We have BBC Canada here. This was in the FAQs:

When does Top Gear air? And will it be the entire, unedited program?
Top Gear airs on Sat. and Sun. at 7 p.m. ET. And yes, it will be the hour-long program with no edits. For more information, please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/

Wikipedia has this info on Top Gear

We also get Coronation Street which is approx 9-10 months behind.

Here is a selection of television broadcasting companies we can view here:

CTV
Fox
Fox Sports
A&E
CBC
NBC
ABC
CBS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox

I think some of the US forum members use it successfully, do a search for their experiences.

Thanking you.

I trialled a slingbox last year (used to work for a tech analyst firm), you would need a lovely person in the UK with a spare TV/skybox you can control remotely. Seems a bit of a big ask to me.

You can always use the BBC's IPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/. A lot of programmes (including Top Gear ) are put on there for 30 days. Once downloaded you also have 30 days to watch them, only thing is you have to be in the UK. But you can get round this by using a UK proxy, something I have been doing successfuly. It also covers all BBC channels not just BBC 1 so plenty of choice.

I have one setup at my folks house in the UK and it works great

how do they fit a 60 minute long programme with no adverts into a 60 minute time slow when it does show adverts??

i watched it yesterday and it didnt go over the hour but had at least 10 minutes of ads. so how is it done?

You can get many of the top gear episodes on You tube....type in Top Gear series 10....etc...

It's heavily edited - often the links between segments are clumsy as banter between the presenters is cut out.

thats my point, the quote i quoted said they are unedited. but clearly they are not.

Friends of ours in Vancouver used to have a Satellite dish the size of a trampoline in their garden. I assume they were getting British tv. Either that or they watch some pretty weird channels!

I can't live without sky 1!!

Between my Weeds, 24, Stargate, Eureka and my ol' favourite from ITV The Bill!


Plus what about XFactor?! Won't somebody please think about the CFactor?!

I have my sky box and DVD recorder furiously taping (or should it be DVDing) them all week till I get back to blighty!

You can't receive Astra anywhere here, surely? The footprint doesn't even come close.
They were just getting free pr0n most likely.

Not really - ask a friend or family member with a spare 'net outlet and Freeview/Sky box to set it up in a spare room or attic or whatever and Robert's your mother's brother.

erm... I wasn't familiar with all your favourites, but it seems all bar The Bill are US shows anyway. Do you really not think that amongst the hundreds of channels you might be able to find them? Almost all local cable companies across Canada take a feed from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, Space, and more, so you'll be covered for pretty much anything out of the US. And there are a few home-grown shows as well, on CBC, CTV etc. Little Mosque on the Prairie and Corner Gas seem to typify Canadian comedies - sometimes quite wry humour and a little more subtlety than the laugh-track-ridden sitcoms from the American majors.

You might struggle to find The Bill, but then you'll have plenty of new shows to watch instead. Heck, if it's police procedurals you're after (although the Bill seemed a bit more like a soap opera to me, so perhaps I'm missing the point) you've got at least three flavours of CSI (Las Vegas, Miami and New York) plus at least three flavours of Law & Order (including Special Victims and Criminal Intent) plus all the other crime stuff like Criminal Minds, Numbers, Cold Case, Missing, etc etc ad nauseam.

As for the X Factor, there are talent shows galore - I know the X factor's been done in the US (complete with Simon Cowell), and apparently they even imported that prize tit Piers Moron for America's Got Talent. The Canadian ones are a bit cringe-makingly awful, though... I watched a couple of Canadian Idol episodes last season, the first time because I was channel-surfing, and the next one because I simply couldn't believe that the standard of performance in the first one had really been that bad. Sadly it really had been.