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On one night visiting relatives over the recent holidays, we were stuck inside due to bad weather, and resorted to the time-proven entertainment of watching TV. We flipped through the channels (this was a house without cable or satellite) and settled on watching Friends and then Will and Grace. The next night, more bad weather, so we again turned on the TV to poke fun at a rather embarrassing movie from the 1980s, Footloose.

This could have happened anywhere in the United States except it didn’t — the bad weather was rain and fog, and we were in London, England. In fact, after we tired of Kevin Bacon’s dancing, we flipped over to a program called Ricky Tomlinson: Laughter My Arse!, and it was clear we were still in London.

Like in the world of pop music, the United Kingdom and the U.S. share a great deal in television, as styles and ideas cross the Atlantic from each direction. The U.K. shows from the 1960s gave us the ideas for All in the Family and Sanford and Son in the 1970s; we exported hits like Dallas in return in the 1980s. British punk and new wave reenergized American music in the 1980s; we sent it back to them (and the world) in the new form of music video. (In fact, the first band played on MTV was a British duo, The Buggles.) We got the Teletubbies, Bob the Builder, The Weakest Link, and the inspiration for American Idol; they broadcast our Clifford, years of Friends and Will and Grace episodes, and — coming later this year — HBO’s acclaimed miniseries Angels in America.

Although there are many commonalities in programming between the U.K. and the U.S., there is one really big difference in the way TV operates in these two countries that goes back to the fundamental decisions made about systems of broadcasting back in the 1920s.

In the U.S., if you want TV, you buy one, plug it in, and watch. The price of watching local TV for free is that you have to spend more than a quarter of each hour watching advertisements. If you want more TV and/or commercial free TV, you get cable or satellite service (more than 70 percent of U.S. citizens do this), and pay about $40 or more a month.

In the U.K, the process starts with buying a TV. Then, you must pay, either in full, or quarterly or monthly, an annual TV license fee of about $205. (If you’re 75 or older, you get to watch for free.) Although this sounds odd, it’s the way TV is supported in the U.K. and most other European countries. In return for this, British citizens can receive for free on their digital antenna eight commercial-free BBC channels, more than 10 commercial-free digital radio channels, and dozens of additional commercially-supported television and radio stations. Like in the U.S., if you want more channels, you have to pay for cable or satellite services.

The license fees also support original programming on the BBC, including shows familiar to American viewers like Absolutely Fabulous and Ballykissangel and films such as the Wallace and Gromit series and Truly Madly Deeply.

Of course, in the U.S., we do have our publicly supported PBS. But we’ve never treated it as a national treasure. PBS has always been underfunded — it receives only about 16 percent of its funds from federal tax dollar sources, about $1.09 each year per U.S. taxpayer. The rest of it is made up by corporate sponsorship messages that have in recent years morphed into actual commercials, and by pledge drives that are ever-necessary and universally despised. Moreover, PBS has never been able to support the creation of programming — it just acquires programs made by other groups, including many from the better-funded BBC.

Consider the math behind what you pay for in each system. In the U.S., on a basic aerial antenna, you generally get 4-6 over-the-air free broadcast channels, with only PBS (mostly) commercial free. In the U.K., you get eight free, commercial-free channels (including two children’s channels), and several commercial-free audio channels. If you tried to approximate this in the U.S., you’d need to get cable, and then you would have already spent far in excess of what an annual license fee would cost in the U.K.