TV Licence Resistance

[dutchmanswife]

DH has been running a campaign for years against the TV licence and has appeared in the Sunday Times this week.

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6797727.ece

I'm feeling quite proud of him.

BBC online has adverts in other countries. They could in the UK too. No good reason not too, they are unobtrusive really.

And the BBC is far too big and bloated. Yes, children's TV and David Attenborough are very nice, but there isn't a justifiable reason to levy a swingeing tax to pay for the likes of Jonathan Ross.

The public service stuff could be funded out of general taxation, just as say libraries are (even though not everybody uses them, everybody pays). With an exclusive public service remit, the cost would be a tiny fraction of what the telly tax is.

Do you actually know anything about the BBC, its working conditions, its budgets and its perks other than what you've read in Murdoch owned papers?

Have you spoken to a BBC employee or contractor - discussed the shoe-string budgets, the constant cuts, the ever-increasing workload?

I can assure you that the reality on the ground is very far from the constant "jaunts" you are talking about.

And as for criticising the salaries of people like Ross etc, personally I could do without him, but can't you see the irony of on the one hand extolling market conditions and on the other hand decrying them when they push up presenter salaries? This is what the BBC felt they needed to pay to retain one of their highest-rating presenters and maintain ratings. I'm sure they didn't just wake up one day and think, "hey ho, I know, I'll waste an enormous chunk of my budget and pay wossy 50% over the odds". They paid what they needed to pay to be competitive with the likes of Sky etc.

As for political bias this is a whole other thread, but as long as they continue to get equal volume of complaints from all sides (which they do, by and large) then I'm not too worried.

Finally, and still on the subject of political bias, can you not see the ENORMOUS irony in taking "facts" from rival broadcasters (including, let's note, Murdoch-owned channels and newspapers) who have a direct vested interest in running the beeb into the ground?

If you want to discuss this using actual statistics, concrete examples and figures then do, but talking about what friends of friends have apparently said is frankly pointless and not very credible.

market conditions are not created by a tax-funded body with no need to make a profit. So they are quite irrelevant to BBC presenters' pay.

As for bias, suggest you look at biased-bbc.blogspot.com/. The idea that they get equal criticism from both sides is absurd.

"popular entertainment for all"

No that isn't what the BBC was created to do. Programming for all yes, entertainment not solely, popular not neccessarily. That is the fundamental importance of the BBC. It does things that other networks won't want to do exactly because they aren't popular.

And as for 'unbiased' reporting? Who can honestly provide that? Fox News? CNN? Sky? There is no such thing.

What i have often wondered is why we have to pay for Sky tv & yet they also get money from the advertisers as well.

I despise Sky tv because of the amount of adverts they have on there.

Perhaps because you DON'T have to pay for Sky tv, if you despise them.

OTOH, you do have to pay for the BBC, whether you despise them or not.

This is the 'critical mass' thing - basically each additional subscriber/licence fee adds nothing at all to programming costs. So if you have 5 million subscribers +ads or 20 GUARANTEED million licence fee payers, which is in the better position?

Sky was set up from scratch without the guarantee of everyone in the country giving them money - they had to earn the subscribers, and the fact that they make a profit doing so demonstrates that they are doing a good job.

OTOH, the BBC managing to run a bizarre mishmash of trash, soft-left propaganda, and public service broadcasting, with a universal telly tax funding it is no achievement at all.

I used to work for TV Licensing, quite a few years ago now. I recall the standard letters being fairly unpleasant, but the rationale was that there was a statutory duty to collect, and the system is based on the Royal Mail address database, i.e. an address is licensed, not an individual.

I'm sorry to hear about some of the experiences people have had with enforcement officers. To be honest, though, most of the people who called us up complaining (and we dealt with loads every day) either had a TV without a licence and were upset about the requirement to have one, or had forgotten to change their address and then got all arsey about it.

Having also temped for Sky even longer ago (I had lots of crap jobs when I was young!), I'm quite happy paying for my dose of 'soft-left propaganda' if it helps keep the entire broadcasting universe from falling into the hands of anti union bastards tax-dodging foreign billionaires

...were watching broadcast tv without a licence, I meant to say

I don't see how the system can be "based on the Royal Mail address database, i.e. an address is licensed, not an individual.": towhit, our experience when my dh was hounded for a licence, with increasingly threatening letters, when he bought a TV - and we already had a licence for that address albeit in my (different) name.

Fair point. IIRC, this happens because TV retailers send details of new set purchases to TV Licensing (I'm guessing they are under a legal duty to do so, although I don't recall which section of the Broadcasting Act might cover this), and TVL decided to generate TV Licence reminders off the back of this where the purchaser's name doesn't exactly match the name on the licence. It seemed to be a bit of a speculative revenue-generating exercise, and I agree it's contradictory and annoying. One phone call/letter/email should be sufficient to get the reminders cancelled off...

You get the reminders if you purchase a dvd player also, which is stupid, because all that proves is your watching dvd's not T tv.

My son (different surname) brought a dvd player and we got the letters, I just ignored them, let them paper chase themselves as I figured it gave them something to do. They stopped.

