If you have a color television in Ireland, you pay €150 per year (currently about $175) for the priviledge to support the pathetic RTE. The BBC collects a fee of £116 (currently about $194) for a service that is better, except for the news, which is as bad as RTE. Could it get worse? It turns out the answer is yes.

In Germany, it is €194 (currently about $227), set to rise to €207 (currently about $243). What do the German's get from their government press masters bureaucrats? I gather not much.

And I thought €40 we pay for public TV in Czechia are way too much... I bet the gov't will allow itself to be inspired by the Beeb or RTE and raise it soon. Needless to say, the quality is even worse.

There's even been a drive recently to collect this TV licence fee from businesses which might have a TV set for showing videos even if it doesn't receive any TV signal. You are required to sign a declaration that you don't have a TV on the premises otherwise they will assume you do.

Hi -

What do we get for the high German fee?

Two monstrous bureaucracies, one for ARD and the other for ZDF - ZDF is the acronym for Second German Television, wow what an original name! - and thirteen smaller bureaucracies for each of the regional TV stations. ARD is an acronym for General Radio and TV Station. Loses something in the translation...

What little is left over for programming is consumed by warmed-over detective shows, made ponderous by the fact that you have to listen for two minutes of dialogue to finally hear the verb to understand what they are saying, and truly horrific variety shows pandering to the over-50 crowd, but shown at prime-time. How horrific? Well, imagine, if you would, a mixture of Lawrence Welk and Grand Ole Opry, but with no talent - pure playback - and lots and lots of over 50s swaying back and forth to what the Germans call music.

And interminable talk shows discussing how necessary reforms are, balanced and representative, whose discussions always end up the same: NIMBY and reforms are what somebody else's constituency needs to happen to them.

And news that was reported on CNN the day before. Unless, of course, it has to do with some politico mouthing off about how wrong the US is.

**That's** what we get for our TV fees. And because the ARD/ZDF duo is also allowed to carry advertising, it means that private stations get to compete for a smaller share of the advertising revenue market, meaning that a number of them do little more than show old US sitcoms and detective series, with the occasional soft porno tossed into the pot late at night.

The only saving grace is the fact that a couple of stations carry a fair amount of science fiction, even though often at appalling times (Farscape was on between 0030 and 0230, but never at the same time!).

John

In Sweden it's $230

In Finland, about $200.

In the US, the suggested voluntary annual donation for PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), is still $40. They seem to manage quite well with that....

John Opie: If you're back in the States, I suggest renting the Farscape series through Netflix.com. It's quite nice to see them in sequential order, whenever you want to see them. Sort of like seeing the famed "story arc" of the Sopranos series.