On the last day of February, my television licence expired and I decided to save myself the £142.50 annual licence fee and not renew it. Dutiful and law-abiding as ever, some hours before any viewing would become illegal, I disconnected my aerial cable and set-top cable thingey (you can no longer plonk these things on top of the telly, of course – nowadays they should really be sub-set boxes). And today I finished off the severance by packing away the TV set and vacuuming away the dust, fluff and other stuff that inhabits that space between tele-paraphernalia and skirting boards.
Concerned friends had asked me to re-consider. Since I lived on my own, wouldn’t I miss the ‘company’ of television? Three separate employees of Virgin Media from the cascade of people involved in discontinuing services asked me what reason could there be for my wishing to opt out. Would I perhaps prefer to downgrade to a ‘smaller’ and less expensive service? It wasn’t too late to change my mind. No, I said, I’m saving myself the licence fee and changing my lifestyle. Lord knows, maybe the very reason I am living on my own is because I have – sorry, had – a television. As for the licence people, they simply spelled out in automated fashion the modes in which I could and could not watch televisual material henceforth.
One concerned friend warned me gleefully that the detectors tended to ‘hound’ licence apostates. I imagined the knocks at the door around midnight – much as the poor Soviet masses must have done when KGB were on the prowl. Would they pounce the very day after licence expiry? Or would they call according to a randomly-generated (important, that, I thought) schedule ranging from expiry plus a week or two to expiry plus many months (when that notoriously false sense of security would have surely set in)? Anyhow, I am now prepared for that visit. See, I will say, how there is no TV set to be found anywhere in any room; how my set is packed away in its box in the attic here, see; how no cables are to be found; no set-top box nor aerial. Do you imagine, I shall challenge them, that I operate a TV illegally but pack everything away at each knock at the door? Oh and by the way, I take it you have some sort of warrant for this Stasi-like investigation of my home? And that you are quite prepared for a tedious and ultimately humiliating session in the European Court of Human Rights if you should put one foot even slightly out of place, or even hint that I have been watching telly at all, when I HAVE NOT!?
Nah, I’m gonna do something more constructive with my time. Such as watch my favourite telly programmes absolutely free on-demand, on-line. And continue to enjoy BBC radio, now helpfully funded for me by the 97% (or whatever it is) of households that pay for TV licences.
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