[andy_m]

The fact is that advertising doesn't add anything to the price of your groceries. Fairy liquid is more expensive in your village shop than it is in Sainsbury's because the latter is a major retailer with greater buying power which is because of growth that has been achieved, in part, through advertising. The companies that can afford television advertising are shifting products in such scale that the unit prices contain fractions of pennies directly attributable to advertising.

And, whether you think it unlikely or not, the choice exists to not be involved. To shop locally and buy lesser brands. I don't think you'd really need to monitor every advert, I think you could make a pretty good guess at whether or not the tin of no brand beans you pick up in the corner shop has ever been seen on tv. Of course, your weekly shop would cost you a fortune but, hey, you know, so what, right?

But I, as a consumer of television and radio have very little personally to show for my £12 a month or whatever it currently is except for the opportunity to be able to pay even more to actually get to the stuff I want to watch.

It really isn't the same as far as I'm concerned. The licence fee is outdated. It belonged in a time when there was only public service broadcasting, not now where we have multi-channel pay tv and online services which are almost un-monitorable (I may have just made up a new word there!) and the BBC isn't even living up to its side of the bargain. It pays its executives a fortune at our expense, is reducing spending on output and produces obviously biased news coverage. That is not public service broadcasting.