TV Licence

Everybody who owns a television in Britain has to pay an annual tax, called the TV Licence Fee, for the privilege. Right now we pay £145.50 annually. This tax is supposed to fund the services of the BBC, but like so many things here it’s not quite that simple. The current government negotiated with the BBC last about how much they would reduce their budget and take on new obligations such as the World Service, which is a bit like Radio Free Europe. Further, some of the Licence Fee goes to subsidise other broadcasters.

There are frequent adverts on TV to encourage us to pay up and reminding that if we don’t they’ll fine us. The way they keep track of who owes the Licence Fee is pretty straight forward: when retailers sell a TV set, they report the customer’s name and address to the TV Licencing Authority who then collect the tax. They’ve actually used this method for a long time, but they used to think that we needed an extra incentive to pay in case the fine wasn’t enough.

And what they cooked up provides a fascinating insight into the British bureaucratic mind. Remember those old World War II movies where the Gestapo used radio detectors mounted on little vans or cars to triangulate radio signals and locate the clandestine radios of the French underground or British spies. Well, the men in grey suits came up with the idea that these Nazi radio detectors must be so fresh in the minds of Brits that it would be a spiffy idea to use the same image to scare everyone into paying the Licence Fee.

So we used to see these little vans driving around with strangely huge antennae mounted on the roof. We were told that these vans could detect TVs inside houses by diving past in the street and picking some mysterious radiation supposedly emitted by TV sets. Yes, really! And here are a couple of examples.

I have no idea if the detector vans were effective in improving the compliance with the tax, but they were a lot of fun. I suspect that there must have been a lot of people left over after the war who used to work in espionage but after the war needed new jobs. Fortunately, the TV Licence Authority was there to recruit them.