I’m curious about the television license.
I seem to remember seeing old cartoons in British magazines showing a van with a circular antenna on top, presumably searching for people with unlicensed televisions. This was before cable, so they would have had to locate people watching television broadcast over the airwaves. Do they still do this? And (a technical question), how do you locate someone who is receiving a broadcast rather than transmitting one?
I would actually posit that fishing and hunting were likely to have been one of the first regulated activities. Accounts of poaching laws and requiring permission by a ruler to harvest natural resources are as old as history.
Older TV sets used to leak a lot of RFI. Enough for a truck with a sensitive antenna to pick up the static, and indicate that maybe somebody was using a television on the premises. It wouldn’t conclusively prove it, but you could flag locations for more thorough investigation.
Re the OP: as you’ve figured out by now, “license to watch TV” sounds far stranger to US ears than “fishing license”, as most US states require fishing licenses, usually with exemptions such as those listed for Illinois.
I believe that the PBS “begathon” variant for funding TV programming doesn’t happen much outside the US, and would seem very strange to a lot of Brits who dutifully pay their license fees for advert-free BBC. Is this the case?
There’s a service on digital channels called “Audio Description” which consists of a narrator on a secondary audio channel who describes any visual elements necessary for a blind person to follow a TV show. Think of it as the audio equivalent of subtitling for the deaf.
But PBS also gets funding from the government if I am not mistaken. Which means that Americans also pay this TV tax, it is just built into your regular tax and cannot be avoided by not buying a TV or radio.
And, of course, many people are ‘legally blind’, but in fact have enough vision to see at least some of the TV broadcast.
We have ‘begathons’ here (on the BBC, too), but only ever for major charity causes, AFAIK. The idea of a commercial pledge drive does seem strange to me (a Brit), yes.
Also… (apropos of nothing much) - not all fishing in the UK requires a licence - it is only required for fishing freshwater species (including migratory ones such as salmon and eels, even if not caught in fresh water)
They just assume that almost everyone will watch TV. If you don’t buy a licence, you will get a letter from the BBC asking to confirm that you don’t have a TV. If they are not satisfied with your answer, they will send a man around, who will ask very politely to be let in so he can see your lack of a TV set for himself.
We went TV-Free for a year or so once. The letters we got (from the licensing authority) start off on a sort of “Ha ha, silly old you - you’ve just forgotten to pay your bill - why not send us a cheque today?”, and swiftly move on to “You are committing an offence by watching TV without a licence - pay up immediately, or else”. I don’t remember any of the communications at any point acknowledging there was such an option as not having a TV - the closest they came (IIRC) was 'If there’s some other reason you’ve decided not to pay, please write to us".
Nitpick: The letter will be from the licencing authority (imaginatively named “TV Licencing”). They are responsible for issuing the licences and dealing with evasion, but they are entirely separate from the BBC. (They are funded from the licence fee revenue, though. They simply take their cut before passing the rest over to the Beeb.)
The licensing authority is the BBC. Sure, they contract out the business of actually collecting the fee, but the authority to collect it is theirs.
“TV Licensing” is a trade mark of the BBC and is used under licence by companies contracted by the BBC to administer the collection of television licence fees and enforcement of the television licensing system.
[…]
The BBC is a public authority in respect of its television licensing functions and retains overall responsibility.
It also was originally set up to make sure that the couple weren’t married to anyone else.
I’m in Oregon state, US. I need a licence to hunt, and also a separate ‘tag’ is required for each species. Mostly deer and elk but also can be cougar, bighorn sheep etc. The price for these tags goes from about $22 for deer to very expensive for others. Some tags are given out on sort of a lottery where you may or may not draw a tag to hunt.
I need a fishing licence, and also a separate tag depending upon species. Don’t need a tag for trout unless it is over 16 inches and then it ‘becomes’ a Steelhead, which requires a Salmon/Steelhead tag. Sturgeon require another tag. None for most other fish. A separate licence is also needed for shellfish like clams or crab, currently $6.50.
