American radio, even satellite, is just music, sports, news and blabbering partisan morons. Why can’t we get the diversity of programs like the BBC has? And yes, I know NPR has quiz shows, but Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me isn’t the same as I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.
It’s the British accent. It makes everything better, no matter what it is. 
Because it’s intelligent and world wide in focus? And not set on selling you anything at all? NPR is good, but nothing beats BBC for me.
If NPR had the funding the BBC has, it might sound a bit different!
American radio did have that diversity of programs—back in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Then television came along, and people started watching it instead.
You can have it too. You just have to persuade people that every household in the country except those that don’t watch TV should pay $20 a year towards NPR. Good luck with that.
BBC Radio 4 has some amazing stuff on it.
Have you ever heard Says You!?
Yes, but unfortunately no station in DC carries it anymore, and it isn’t podcasted.
The site I linked has a list of stations that carry the show, and several of those stream on the web. Find the time that’s most convenient.
Or, if you’re on a Mac get Radioshift, which is basically Tivo for radio.
Actually, NPR does come pretty close to the BBC, in a lot of ways. The problem is that NPR just doesn’t have as many outlets as the Beeb does (though the Beeb is going to be laying off a lot of folks, so that’s not looking good), so they can’t justify creating as many programs as the Beeb has. Only so many hours in the day to air them, and most stations in the US don’t carry even a full day’s worth of NPR programming. Instead, they’ll have a few hours and then fill the rest up with classical music (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
A closer comparison to the BBC, I think, at least in terms of content and the like, would be Voice of America, which is aimed at an international market, rather than a domestic one.
As others have alluded to in referring to the license fee, one major reason that the BBC can produce so many interesting radio programs is that it is effectively isolated from market forces. This website shows a quarterly breakdown of what radio stations people are actually listening to in Britain. BBC Radio 4 and BBC 7 are the two stations carrying most of the speech programs the BBC produces - last year, they had a combined audience less than either Radio 1 or Radio 2, the BBC’s DJed popular music stations.
I’d speculate, though I have no cites for this, that there’s a roughly similar audience for this kind of thing in the US as in Britain, but that the semi-monopolistic nature of BBC Radio makes it easier to survive. According to this news article , about 6 million of Radio 4’s 9 million listeners listen to the Today programme, the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs radio show. An hour after the end of the Today programme, Radio 4’s audience for Woman’s Hour is just under 3 million. This kind of audience fall might lead a US station to stop syndicating NPR once Morning Edition has finished, perhaps switching to something like easy listening/easy classical music to capture more of the working crowd. The BBC, by contrast, fills an entire schedule for Radio 4 even if (relatively speaking) no one is listening! This produces a lot of good programming - the News Quiz, Excess Baggage, the aforementioned Woman’s Hour, PM, etc - but a lot of dross, too, which you may not notice if you’re only listening to an occasional program over the internet.
BBC Radio 4 is about the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve been listening to it since I was a homesick 14-year-old on an exchange trip to France.
It’s on almost permanently in my house, and to my great amusement, my wife has finally become addicted after nine years of me trying to tempt her with it.
The news programmes are second to none (apart from Jon bloody Humphrys) - intelligent, in-depth, fiercely independent (qv the “sexed up dossier” scandal) and seeking balance.
The comedy is patchy, but when it’s good, it’s amazing - so many things having spawned TV shows and more: Have I Got News for You (The News Quiz), Dead Ringers, Goodness Gracious Me, That Mitchell and Webb Look (Sound). But it also has gems such as I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue that would only ever work on radio.
The quizzes are erudite to a ridiculous degree. Nothing has been dumbed down, and the questions are often incomprehensible. I love that! From Round Britain Quiz:
Yet somehow, the panel will probably solve this!
The documentaries - wow. Similarly the magazine programs, which sometimes betray a dreadfully liberal bias (Woman’s Hour), and sometimes a little-Englander right-wing one (You and Yours, Moneybox), but they almost always teach me something I didn’t know. The arts shows are spot-on too - Front Row manages to deliver superb coverage, every single day.
The drama is often appalling, but occasionally they hit a superb note: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came from Radio 4, and last week’s adaptation of The Piano was very moving.
Interested parties may like to know that it’s currently doing an adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, starring Harry Enfield, with a soundscape very heavily influenced by HHG2G.
