Back in my london living badly paid days we didn’t pay th poll tax or the TV licence and I remember coming home one evening and seeing an unmarked van with a directional aerial mounted on the roof, scanning up and down the road.
The TV was not turned on that night.
The TV licence people didn’t do much in the way of cross-checking because if an address had never got registered by someone buying a tv licence, they never seemed to bother you, but whenI moved to a flat that had had a tv licence, they were down on us like a ton of bricks.
When I moved into a new house on a new estate in Dublin, a licence inspector called round one night and “warned” us that they would be checking out the area in about a month’s time and that they would be asking to see our licence then. We bought a licence the next day and they never called again.
When I was at University, all of us received letters from TV Licensing addressed to our campus room numbers. We were momentarily worried, until we noticed that some of the “addresses” that had recieved these letters were actually bathrooms…
I live in the UK and haven’t had a TV for 7 years. I still get nastygrams from the TV licensing people - who ignore my phone calls. They sent someone round once. He left happy. The thing is, they assume that everyone has a TV, so they send letters to all the addresses which don’t have a license. I actually sent a letter to the Advertising Standards Authority complaining about the aforementioned advert.
With the increasing proliferation of cable and satellite and the consequent Balkanisation of TV, not to mention the politicisation of BBC Radio, I’m not sure that there’s actually a need for the current BBC. But that’s for Great Debates.
So what happens if you have a DVD player hooked up to an old Amiga monitor, as I do?
(I also have an old VCR, but it isn’t hooked up to anything, not even an antenna. I live in Toronto, Canada, and if I wanted I could get cable no problem.
The costs of cable add up very fast, however. [ul][li]Basic cable: around CAD 35/month (CAD 1 = UKP 0.44).[]Cable with extra channels I’d actually watch: CAD 50/month.[]Digital cable: CAD 60/month plus rental of the digital cable box (includes all the analogue channels and a fancy onscreen TV-guide thingie).Dgital cable plus high-speed internet (what I really want): CAD 100-110 / month. [/ul]Assorted specialty/allophone channels (everything from the gay channel to Tamil news) are extra.[/li]
The satellite and wireless-cable services end up costing about the same per month. All of these services are currently delivering around 250 channels.
That TV license fee is starting to look cheap by comparison…)
You only have to pay the licence fee if your equipment enabled you to receive broadcast signals (by whatever method). If you’re only viewing DVDs you wouldn’t have to pay. Similarly if you removed the tuner circuitry from your VCR so that it was a “play-only” device you wouldn’t need a licence for that either.
Another happy BBC customer here. I’m not sure the TV programming alone is worth all the cash, but throw in the radio (I’m hooked on Radio 4 and the World Service, while the spouse likes Radio 3) and it’s more than a bargain.
Of course, I get it all back (in a manner of speaking) by performing in one of the Beeb’s eight musical ensembles, so I suppose I’m biased in that respect.