The same happened when he got a new TV, we just ignored those too, I don't see why I should waste, time, money and effort doing their job for them and I kind of like the idea of having one of those guys come to the door and mouthing off about having a tv licence and then waving it under his nose.

Hasn't happened yet, but I can only hope.

I like Radio 4....and some BBC TV....but I think the license fee will go in the next 20 years

And the reason for reopening a 2009 thread is..... ?

cogito

was there any need for that?

Yes. There's been a bit of a rash of years-old threads being resurrected recently.

BBC TV and radio is worth every penny. It's one of the best things about Britain.

Having lived in Spain, I can safely say I will always support a reasonable licence fee (such as it is now). The quality of terrestrial TV in Spain is dire!

In countries where there is no public service TV, all channels are financed through publicity. That means having to tolerate constant ad breaks in the middle of programmes. Here, the length and quantity of ad breaks are kept in check because commercial channels know that if they bore us too much with ads, we can just switch over to a BBC channel. In Spain, I remember many an evening trying to watch a badly dubbed 1 and a half hour hollywood movie, which ended up being spanned out over nearly 4 hours! Every 15 minutes they put a 20 minute commercial break!

Personally I thing the BBC produces a lot of good TV, and certainly a lot better than ITV, except maybe Downton Abbey.

What is more, the BBC provides a lot more than just TV. Radio stations without commercials, a huge website, which includes "bitesize" revision resources for GCSEs, free courses in languages. A long standing relationship with the Open University. I've just finished this year's OU course in French, as I work towards my degree in modern languages. Many of my course resources have been produced in conjunction with the BBC.

I don't begrudge the licence fee, but the attitude of the licensing people if you don't have a TV is wrong and needs dealing with. It's no good them saying "but the way our system works we have to treat you as a criminal until you prove otherwise" they can bloody well change their system.

I usually download the TV I want to watch so I guess technically I could stop having a licence. It would be immoral though as I'm downloading BBC TV programs and getting the benefit.

Thanks, Cogito, for pointing out that this was an old thread.

I was puzzled by references to J Ross, but found the comments re TVL letters (and experiences of their staff) very interesting.

Some of the salaries that the BBC pay are ridiculous, and not just to "stars" like Jonathan Ross. Why do newsreaders have to be on £90,000 a year? There are plenty of people perfectly capable of doing the job that would be happy to work for a third of that.

The BBC is full of inflated entitlement. They need to cut out the dead wood, cut costs and start producing high quality programming again. Otherwise they will simply die on the vine.

I arrived in the UK in 2003. I rented a house. I had no TV, nor any intention to buy one. I got the first letter from the TV licensing organization, and I immediately called them to tell them I had no TV, and I would be very happy to receive their inspectors in my house and show them. They "warned me" that inspectors would be checking, and that they work evenings and weekends. I said that was fantastic, as I worked full time and would only be home evenings and weekends.

One day when I came back home, I had a card in the letterbox from the TV licensing org. It said they had come at 11 am and I wasn't home, and reminded me in a very nasty way that I had to pay my licence.

I called them again and repeated that I had no TV and worked full-time, as I already had told them before.

Two weeks later I got another letter, telling me the TV licensing company had special radars to detect houses with a TV. I called them again and told them that made me very happy, as then they would confirm that I had no TV.

Some weeks later I got another letter telling me that I could get summoned to court. I called again and I said this was harassment, and told them to stop threatening me.

Two years and-a-half later I moved away from the UK. I had a collection of nearly a hundred ever-more-threatening letters from the TV licensing company. The latest ones stopped short of telling me that a mob of lawyers, judges, policemen and professional killers were going to gather that night to kill me if I kept refusing to pay the TV licensing.

Had I had any money, I would have taken them to court. Funny thing is, despite their inspectors "working evenings and weekends", their wonderful machines which detect the presence of TVs, their lawyers and their constant threats... after 2.5 years they had been unable to confirm that I indeed had no TV. And they must have spent at least GBP50 in threatening letters.

I still show the letters to my friends and have a laugh about it. It must certainly be the most ridiculous show of empty threats I have ever received in any country.

I know they do visit from time to time, though on both instances when someone has visited (at this and a previous address), it was at an inconvenient time - one when I was about to go out, and thought the woman (at lunch time) was my 'lift' and the other visited on a Sunday evening around 19:30 when I had something nearly ready to eat in the oven, so I told him I had food about to burn, and left him standing outside without even opening the porch door.

The vans might have kit in (though I have seen conflicting reports about them) that could detect whether a suitable frequency tuner was in use, though with a range of digital services they'd now need more kit.

If I watched live TV via iPlayer or similar, I'd need a licence, but just having the 'ability' to watch is not enough to need a licence. As things stand my internet connection is unlikely to support a 'live' show (and my TV aerial cabling is not providing signals to any of the three rooms because the distribution amplifier in the attic has no power to it).

They could happily walk round, but proving whether I do or do not watch 'live' TV would be awkward. I would, however, ask to see their warrant if they did want to come in, because 10+ years ago I told them there was no TV (there is now an old TV in the house, but has no built-in Freeview so can only be used with the DVD player!)

I have my laptop connected to a network at work. I download all the BBC iPlayer programs I want for me and dd, and then watch them at my / our leisure.

No need for a licence.