Sorry, I got carried away. The question is “why?”. This is why, for Radio 4 - the Radio 4 remit:
…and it has the funding to back this up. And the good news is that it shares much of its content with the World Service.
ETA: QuizCustodet, I bet you’re listening to Excess Baggage right now, aren’t you! 
Yeah, why do some people rate him so highly? Being interrupted every ten seconds doesn’t make for a tough interview, just a pseudo-agressive one.
Perhaps part of what makes Radio 4 in particular have such qualities is that the BBC is, and always has been, based around philosophy of quality, of independence, and essentially of public service. So it’s not just immune to market forces (although this allows it to continue existing), but it places its own forces in the form of high self-expectation on itself.
This in turn means that one reason many people are attracted to working at the BBC is precisely because of these values. Not just presenters, but producers, researchers, and all the way down. This helps to preserve its individual character.
Actually, you’d be wrong. There’s been a couple of threads on this, put since I can’t search for NPR, you’ll just have to take my word for this, but listeners in the US are abandoning commercial radio in droves and heading for NPR. Seems they’re tired of blowhards screaming at one another on the talk side and the endless repetition of the same damn songs over and over again on the music side.
Well, Winnie the Pooh, or Edward Bear, lived under the name of Sanders. “One born sneering”? Pooh-Bah from The Mikado was “born sneering”, so if they got together they’d be pooh-poohed, or snubbed.
Let’s face it, I am good.
But the BBC also produces a lot of that. This thread would be better titles “Why is BBC Radio 4 so much more interesting?” Radio 1, for example, is not terribly different from commercial pop stations, at least not in peak listening hours. On the TV side, the main channel BBC1, which consumes one third of the BBC’s entire budget, makes a mockery of the idea of public service broadcasting. It’s entirely ratings-driven, in direct competition with commercial channels.
In the US you have commercial-free radio in the form of Sirius and NPR. Here, that role is taken by the BBC. The difference is, you have to pay for BBC radio regardless of whether you like it. That does mean that it will throw up some gems that a free market would fail to support, but it also means you’re being forced to pay for a lot of dross, as QuizCustodet noted.
I take the view that the BBC should only aim to make programmes of a sort not available on commercial networks, which would mean a drastically smaller BBC. A counterargument is that that would lead to the “ghettoisation” of the BBC, that it needs mainstream programming to give it status, so that viewers will be more likely to give its more public service offerings a chance. But that just sounds like rationalisation to me. As somebody once said, after a while the primary goal of any organisation, whatever it was originally set up for, becomes the preservation of that organisation.
[metafilter] Because it’s European, and anything European is always better than it’s American equivalent.[/metafilter]
Are you saying you really can envisage the BBC still producing the quality stuff, and continuing to do so long-term, without any of the prominence the organisation and some of its brands have as a whole?
While I think I might be in danger of providing my own counterargument, take your example of Radio 1. Yes, I hate the way the daytime dross mostly is differentiated from commercial radio purely by the absence of adverts. However, the other programming (which is ghettoised at present) is able to create things which wouldn’t happen in a commercial environment, and which reach a greater audience than they could if the widespread popularity of Radio 1 as an entity didn’t exist.
The NPR station where I work carries the BBC World Service, seven days a week, from 11 PM or midnight until 6 AM. It’s distributed in the US by Public Radio International. We are prohibited from podcasting it, but it can be listened to on the web from our website. It’s often mentioned as a listener favorite when people list why they have renewed their membership.
It’s fascinating to hear about issues in countries that hardly, if ever, get mentioned on other media outlets. They do extended pieces, not just headlines or summaries, so you get an in-depth picture of their topic rather than an overview.
Is World Service also available in the UK? Which of the Beeb stations does it correspond to? Is it running its own programming, or does it run in tandem with a regular BBC outlet? What I mean by that is best served by this example: during NPR pledge drives, one week is called “coordinated pledge week.” NPR will have two editions of Morning Edition or All Things Considered running in tandem, with slight differences in the content. One does not deviate from format, for stations who don’t need the other feed, and the other one has a different hour grid, to accommodate NPR staffers urging local listeners to call in and support their stations. Essentially, the control room must be going nuts all week, running two versions of the show at the same time. Does the Beeb have two versions of their morning news program running concurrently, one for the UK and one for world syndication?