Because he doesn’t watch live TV. What part of that do you not understand?
It’s not often that the Repo Man tries to call at Ermine towers, but one of your boys visited this Sunday, while the Ermine is laying out a printed circuit board, so no, I don’t appreciate the gratuitous interruption to something that needs concentration and keeping a load of spatial stuff in mind. But you’re also cheeky enough to want to come inside my house because you want me to prove that I am not lying to you. Well F*** off.
I’m not having you search my house for it. An Englishman’s home is his castle etc. And I’m not pulling down my aerials either. I may want to use them one day, in which case I’ll pay out. All I have to do to be legally absolved of the need to buy a TV licence is not watch live TV as it is broadcast. And I don’t do that. It’s really no great deprivation, despite the apparent incredulity. One of the joys of becoming financially independent is you usually get to do that by living a bit differently to the way other people do. This is one of them.
There are ways of looking for signals leaking from TV gear in use. It’s a lot harder now those damn Europeans with their pesky EMC regulations mandate lower emissions from consumer electronics. I wouldn’t imagine it’s economically viable for TV licensing to have people capable of driving the gear and making sense of the results. And it doesn’t look like this
There is a satellite dish and a TV aerial on the outside of my house. You are very welcome to park a Transit van on the public highway and point a dish at the Satellite quad LNB and look for the 11GHz local oscillator, and use a Yagi aerial to look for the Freeview local oscillator leaking from the TV aerial, it’s about 39MHz off the wanted channel if I remember right. Take yourself down to Livingston Hire and book out something suitable, the Rohde & Schwartz FSV13 would probably see you right. If you pay my consulting fee I’ll show you how to use it 🙂
You won’t find any signal, because I don’t watch TV, there’s nothing connected to these aerials. I do still have the Humax Freesat box I talked about a while back but it is in a box in my loft – the resale value is sod all and I might one day change my mind. It’s not hurting anybody and I’m not using it.
I’m not one of the rabid refuseniks who doesn’t think there should even be a TV licence, though the vexatious rudeness of TV licensing could turn me into one. There may be other better ways to fund the BBC but to be honest that’s not one of the problems in the world I give too much headspace to. The reason I don’t need a TV licence isn’t that I don’t watch TV, but I don’t have any way of picking out what’s worth watching ahead of time, other than people telling me. Obviously they have to watch TV first – thank you Under The Money Tree and Mr Squirrel for the last couple of recommends. I can’t abide TV series of the sort most people really rate like Breaking Bad or The Wire. I don’t do sport. If I am interested in someone’s recommendation I watch it on iPlayer or the ITV/C4 equivalents. There’s not much point in me shelling out £145 a year for the privilege of being able to do something I don’t do. If I needed to pay for iPlayer I’d live without. I do vaguely miss the TV news but it’s hardly as if the Web is without news, for instance if I want to see some people fighting over buying a television set then due to the magic of the new-fangled intertubes I can do just that. I think this is my favourite clip of Britons behaving badly, though I do note on some of the videos the gentlemen of the press outnumber the punters. The weather forecast is that much better on the Web, and if I want cat videos then there’s always Youtube.
I do have a TV, though not the big one from this post – that went to the county dump a while back. Mrs Ermine uses it to watch DVDs. It is so old it doesn’t do Freeview or HDMI, though it has a nice analogue tuner showing many varieties of snow. I was even toying with getting a bigger TV monitor, preferably without fighting for it, because a 20 inch 4:3 machine at not even SD resolution isn’t that easy to see from a distance[ref]I can see the damn thing perfectly well but it hardly fills the field of view :)[/ref] and does lose the effect somewhat. But then I’d have to get a secondhand stereo for the sound because that’s half the story and it would end up in some ghastly version of the Diderot effect. And I’d like to go HD but couldn’t find anywhere to rent HD movies without being sucked into a subscription, and movies aren’t important enough in my life to subscribe to anything. DVDs seem to be £1 a go PAYG from the library, and you can’t argue with that.
TV Licensing are a vexatiously rude bunch of tossers
The reason TV Licensing get such a load of shit from people is that they are bully-boys. There’s a tradition in this country that you are innocent until proven guilty, but in TV Licensing start from the assumption that nobody in 21st century Britain can live without the glass teat feeding the lifeblood of consumerism directly into their face. Despite there being the competing multimedia firehose pointed at their face that you’re now looking at, and the smartphone for da yoof. So you are guilty and they address you as such. It starts off with the wheedling
TV Licensing -> Ermine after 1 month Shurely Shome mishtake, Sire has omitted to renew?
NO, you numbskull, I don’t watch live TV because it consumes too much of my precious time to find what I want, so I wait for others to tell me, OK?
TV Licensing -> Ermine after 2 months RENEW NOW YOU BACKSLIDING SPIV; WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE – YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE, MASSIVE FINES, INVESTIGATE, INVESTIGATE
Ermine to TVL – no, I am not telling you anything, this is something I am no longer doing. I’m not paying money, wasting time on your phone system, giving you my phone number or email address to hassle, and the onus is not on me to prove my innocence. The onus is on you to prove I am doing something you can charge me for. As I walk down the street I can see lots of people’s TV screens. You are more than welcome to see if you can see mine from the public highway. Maybe I should get me one of these TV simulators to make your pay-per-hit Capita dudes have a rush from the thrill of the chase, eh?
TV Licensing -> Ermine after 2 months, random mailed intimidation and final demands.
I haven’t had this sort of aggravation since Thatcher’s Poll Tax in the early 1990s!
TV Licensing -> Ermine after 4 months Up close and personal we want to inspect your house to make sure you aren’t watching TV.
Eh? I haven’t ever had so much bloody grief for something I’m not doing and don’t need to do. It’s not 1984 guys, where you get into deep doo-doo for switching the damn telescreen off! Chill out and piss off.
Postscript
It appears that I will never be shot of this grief, this bloke has been harassed for the last 8 years…. Still, saving ~£150 a year is worth some aggro, the opportunity cost is a respectable amount in red wine and coffee or 3 DVD rentals a week!
Simple Living In Somerset 