The IT Crowd was actually aired on Channel 4, not the BBC. Channel 4 is publicly owned (for now…) but is fully funded through adverts. The ad break timings likely don’t match what you have in the US though (at the start and end and a single break in the middle over a 30 minute runtime).
If you watch an NFL game on Sky there are a load of breaks where they cut to a UK analysis crew. Every single one of those is an ad break that they have in the US but not in the UK. Sky does still has ads, but clearly far far fewer than the US is willing to tolerate.
NFL is an extreme example but I always found the comparison interesting.
The NFL is the most ridiculous two hours of television in the US. I don't really understand why people put up with the amount of ads they shove into a game.
There was service years ago--maybe it's still around--from one of the TV networks that would cut a whole game into 15-20 minutes, mostly be not showing any ads during the game, and cutting out all of the commentary/standing around.
The on-air duration of an NFL game is actually closest to 3 hours. It's 2 to 2.5 hours when shown without ads.
The NFL GamePass service that you can subscribe to (how I mostly watch the NFL from outside the US) offers 'Game in 40 minutes' (sometimes called Condensed). It just cuts from play-to-play-to-play. It's a great way to be able to watch a couple of other NFL games in a given week (fits nicely into a lunch break), but I do actually miss the proper commentary. Good commentary teams are very helpful in breaking down what happened in the blur of action that is each play.
In 2019, it was 14-18 minutes of explicit advertising per hour depending on the network and the genre (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1025656/ad-time-primetim...), up from about 13-16 minutes per hour in 2009 (https://time.com/96303/tv-commercials-increasing/). "Bumpers", network identifiers, and other content inserted by the airing network that is not ad space sold to a third party are not included in all of the counts. Local (as opposed to national) advertising time is also missing from some of these datasets. Overall, the duration of scripted US television shows is now approximately 40 minutes per hour: http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm
Other ways television advertising has increased over time:
Number of ad breaks. In the 1950s and early 1960s ads were aired before and after shows, often with the host of the show doing the ad reads for one or two products that were billed as the show's "sponsors". A break for ads in the middle of the content was added in the mid-1960s, and the number of breaks per hour increased at least into the 1990s. https://ibuzzle.com/television-advertising-history
Number of ads per break. Television ads have gotten generally shorter over time. 30 seconds became the norm during the 1970s. From 2009 to 2019, the percentage of ads that were 15 seconds long increased from 35% to 42% (https://time.com/96303/tv-commercials-increasing/).
There's been a fair bit of misunderstanding around Channel 4 since Nadine Dorris (ex Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) aanounced plans to sell off Channel 4. A lot of people never reaslised it was publicly owned and then assumed it was the same model as the BBC, but with some adverts.
S4C (Sianel 4 Cymru, Channel 4 Wales) receives some licence fee funding (partially via the BBC making programmes for it), but it's a separate entity to Channel 4
Only the BBC gets money from the license fee. Part of the strong objection to the license fee is that BBC’s international arm already is a huge cash cow, so BBC UK could still remain ad-free.
