Scargill

Today, I bought my TV Tax.  Maureen’s been stuck in America for a while now as you can imagine thanks to the volcano and the post has been piling up so this morning I decided to go through and sort out anything urgent.

In the middle of it all were two extremely nasty letters from the Television Licensing Authorities or TITS for short, looking more like something I’d imagine coming from a bailiff…. “Enforcement officers have now been authorized to visit..” blah blah from a certain Michelle Tunstall of the TV Licensing Authorities.

You know what REALLY annoys me the most about this – there are countless channels out there, all supporting themselves with advertising or in the case of Sky with advertising PLUS a monthly fee (which I pay as Sky’s channels in general are infinitely better than the BBCs IMHO) the TV licence is nothing more than a TAX to support an archaic, TINY SEGMENT of the TV scenario – i.e. the all-pervasive BBC.

To ensure the continuation of jobs for the luvvies, they have positioned themselves so that it is impossible to buy ANY TV system WITHOUT being able to watch the BBC and hence be eligible to pay the licence. So if you rip up your aerials and ONLY have a Sky receiver, it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to permanently REMOVE access to the BBC so that you could legitimately claim to being UNABLE to receive BBC.  WORSE, because of the I PLAYER, if you have a computer with Internet access they can ALSO claim you can watch it that way. What other system other than something the CCCP or Chinese government might have come up with, could possibly be so all-pervasive as that.

If you think the iPlayer is good – I suggest you get someone to set up a VPN to the USA so you can see their equivalents… top quality USA sci-fi can be had in exactly the same way and THEY don’t pay a TV licence!!

The result of this is that the BBC is not SERVICE but a MONOPOLY and the TV license is not a license but a TAX. We are FORCED to pay £145.00 a year whether we want it or not – OR become a hermit with no radio, no television, no computer, no console…in short, no incoming communication at all.  Are the British public REALLY happy with this? 

Every now and then I try to imagine what it would be like to be stuck in a hospital ward or old folks home with only BBC and ITV to chose from. It fills me with HORROR. You have a choice of sport – in which I have ZERO interest, or soaps about boring people making boring conversations in pubs or working man’s clubs… or you can watch doctor who, in which a succession of testosterone-challenged men wandering around in cardboard cut-outs proving just how BAD acting can be and as for the co-stars – can’t they at least get hold of someone who doesn’t look like they’ve recently been run over by a BUS? We could not produce science fiction in this country if our LIVES depended on it and yet the BBC continues to pay, year in your out for this absolute RUBBISH. The only time they got it right was way back in the 60s when they took on Star-trek and they could not even manage that for very long.

£145 quid DOWN THE TOILET – just another tax, nothing more – it would have been better used contributing to my SKY bill. I hope this upcoming generation has the balls to get rid of this antiquated and unfair mechanism to extract more money from us – let the BBC stand along with the rest on it’s own two feet – they’ve had their share of public support – enough is enough. We should pay for what we want to watch – nothing more.