If I hunt/catch an animal or fish there is certain information that must be recorded on the tag and turned in later for game management reasons. The fees are also used to help pay for most of the Dept of Fish & Wildlife and various other habitat enhancement uses.
Don’t need any permits for ownership of either long rifles or hand guns. There is a background check to see if you are a felon, and for hand guns a waiting period before you can pick them up, presumably to keep you from purchasing in a moment of anger. Serial numbers are recorded at point of purchase but no permit is required. If you want to carry a concealed hand gun you must take classes and pay a small fee about $35 plus a background check and this permit is revokable if you get in trouble with the law.
A dog needs a licence, mainly to be sure it has had it’s vacinations, none for a cat.
TV permit? To support state run telly? That ain’t going to fly here. I’ve seen the BBC and all I can say is you get what you pay for.
Saying that the state “runs” the BBC is like saying that the FCC runs American TV stations. The BBC operates independently under a charter granted by the state. I suppose the government would have two means of applying pressure to the BBC, if it wanted to: charter renewal, which only happens every ten years or so, and setting the level of the annual licence fee.
The former would be fairly useless as a lever on the BBC, since it is just about inconceivable that a government would refuse a new charter, given that most of the public hold the BBC in higher esteem than any government. The most they could do is moan about a few things and maybe tinker with the terms of the charter.
The level of the licence fee might seem a more likely means of influencing the BBC, but in practice the fee just goes up roughly in line with general living costs. Again, a government daring to take on the BBC – “be nicer to us on BBC News or we’ll freeze the licence fee” – would likely incur the wrath of the public. We might like a lower fee, but not on those terms. Some people do advocate reducing the size of the BBC, but not with a view to controlling it editorially.
Anyway, the proof of the pudding is whether the BBC is editorially independent and impartial. And while it has its biases like any media organisation, it has a long-standing reputation for impartiality. Nobody here apart from a few crackpots considers the BBC to be a “state broadcaster”.
In Soviet Union, license needs you!!
Sorry.
I first learned about the whole UK’s TV license from a great episode of The Young Ones MTV first broadcast in the mid-eighties!
“Bastard’s the name, but you can call me Right Bleeding, all my friends do, or did”
“Why?”
“I killed him, WHERE’S YOUR LICENSE?!?”
I think the whole TV-license thing just went along with the post-WWII, we’re fucking broke, neo-socialism attitude of the UK. I mean, as an arrogant American, I can say that it was not only because the US came out unscathed but because the US is vastly larger than Britain that everyone knew that advertising would more than pay for TV broadcasting (just like it did with radio).
Still, it is a totally alien concept to us Yanks…
I’m pretty short sighted and decided to check out how effective this service is by taking off my glasses. I was watching a nature programme at the time and the audio commentary did make it a lot easier to follow. For example a long shot of jungle was just a blur of green to me until the commentary told me I was looking at orangutans up in the trees and I found the little orange blobs. By the time they panned in to the close up of orang faces I could see them reasonably well.
For me, it’s worth paying the license fee to not to have to sit through all those adverts.
There’s sometimes tax support at the state level, too. Still, it doesn’t pay anything close to the whole cost of PBS. And the amount given to PBS is pretty small potatoes compared to most government expenditures.
Most PBS stations show stuff besides PBS fare, which they have to pay extra for. British imports are very popular with them, so we get to see BBC programs on stations which periodically beg for money. And have “underwriter’s spots” which look suspiciously like commercials, except they are inserted between shows, not in the middle of them.
At various times, quite frequently, members of all political parties seem to be complaining about the BBC being unfair to them.
Also, Conservatives tend to think it too liberal, socialist and liberals think it too conservative. The BBC is in many ways imperfect, but it is, I think , demonstrably reasonably independent of government or any specific political party.
There are still adverts though - they’re just all for BBC-related products (books accompanying their TV series, services available on their website, etc). Not all of them are after our money - some only demand attention, but they are adverts nonetheless.