programming and operations. And what has The Beeb given the good citizens of Britain? Behold...

• High-quality, intelectually stimulating cultural TV events such as Jerry Springer: The Musical and The Benny Hill Show.
• Classical music announcers on BBC Radio 3 who take Bach, Beethoven and Mozart as seriously as Manny Ramirez.
• An overnight text news service called Ceefax on BBC2 with graphics so blocky, outdated and slow to update it makes an old Atari 2600 video game look like the latest Pixar movie.
• News announcers on the BBC World Service who are specially trained to maintain a calm, reassuring, well-modulated voice even if their arms unexplicably fall off in mid-sentence.
• Cultural programs that simultaneously laud and ridicule the religions of the world in the name of tolerance and diversity.
• News and talk show personalities who, like other government bureaucrats around the world, regularly skewer the BBC on the air by exposing its corruption, bureaucracy, hypocrisy and overall bad taste—and keep their jobs thanks to the instutions of free speech, unionized labor and tenure.

There is no escape from the BBC here in the USA, even though this hasn't been British soil for quite some time. Consider the following, dear reader:

• PBS would air test patterns 19 hours a day if not for BBC shows.
• The most popular shows on American TV are BBC imports, like "Dancing with the Stars" (not bad, actually), because Americans are catching on that American-invented reality shows really suck.
• NPR would actually have to have its own news department if not for the BBC World Service.
• You have to pay cable rates as high as the BBC television license fee in the UK to watch the BBC America cable channel, which carries the same BBC stuff you already get for free on the local PBS channel, except you no longer have to endure the quarterly PBS pledge drive and it must be really good if it's on cable.
• Every hour of every day, somewhere in the USA, the one billionth rerun of "Monty Python" or "Doctor Who" is running on a PBS channel, or Benny Hill is once again chastisingly patting that old bald guy on the forehead in fast motion on said channel.
• You wish Anne Robinson was back on American TV because she reminded you of the nun who was your sixth-grade teacher back in parochial school, and whom you liked anyway.

And yet we love The Beeb all the same. It had the world's first regularly scheduled TV service in the late 1930's, which continues today as BBC1. A series of radio lectures by C.S. Lewis on the BBC during World War II were transcripted into Mere Christianity, his classic book on the Christian faith he professed and defended in the academic world. BBC Television has produced some of the world's best dramas and documentaries. The BBC World Service is a world standard in broadcast news, in spite of its shortcomings. And, dash it all, deep down inside we really like old Auntie.

After all, if not for the BBC, the nice folks at PBS and NPR would actually have to work for a living!