Sean Gabb
I have just caved into a computer-generated threat letter, and renewed the television licence. That’s £145 handed over to the the main organ of the ideological state apparatus. My money will be used for, among much else, the following:
Salaries for people who would be more honestly employed carrying bags of cement;
Celebrating every attack on our liberty and heritage, and calling out for more of the same;
Systematically corrupting every reasonable standard of taste and decency.
I suspect the Nazi and Soviet propagandists would have been impressed by the scale and sophistication of the BBC lie machine. At the same time, they would have found most of its output artistically repulsive, and would have prevented their own children from being exposed to it.
And I am now a more or less willing accomplice to the crime. My only mitigation is that I waited until the Beeb had been forced to lose some of the money in generating and posting four threats. Oh, and I opted to receive a paper licence, which the website helpfully told me would reduce the amount of money available for making television programmes.
You may heap such abuse on me as you feel justified.
Staff at the BBC claim you get good value for money, but if that was really the case, why do they need to send thugs round to your house to intimidate you into buying their product, or use the force of law if you don’t…
I’ve never found BBC content worthy enough to justify paying their licence fee, especially when you have YouTube and various other streaming sites that you can legally watch on your computer without a licence (including BBC’s iPlayer!). So thank you Mr Gabb for paying your licence fee so the rest of us can watch Dr Who for free.
Yes, I’ve had that letter too. I sent it back to their “customer services” department with a quite strongly worded remonstrance. It worked – I got a smarmy half-apology and a promise they wouldn’t bother me for two more years.
(I haven’t watched TV at home since the aerial system on top of my block of flats failed in 2010. And I don’t have a TV that can receive digital transmissions, anyway.)
The fact that this upsets you so much pleases me at least an equal amount.
Love it when loony libs get upset.
More posts like this please.
Still laughing over the collapse of the soviet shithole and the Chinese kicking socialism into touch are you Leftie? Take a trip to Eastern Europe and look at all the busy shops since socialism went down the bog. Know that all you have to laugh about is Sean being weak enough to pay his TV thievery–and they have to threaten cos no one apart from clowns like you would pay for their leftist propaganda shite through choice.
You should not feel bad. We all have to act in accordance with the State we live in, not the one we might wish it to be.
Me, I don’t have a television. Haven’t had one in years. I rarely get letters from TV licencing, I think mainly because I am on an estate primarily populated by the elderly and demented, so they probably have it on their database as not worth the effort.
Today, the “detector vans” are in fact empty of electronic stuff. They exist, for advertising purposes mainly, to terrorize simple-at-home-mothers on “estates” into going to court and “pleading guilty”.
I managed to look inside one a few years ago, before being hustled away by the two goons. The van was empty. The aerial wires from the roof didn’t terminate in any object at all. They were bare.
Thus, these mothers can be criminalized, made examples of, and fined heavily. The BBC doesn’t give a f**k, for a “criminal record” handed to a Bootle Mum means nothing to either the BBC or, really, sadly, the Bootle Mum” herself. She probably has about five of those kinds of records already – but that’s the fault of the LabourGramscoFabiaNazis in Liverpool, who are _strong_, and who _call for_ stuff, in the local paper, almost all the time, every week.
The GramscoFabiaNazi pressure to keep the “burgeoning New Class” of “Tomorrow’s People” replicating suitably, and at a fast enough rate, is enormous. The bastards cannot afford for there to be none of these people, or only a few, when the shutters finally go up outside their Condominia. There’ll be no little girls (or boys (although I have always doubted the existence of homosexual sex, believing it to be a GramscoFabiaNazi invention for tactical purposes in war)) to go out and hoover up confiscatorially from those foul little “people outside”, for, er…”their” pleasures. So the “lower classes” have to be kept up and breeding and in being. (Otherwise there’s nobody left to f*** who later won’t say anything. Inside the Endarkenment, of course, you can always kill the effing little bastards anyway, trash their remains and bury the slurry… Organic fertilizer, probably, it will be. Bastards. Don’t you just hate them then?)
Back in the 80s before digital, I saw on BBC’s Micro Live computer programme how ‘hackers’ could park a van outside a business and tune into the signal emanating from the lead connecting the computer to the monitor, thus viewing the contents of the screen. This is presumably how a TV signal could be detected, but fortunately, it required expertise beyond the skill set of the ordinary BBC time server. So yes, for the most part, the TV detector vans were a lie, but surely now with digital, it is possible to verify instantly whether someone uses a TV set?
