Party Vibe

the license fee is for the whole lot, its the right to receive the television signals.

its not that well known outside the TV industry (particularly engineering) but BBC and ITV despite being “rivals” have always all shared resources (albeit sometimes grudgingly) even before the boom in privatisation/freelance/independent production, then in the 80s they were encouraged more than ever to work together

Due to this today lots of BBC channels transmit out of old old ITV network facilities – many commercial channels transmit from BBC Television centre.

BT and arqiva (which once was also a public sector organisation called the IBA and was part of NTL for a bit) link the whole lot all together and a lot of brainy people shared their knowledge to make the radio and telly work

Sometimes it was done on commercial contract but sometimes it was an informal basis with even commercial rivals helping each other for free, as the “public money” was paying for this “unprofitable slack time”

Its difficult to explain further without going into heavy technical or business detail and it did seem a bit more justified to the private citizen when more of these were public sector companies (until the 1980s/1990s) – even though ITV was private there was a nationalised company running all their transmitter masts for many years.

The market and privatisation took over eventually but even until the late 90s there was some sort of shared “public service broadcasting” ethos even with commercial broadcasters.

The extreme ruthless competition Thatcho, Murdoch and co championed finished off this goodwill and cameraderie though..

not offhand but its more a grey area as its been tolerated since the 1980s because thatcho thought it “introduced a free market ethos to broadcasting” – it was mentioned in the Grauniad a while back (probably Media Guardian)

The technique is called “product placement” – Ofcom is aware of it and has expressed concern at various production companies but has been told that “without it the programmes wouldn’t be made” as the revenue from doing so is costed as part of the production budget and this has been going on for years.

Bear in mind a telly programme these days isn’t often made by staff with full time jobs but by a small production company which has one or two high paid staff/star talent (usually the directors) but the rest of it is done on a shoestring and with loads of penny pinching