You get how many channels!!!!!???

Growing up I always wondered why the television had channels 1 to 10.... 1 to 10 when there were only 3 Television channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Of course my dad ruled the TV, he decided what we watched and most of the time it was either something on ITV or the news the later much to my brothers frustration..... It seemed to be that we were either watching the news or a soap opera or a John Wayne film or some western, he did like Clint Eastwood too so wasn't too bad. I watche "The Enforcer" last night and it was full of classic Clint quotes "CALLAHAN: Well what'd you want me to do? Yell "trick or treat" at them?".

Anyway, along came the inspirationally named "Channel Four" (Can't imagine how much they paid the marketting team to come up with that name), which to start off with, was rubbish, however my brother uncharachteristically seemed to like some of the ... err.... Art programmes.... hmmm.... then came Channel 5 , another class example of clever PR and shortly digital TV and a huge array of more free to view channels. OK there were paid for cable channels and satelite channels in the intervening years, but not free.....

With all these channels now we still have the BBC which is publicly funded and not funded by advertising, they show a lot of repeats too sometimes, but sometimes they do produce the kid of great programmes that you know on a commercial channel would just not happen like "Blue Planet" which is an example of what I love about the BBC.... but I'm glad that we still have television that is not playing to the largest crowd and is independent of any other influences, if someone owns a company they will decide what goes on. So it must really gawl people like the Murdochs' that there is some form of popular media broadcasting that they just can't buy. For years they've railed against it, when BBC launched the iPlayer allowing people to watch TV online in the UK, they said that it was anti competative, how can it be anti competative, OK all channels have to compete for viewers, but the independent TV channels don't have to compete with the BBC for advertising.