The BBC license fee in the UK is $246 a year, and the population is 60 million
I know, I'm British.
that's a lot of doe to spend on the best TV documentaries, the best in the world, using the top professionals and professors who write the science books!
Utterly flawed logic. What is the aim of a
good documentary on science? To convey a vague understanding of concepts which are otherwise shrouded (from the point of view of a layperson) in highly technical details. They are not meant to bestow a working knowledge of science. Yes, there's often a great deal of assistance from physicists, so the documentary makers can represent the work of the physicists as closely as possible but that doesn't mean you learn more as a result, only that you learn things which aren't incorrect.
If documentaries were so good at teaching people science (or anything else) why do the "professors who write the science books" bother to write books? Why write a large book full of equations, diagrams and tables when you could just make a documentary? It's because documentaries don't come close to teaching you a working understanding of science, they only skim through the more accessible stuff or to explain the concepts, not the details.
You
claim to have an astronomy degree. If you are being truthful surely you know the difference in how much information you get from a textbook compared to a documentary?
For instance, The Elegant Universe is all about string theory and its an excellent (if not slightly over zealous)
introduction to the
concepts of what string theory is about or trying to do. Doesn't tell you how to actually derive any of the results nor does it even get close to some more abstract but fundamentally important concepts in string theory. You learn more about those details and deeper results from spending 3 hours reading a book, compared to the 3 hours of the documentary.
Expensive and glossy documentaries are about explaining to people who
don't need or want to know the details of a theory what exactly the theory is about and a bit about how people work on it. The flashy and expensive computer graphics help to sell the concepts to people who can't be sold on equations because they don't understand them. Documentaries are 'eye candy', they serve a purpose but that is not to teach you how to do anything in the theory which the documentary is about.
Do you honestly think watching a TV documentary and reading pop science books but
not reading any textbooks, journals or lecture courses will give you a firm grasp of the specifics of a theory?
And I'm pretty sure the BBC doesn't spend all of its 60,000,000*246 dollars on documentaries (not the mention you only need a TV license for each household, so 1 license covers a family house, irrespective of numbers of people or TVs).