Practically Classics Forum

I am beginning to think it is compulsory to have a TV licence even if you don't have a TV!

A friend has received his sixth threatening letter of this batch, which says the Police will called out and he will be prosecuted for not having a license. The friend hasn't had a TV for twenty-five years or so - and it was outside in a shed for some years before he managed to get rid of it! The Licensing lot send him these letters every three years or so and he has got rather bored of having to send a reply, so is ignoring them now!

The irony is that my friend is now 78 and would qualify for a free license if he had a TV!

When TV went digital, rather than buy a box, I sent back the licence, since I could no longer watch broadcast TV. Sime friends of mine had sent back their licence some years before. So long as their TV was not able to received a signal, the authorities were satisfied with this. It started as an experiment; they weren't watching much broadcast TV, as there was so much crap on it. The found that after it was effectively cut off, they didn't miss it.

With this in mind, I decided to see if I could do without a box and a licence and rely on my twenty years worth of VHS and DVD. That was over three years ago and the answer is yes. My parents qualify for a free licence and I do see some TV at their house but not a lot. I still have a radio (At one time, I am told, you needed a licence for a radio), which I switch on first thing, just to check that we aren't at war or something.

Like your friend, I got a letter, saying that the authorities would be checking up. I told them that they were welcome to park a detector van outside my house, for as long as they liked, they would not catch me watching broadcast TV. Their reply was a little less bellicose and may have been composed by a person. They explained that they would get in touch, in three years time, to see if my circumstances had changed. I told them that I would tell them if they did but they still wrote to me last Summer. I informed them that I still believed much of broadcast TV to be crap and that I would continue to rely on VHS and DVD.

It does appear that their flow charts are based on the assumption, that we are all addicted to TV and that if we don't have a licence, we must be pulling a fast one. We should be glad that everything doesn't work that way or else we should be stopped and searched every time we left a shop. Whatever happened to innocent until proved guilty

Technically, since the relevant legislation was never actually changed to reflect the shift toward TV ownership, a radio licence should still be purchased where a radio receiver is in use and a TV isn't. However the available stationery no longer includes a radio only licence and it's just taken for granted that as the form hasn't been updated, then so it's no longer needed.

The digital spy forum is awash with tales of woe from members who eschewed the TV only to have been caught using their broadband connection to watch telly on a PC. Watching recordings that other people have emailed or posted to you is something else recently tested and found to require the licence but surely the time must come when the licence fee is abolished since even mobile phones these days will stream BBC content and no, you don't need 4G for that purpose so it really is getting harder to avoid the fee. That said, it's cheap for the amount of content it makes available and renting films either from the web or your local DVD rental van would surely cost more.

There was a bit on Jeremy Vine one lunchtime (yes I know, but I parked up when Ken Bruce was still on) about TV detector vans, and a chap from BT who was sent off to drive one of these detector vans said they were just for show and to put the fear of Big Brother is watching you as they contained NOTHING inside, and they didn't have the technology to actually detect if you were watching TV or not.

TBH a lot of the BBC content these days is dire and not worth watching, and makes a mockery of the fee.