Do I detect TV licence fee reform?
A RECENT Daily Express poll showed that a staggering 97 per cent think the TV licence fee should be scrapped. I use the word “staggering” advisedly – I’m surprised it wasn’t 100 per cent.
All right, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration. There are some good arguments for publicly funding the BBC – but for years now it’s seemed to me that they belong increasingly to debates of long ago.
The TV licence may have made sense in the days of two, three, even four-channel television, but now we have such a staggering array of choice at the touch of the remote control it seems utterly illogical to be forced to pay for a service that increasing numbers of viewers barely use – especially the young, glued as they are to their iPhones and tablets.
Then there’s the whole murky question of enforcement.
Our Netflix service is in my name and on my credit card. If I stop paying for it, Netflix doesn’t threaten me with court action. It simply stops sending its programmes to my TV.
Why can’t the BBC be thus funded? Choose whether or not to subscribe, and if you either opt not to, or default on your monthly payments, then you automatically lose its channels. I can’t believe it is beyond the Beeb’s techies to set up a digital system like that. Loads of other providers use them.Why not Auntie?
As things stand, own a TV and refuse or forget to buy a licence (which goes up this Monday from £159 to £169.50) and you’ll be handed a fine of up to £1,000. Refuse to pay it, and you’ll even risk imprisonment for contempt of court.
It’s antediluvian – much like the “TV detector van” that used to prowl the streets, radar-like contraption slowly spinning on its roof. Complete hokum – the van couldn’t detect anything, let alone whether someone was watching telly inside the houses it menacingly cruised past. It was no more than a fear device, pure and simple.
So I welcome BBC Director General Tim Davie’s announcement this week that the corporation has finally grasped the nettle and will explore how to reform the licence fee. Good for Davie, left, in going where his predecessors feared to tread. Who knows? Perhaps BBC will soon stand for “Buy By Choice.”