The BBC, in general, do a good job in their programme output, “I Love My Country”, “The Wright Way” and “Mrs Brown’s Boys” notwithstanding.
Their coverage of last year’s Olympics was nothing short of brilliant, and their news coverage is excellent. iPlayer is very handy, the website is full of useful information and, of course, the nipper would be lost without CBeebies. They have fallen from grace recently with the scandals over executive payoffs and abuse but that’s a blog post for another time.
Let’s get one thing straight though. I disagree with the way it is funded.
I am not a fan of the TV licence. I don’t think it’s fair to expect all television users to pay for a service that not all television/radio/web users use, and I think TV Licensing, the BBC’s deceitful revenue collection brand, uses so much artistic licence in their communications to “customers” that they should commission their own comedy.
But I accept that if I want to watch or record television as it is broadcast on pretty much any device that is capable of receiving it, I must pay the licence fee.
This morning, while on a rare visit to Facebook, I stumbled across a page encouraging people to not pay for their licence fee, and showing them how to get away with it.
This would be fine if the people in question did not use the television for receiving live broadcasts, instead only watching DVDs or playing on games consoles as in this example of unrelenting harassment from the halfwits at TV Licensing. However, the Facebook page is encouraging people who are watching live TV to not pay.
I am no lawyer but the legal arguments the page makes certainly do sound viable. It’s a simple process of cancelling the licence and instructing TV Licensing that they are withdrawing the implied rights of access. TV Licensing now cannot approach the person’s property to interview them under caution. Without evidence from an interview, there can be no prosecution. In theory, it is sound.
TV Licensing reply to these requests saying they will respect the withdrawal of the implied rights of access, but reserve the right to use alternative methods of detection, presumably meaning their mythical detector vans.
The participants in the conversations on this Facebook page are mostly the semi-illiterate grammar-free zones that abbreviate words with less than five letters because they can’t be arsed to type them and they are lapping it up. The something-for-nothing in them will always override the moral compass (I loathe this phrase but it is appropriate).
“Zomg, ths 4 rl?” they ask. I have no doubt that it is possible to evade the TV licence this way. But is it right to?
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t agree with the licence fee. I think the BBC should be funded by advertising, as the rest of the networks are. The licence fee model may have been right for the BBC in its early decades, when it had no competition, but not now.
But it isn’t funded by advertising. It’s funded by the licence fee. Rules is rules. I don’t like it, but I won’t be taking the advice of this Facebook page.
