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I've got a bit of the hump at Public TV. I like PBS, and I've been a PBS Supporter for over 20 years. Sure, I'm no Katherine Schlossberg Charitable Trust, but they get my $40 on a timely basis every March.

And I've joked about it often, how the PBS people are, well, in all kindness and trying not to hurt their feelings, they're money-grubbers. I get more mail from my local PBS station than just about anyone save for credit card companies. I send them some money and within a week I get a nice letter saying, "Thank you for the money. Now can we have some more? Here's a list of amounts you can give us, just pick the one you like best. If you don't like any of them you can write in your own amount. It's such a little price to pay for good TV. And we really do need it badly, Aunt Beulah at the station needs hernia repair surgery, so please, will you just give us some more fucking money, dammit???"

I know it costs a lot of money to put on quality programming without the commercials. Believe me I know, because they're always telling me. I like to watch (yes, I know it's lame) "All Creatures Great and Small." I've seen every episode a hundred times, but the animals are so cute and the accents make feel all warm and cozy. It comes on one of the two PBS stations I get (this would be the one I don't contribute to). One night I sat down to watch it at Mr M's, and instead of hearing the famliliar happy music and seeing Sigfried and James bouncing along in their car, I saw two dour faces staring at me. They were Local-PBS-Station-That-I-Don't-Give-Money-To employees telling us that they knew we'd turned in to see the heartwarming story of the British vets, but instead were seeing them. But did we know that it cost $3000 to get this program? (I can't remember if it was $3000 a series or $3000 an episode. For a series it sounds pretty dang cheap.) They told us this for around 15 minutes before the show started. It became a weekly ritual, aired before the show for an extended period.

Funny thing is, while they were telling us about how poor they were and how they were spending $3000 on our personal enjoyment, they also gave us an "incentive" to open up our checkbooks (they call them "gifts" - apparently someone's changed the meaning of that word since I last looked it up). The incentive? For donations of $120 or $240 we could get - DVDs of the "All Creatures Great and Small" program! Wow, what a nice "gift." First of all PBSers, if I wanted the DVDs of the program, I'd order them out of a catalog for their retail price of $39.95, and second of all, if I was going to buy DVDs of the program, I wouldn't be fucking sitting down to watch it on TV, would I?

And while we're on the subject of the station I don't contribute to, several weeks ago on Sunday mornings they started repeats of the "Manor House" series. This is the show where they hire modern Brits to go live in a manor house and be servants of another family who've been hired to be rich and live there. It's a great series that I enjoyed the first time I saw it. And this second time too. But then, when it began again the week after it ended - well, I may have had a serious "thang" for Edgar the Butler, but hell, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with him.

(Finally, this past Sunday at "Manor House" time - when it would have been time to restart it yet again - I saw a program where two men were worrying over a plate of ham, so they must have moved on.)

The PBS station I do give my money to is a little different. They used to pride themselves on being one of the only stations in the country who only did one pledge break a year. Boy, did they pride themselves on that. All they talked about, it was. Then they prided themselves on being one of the only stations in the country who only did two pledge breaks a year. This Saturday morning, when I was lazing in bed watching Britcoms only to be accosted by a pledge break - they prided themselves on being one of the only stations in the country who only did "a few" pledge breaks a year. Hmmmm, can a few be considered as many as 12? Because I swear, they're doing about one a month now.

But here's the deal. Here's the thing that's pissing me off the most about PBS these days. Pledge breaks that aren't pledge breaks.

Has anyone else noticed this? And it usually happens on weekends - your PBS station will announce a show as a "special," some big musical gala, or movie retrospective, or 3-hour-plus show of a pop psychologist giving us the lecture of our lifetimes, the one that's going to make us all deliriously happy. So you tune in to watch whatever this program is, and guess what - it's nothing more than a glorified pledge break. Peter, Paul, and Mary sing a couple of songs and we break to some centralized generic studio, filled with happy, scrubbed-clean TV personalities, telling us about how grand this show is and about how absolutely friggin lucky we are to be able to view it, and so why don't we go get off our ungrateful asses and pledge some money to PBS at the 800 number below before they go back and let Peter, Paul, and Mary sing two more songs, or Dr Dyer give you three more of his 100 tips for a happy life, and then we can have another 20 minute pledge break.

And this, my friends, is the lazy man's way of money-grubbing. This is bypassing making the station managers beat the bushes for volunteers from the local high school to answer phones, bypassing humiliating themselves for two weeks to beg, and bypassing having celebrities like Mr Humphries from "Are You Being Served" or Onslow's dog from "Keeping Up Appearances" visit the local stations and mix with the great unwashed. (And in our area, you've no idea how true that can be.)

This is, in effect, saying, "Hey, we've got a whole Sunday evening here with nothing to broadcast, let's show this four hour 'All-Star Bluegrass Spectacular,' and maybe even collect some money in the bargain - with the people in the Big Office doing the hawking! We can piss off to a bar for the rest of the night!

Hey, if I have to show up at work and humiliate myself for money, why shouldn't they?

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Just a word to the wise: when one buys batteries for $1.85, one tends to get a pack of $1.85 batteries. The pack in question lasted for one day.