First things first, I'm typing this on my iPod, so the links will come tomorrow, as it's just too fiddly. That's a bit of a lie, I'm just being lazy ;-)

The BBC regularly comes in for some stick over the license fee. There are times when I feel it's justified (for example the current series Life, or the coverage of the Formula 1 this year, which has been excellent), but there are also times when I wish they would quit it with the audience chasing popularist crap.

OK, so I understand that some people hate F1 and love the likes of Eastenders, and Celebrity Dance Your Way Out of a Flagging Career. That's fair enough I suppose, although I'd prefer to see more educational documentaries on. It is supposed to be a public service broadcaster, isn't it?

The thing I saw today, which tipped me back towards the "abolish the license fee and make the beeb pay per view"* was when I visited the news.bbc.co.uk homepage, and saw that a tweet Stphen Fry made earlier, which mentioned that he might "retire" from twitter after copping some negative comments from someone, apparently merits a story. On the vey front page.

Honestly, is this still the real world? I missed the news the other day, but were there news articles when Lily Allen decided to quit the modern world and turn her back on the medium which granted her fame? It wouldn't surprise me if there were plenty of articles on it. People will accept any crap you feed them in the name of news. Then again, the newspapers etc are only supplying what an idioic majority want. In a country where more people vote in silly song contests on the telly than in actual elections, that base level is probably pretty low.

*incidentally, this is my preferred solution to the license fee. Make the BBC a pay per view entity. I would happily pay for the F1, and I would pay for Life. And most likely I would be paying for things like Top Gear, and By Any Means, and Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and Mock the Week, and most definitely QI. I wouldn't pay for things like Eastenders and Strictly. This means that programmes that are crap don't get made, as people won't pay for them. Although it probably means that we will have more programming like Strictly, that has all the idiots calling the premium rate phone lines to vote.

Bugger, my solutions have been once again shown up by the terrible scrutiny of logic...