British Invasion and is PBS still necessary?

Flipping channels tonight the wife and I saw PBS was showing a British Invasion special as part of their annual March pledge drive. We missed most of it, but still caught some great performances. Gerry and the Pacemakers doing Ferry Cross the Mersey, Procol Harum doing Whiter Shade of Pale, Denny Lane from the Moody Blues doing Go Now, and my favorite performance from Lulu doing To Sir With Love. She still looks hot and still sounds great! Why is it that a lot of these acts still look good and still sound as good as they did back then? Forty years from now will some of these rap and hip hop musicians still look and sound as good? Yeah right.

The other thing that was going on was the annual March Pledge drive on PBS. I couldn't help wondering while we were flipping back and forth between channels if PBS was still necessary. In the past with only the three main networks and the local channels PBS did have an important place. Now I am not so sure. True I do watch still. They have some good programming that I do enjoy. I wonder though if the programming they do would not find a home on one of the cable channels if PBS stopped broadcasting. There are niche channels now on cable so the programming found on PBS would easily find a spot on some of them. And I really do believe that some of the cable channels would pick up the best shows. So should we just move on and end this experiment in public financed broadcasting? Has their purpose come and gone? Does PBS still serve the public good? Me? I have to say as much as I enjoy the programming I think the time has come to move on. If the shows are really worth watching they will find a home on some cable channel. True we would have to watch with them with commericials, but I think we would survive.