The reason that the early detector vans (up to about 1990s) was that the van’s radios could “see” the “local oscillator frequencies” being generated inside your telly. These were necessary for the heterodyne signal (of vision and sound and carrier) that was transmitted, to be decoded, and dealt with in parts individually inside your set.
This is how in the early part of the War U-Boats could find ships to sink. They could “home in on” the local oscillator frequency of the ships’ radio _receivers_ at about 455KHz, find where they were, and go and do them. I’m talking about the RECEIVERS here, let alone the tx frequencies!
Modern tellies don’t really radiate any sort of RF signal at all, being digital.
David, don’t you have to sign up to digital or something? You can tell I don’t have a telly 🙂 Think I replied to the wrong post.
One of the few coherent policies of UKIP iOS to stop it being a criminal matter. The other is weaker as it only looks to reduce the size of the BBC whereas it ought to be a slashing exercise.
Despite all the rhetoric, I don’t see UKIP challenging the status quo then?
I did not think you had a television set Sean – but I may well be confusing you with someone else (I often find myself getting confused these days).
The BBC tax is indeed disgusting – although Sky News (and I pay Sky) is just as bad as the BBC, the campaign of the left (including the establishment financial interests represented by the “Financial Times” newspaper) to prevent Mr Murdoch from controlling the television news company he himself created, has given the left a monopoly of television news in this country. Rupert Murdoch certainly has his faults (many and very severe faults), but he was open to allowing non leftists some access – the po faced leftists who control both the BBC and Sky are not.
I watch Fox News (hardly perfect, but it does not make me feel ill) – hence my payments to Sky (although they could not even repair the telephone correctly when it went wrong – they really are unreliable people), although when computers get a bit better I think (if I am still about) that I will get rid of my television set.
“Bottom line” – I agree 100% with your desire to get rid of the BBC tax. However, given who regulated television and radio are in this country, it would make no real difference if the BBC vanished tomorrow – Sky (both news and entertainment) is just as leftist as the BBC, and no conservative “talk radio” exists.
Ronald Reagan (for all his faults) was sincerely interested in allowing conservative voices to be heard – in breaking the leftist monopoly on radio.
As my Conservative Party “tribe” was in office from 1979 to 1997 and from 2010 to the present, and has done NOTHING to allow conservative radio and television stations to exist, it is only fair to conclude that my “tribe” does not mind the left having a monopoly of television and radio. Both “public” and “private”.
Don’t you have to sign up to digital or something? You can tell I don’t have a telly 🙂
My wife and I decided, before our daughter was born, that there would be no television in the house. But you try looking after a child without one.
This would not have gone to court – unless you told them you had a TV. They have to get in your house to see if you have a TV and aren’t supposed to get a magistrate’s warrant without prior evidence that do you have one. I don’t pay – but then I genuinely have no TV. I don’t miss it.
You should have sent them a Withdrawal of Implied Right of Access letter forbidding the TV licensing authority from accessing your letterbox to send you threatmail. Apparently it holds them off for 2 years.
You don’t have to have a TV License unless you listen to, or record, TV programmes that are being broadcast live on terrestrial TV. (Live Sky News counts, BTW, even if you never watch BBC.) It is possible to legally watch all the TV you want so long as you do it on a computer and avoid watching any live streams.
…and, BTW, when I wrote and told them I didn’t want a TV License any more I actually got a seventy pound refund on what was left of the one I had at the time.
FWIW, until recently I lived in a house in the sticks for five years without a television. About every three months an envelope would drop through the door containing a message of varying degrees of obnoxiousness wanting to know where their licence money was, &c. After approx the seventh one arrived I realized these missives go through a cycle of escalating nastiness, the final one with a red border & headed “What to do when you get to court”. What sweeties. If you ignore that one they start again with the polite enquiry and work their way back up the ladder of intimidation. I ignored the lot, and no one came tapping at my door. In a way I was a bit disappointed as I didn’t have a TV (iPlayer, 4OD &c providing my few & simple needs) and was looking forward to telling them politely to F— off and come back with a warrant if they thought I was breaking the law, for which they had better produce some evidence. Maybe next time, then.
