Thursday, November 19, 2009

TV Licensing Fail

Today I received a letter from the TV Licensing people (the BBC basically). Let's break this letter down and see how much they fail.
THIS ADDRESS IS UNLICENSED
Yes, yes it is. Thank you for reminding me in block capitals.
YOUR DETAILS ARE BEING PASSED TO OUR ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS
Again with the block capitals. I assume by "enforcement officers" they mean some guy in a van who'll serve me a court notice if they tell him to. What have I done to deserve this I wonder? Let's read on.
We have contacted you before. However, there is still no TV Licence for this address.
Yep, because I don't need one. Remember how TV isn't mandatory? Means a TV licence isn't either. No TV == no TV licence. I like how the tone implies that it is mandatory though. I assume this line (along with the block capitals previously) are trying to make the receiver of the letter worried. They might be able to make a sale to someone who doesn't need a licence.
It may be that you have just moved in. In this case, you should get in touch to let us know. If you have a TV License for your old address, we can transfer it to your new home. Or you may need to buy a new licence.
Note that not needing a licence still hasn't been presented as an option yet.
If you watch or record TV programmes as they're being broadcast without a valid licence, you are breaking the law. If you're found doing so, you could be taken to court and fined up to £1,000.
Shocking. They finally admit there are cases where you don't need a licence. I assume they're required to do this by law to avoid charges of harrasment or somesuch. Either way, they managed to wrap it as much as possible in more text designed to worry you and make you think you've absolutely positively got to have a licence.

I'll stop there as it's just more of the same. There is one classic line though:
Every day we catch around 1,000 TV Licence evaders - you could be next.
No, no I couldn't. Also, that must be an inflated figure. That's 365,000 people a year, meaning that given how long they've been running, a sizeable portion of the UK must not be buying a licence.

For those of you wondering - yes it's true, I don't need a licence. I don't watch (or record) any live TV. It's honestly not worth £143 a year for 5 channels which have maybe one good show a week between them. During peak season. Plus, the BBC is the only channel which sees any of the money anyway, but that's a whole failure in itself which I won't go into here.


Edit:
From the comments: http://tv-licensing.blogspot.com/

1 comment:

  1. You're spot on with everything you said.

    TVL deliberately use scare tactics to coerce genuine non-TV viewers into buying a licence they do not need.

    It's no different to some cowboy builder knocking on the door of a pensioner and telling them that unless their perfectly good roof is repaired they'll get rained in.

    TVL are the lowest of the low and I encourage you to visit my blog to read more about their deceit.

    Peter

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