Verbal

Come on then delldays and Sergei. Apply your collective intelligence to showing us how 'bias' is exhibited in the BBC's shows. Give examples - yours, not someone else's. Start with the left-wing vipers on Top Gear, or those Trotskyists making Human Planet. Let's hear specifics.

I don't take that line because it's rubbish. The state education system would be substantially improved and enriched by the admission of bright, motivated, middle class kids. Creaming the top off into the private system impoverishes the state system. Can you now concentrate? This is a thread about BBC 'bias'.

Oh dear, you've just gone and done what I suggested you didn't. Now sit down, have a think, take a deep breath, and re-read my post.

Yes, dune, that's right. You are forced to pay a tax to have left-wing propaganda rammed down your throat. That's exactly why the BBC exists, and it's really no different to Fox News. There are left-wing equivalents to Beck and Hannity all over the BBC airwaves. And they are laughing at you.

We can have all the arguments you want about BBC bias - be my guest. We can argue about whether or not the licence fee is a sound model for paying for the BBC. We can even argue about whether the BBC should be abolished. But don't run the three together in some unholy mess that just gives the (no doubt false) impression that you simply can't concentrate. They are all separate arguments to all those but the few who, like you and delldays, seek some visceral revenge against anything and everything that makes any kind of social-contract claim on your pocket money. Sometimes, usually, the 'greater good' is a wise argument, especially when it defends the interests of the majority from the foolishness of the minority.

Dune, are you sick?

It's off the point, but I have bad news for you, delldays. You DO pay for private education - through making up the huge losses to the exchequer on tax exemptions because of charitable status.

Your analogies are so entertainingly, off-the-wall, bizarrely wrong. Keep going.

You could see the licence fee as a tax on the stupid. The majority understand perfectly well that it represents good value - and it also keeps the predatory, malign influence of Murdoch at bay. There will always be a few who don't get it, either because they believe Murdoch's self-serving crap, or because they cannot reach for words to form a coherent sentence. The licence fee is a remarkably efficient way of delivering television at a fraction of the cost of what Sky does charge, and would charge if it ever succeeded in persuading enough fools to support the BBC's abolition, or demotion to a subscription service. So the majority benefit; the minority whine. That doesn't mean the BBC is or should be above criticism. There's a lot it could do a lot better, and there's arguably a lot it could do a lot less of. But the funding model is still sound.

Quoting maniacal, reds-under-every-bed, conspiracy-theory bloggers, as if what they say is gospel, doesn't exactly help your case.

I think I've seen that in the BBC health & safety course. Clearly they had a special dispensation to drop Davro on his head.

What's the context for 'tribes of Pakistanis...raping white children'? And was that comment made by a third party?

Think yourself luckier. I'm on vodafone and up north right now - so far away that my damned phone is working normally. What I'd give for some peace and quiet.

It doesn't border on racist; it IS racist. But apparently that okay on Saintsweb threads now.

I am very, VERY tempted to report you.

Good, but no cigar. Here is a cigar (or, in his case, a huge spliff which always he smoked before writing stuff like this). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

Watch your language. (Please)

But the ref didn't book him. If he had, then Rooney would have escaped any further punishment.

Nothing gets done without it.

Brian Blessed

Then act on it. Don't pay your licence fee.

As long as thy don't throw his autobiography. That really could kill someone.

Keep up crabby. The fourth dimension is general relativity and the multiverse comes from string theory (among others). The anthropic principle may explain more than we might hope - the idea that the universe is ordered precisely as we would wish to see it. Which is why we keep hoping for aliens.

Quite. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/chelsea/8349977/Chelsea-defender-Ashley-Cole-shoots-club-intern-with-a-pellet-gun.html

Have you read his autobiography?