At a different address (likewise no TV) some years before, I bothered to answer their first enquiry & in due course one arrived from a different jobsworth saying I hadn’t replied. I wrote back enclosing a copy of letter No 1. Lo & behold their next bit of paper came from a third flunkey (none of these names, I’m now sure, attaches to any actual flesh & blood) to the same effect—no reply to our previous, etc. but sounding a bit shirty. I made an A3 poster of my next message, which against all temptation was perfectly polite. A fourth demand arrived, at which I gave up. And they didn’t come knocking there, either.
Maybe it just helps to live in the middle of nowhere, or have the Buddhas on your side, or something.
You’re not alone in caving in Sean. I still have one, I am sad to say. When certain factors in my life change in the next 12 months or so, I will not be having a television in the house.
My father desperately wanted to stop paying for this blatantly biased media outlet too a few years ago, but my mother is not political and enjoys watching a lot of television, it her only escape from certain things, so a house without a television would have caused quite a bit of strife.
My father therefore studied on what to do to not pay for the BBC to pollute this nation with their propaganda and purposeful omission techniques, and was ready and prepared to try and tackle it.
He is not a very confrontational person, so this would understandably have been difficult and would have caused quite an amount of stress. I know how it feels to have that thumping chest and tight throat when having to dissent against something. Some thrive on it, others don’t.
However, it eventually all became unstuck because of the stress and anxiety it was placing on my mother – who has Parkinson’s disease and is pretty fragile with worry, anxiety, depression and the general feeling of being unable to cope, which is sadly a integral part of the condition.
Having people battering on the door at night, confronting you and trying to enter the property, having letters threatening fines and ultimately a letter threatening that court proceedings were being prepared proved just too much – and it was decided that it was just not fair to put my mother through all this intimidation and stress.
I actually tend to agree with the fee apologists in that it is not a bad deal for the range of channels and radio stations. Nor would I really like a “Fox News” kind of situation.
The problem many of us have with it is what the content of these programs have and what the whole institution of what the BBC is, even self admittedly so.
It does not matter whether if it is “thought for the day” on Radio 4 or the latest “drama” – it is saturated with agenda and a one-sided basis of viewpoints.
I wouldn’t even mind so much if it even made an attempt at being neutral or giving fair air time to different positions. I don’t expect it to be a mirror of what I believe, but the ‘impartiality’ they supposedly have, overall, is none existent.
They do not tend to make any ‘conservative values’ promoting dramas, they do not seem to give any air time to ‘right wing’ or dissident book reviews, they do not report on things such thousands of violent left wing thugs rampaging down the streets of Germany with knives and baseball bats.
I remember it took them something like 7 days to finally give coverage to those French car-burning riots a few years ago, no doubt shamed and embarrassed that they were the only one not mentioning it.
Their choices of what to cover, how they cover it, what messages to slip into comedies and dramas are, to me, entirely positioned one way. The “progressive left” way.
Never paid for a licence, and I have a big television/monitor. Think I once received something about in the post years ago, threw it in the bin. Would never dream of paying that outrageous tax. I’m in Ireland though and it may be stricter in the U.K.
Pat Rabbitte (a Labour party lunatic over here) once proposed to extend the licence fee to cover other electronic media, given that so many people now access content online and not through television sets. It was a fascinating example of “mission creep”. The licence fee’s original intention was to fund the state broadcaster, RTE. But now that people’s attention has shifted elsewhere, he thinks it is his duty to muscle in. Even though it is not “public” content! It’s people watching YouTube or Netflix, and reading newspapers and blogs. He didn’t even know what he was saying. In his balloon-animal mind he thought the licence fee was a sort of general tax on just enjoying things on screens. It was baffling. Thankfully nothing came of it but the ground has been prepared. Kite-flying, or whatever.
Actually, come to think of it, this proposal led to a few good examples of media “coaching”. This is when the journalist/interviewer appears to be coaching the politicans through the interview. They put trendy, pithy phrases in their mouths for them, and help them avoid gaffes, and offer them easy chances to look tough on some issues. It’s actually quite patronising when you see it happening. Pat Rabbitte was coached through interviews on this absurd licence fee thing, as most people just thought it was creepy and stupid. There are many benefits to having stupid masters, come to think of it. What you want is a particular kind of stupidity.