I am having, once again, the internal debate on whether to get rid of Sky and BT Sport. It costs a fortune, I watch far more television that’s good for me and, worst of all, it is making Rupert Murdoch even richer.
When the late playwright Dennis Potter contracted cancer, he called the tumour Rupert after the not-too-great man himself and that confirms to me what Murdoch brings to the British table. His odious media empire is a cancer on our society.
I know why people like me have Sky. The sports coverage is excellent – as it should be given what they charge me – and they cover almost all the main sports. If I want to watch live football, rugby union or league, golf and cricket, then I need to have Sky. The BBC continues to lose major sporting events by the year as the freeze to the license fee goes on. Soon the BBC will have no golf and perhaps no rugby of either code. What’s the world coming to?
And when the BBC has no meaningful live sport to offer us, what then? Murdoch’s channels, which were almost exclusively sport, now include Sky Atlantic, which I don’t get, which shows many of the great American series I used to see on terrestrial TV. With his news channel and the general entertainment channel Sky 1, the question of whether we still need the BBC will be asked more and more. I think the answer is that we need the BBC more than ever, but I suspect that as usual I shall be on the wrong side of the argument.
By stopping my handouts to Murdoch (as well as too Branson and BT Sport), I will be probably left with no live sport to watch at all, but I can always manage with the radio. But would that matter? It’s true that many people have Sky but it’s also true that many don’t. The breaking up of sport into a myriad of different channels has all but taken away the shared experience where you’d watch a game on the telly and spend all the next day talking about it in work. I think I’d miss it a lot less than I imagine.
I’m certainly fed up with Murdoch and his vile newspapers. The Dirty Digger returned to the UK during the election campaign to take the charge of the campaign to see the Tories win, or better still for him, Labour lose. Murdoch will never forgive Ed Miliband for criticising his company over phone-hacking the likes of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and Labour’s former leader will continue attract the old boy’s bile for the rest of his days. The Sun is not a newspaper in the conventional sense: it’s a celebrity gossip rag, with added extra right wing politics. I certainly don’t buy it, as I don’t buy the Times. It may be time to get rid of Sky, too.
If Murdoch gets his way – and who says he won’t with his buddy Cameron restored to number ten – then the BBC will not survive and if we want to watch TV in future, we will have to pay him to watch any telly at all. That is what Murdoch has been about all long.
I can imagine a life without Sky and The Sun, but I am not sure I can imagine one without Radios 2, Five Live and Six Music, or Match of the Day or Would I Lie To You. But the way things are going, I might have to.
1 comment
Just stream the sport via the many free sites. No need to pay
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