TV licence

I, and the four other residents in my student flat, received some rather threatening e-mails recently from the TV Licencing Agency informing us that we are ‘under investigation’ for not having bought a TV licence.

For those of you unaware, TV licencing laws in this country stipulate that if you own and watch a TV, or if you use any other electronic device to watch TV as it’s being broadcast, you are required to pay an annual licence, somewhere in the region of 140 pounds.

Feeling rather agitated that the tone of their missive was automatically assuming that we watch TV and were thus cheating the system, and finding no mechanism on their website to claim otherwise, I sent them a polite but rather clipped e-mail informing them that none of us own a television or watch live feeds.

They got back to me fairly promptly and said they would update our records, but I’m still a little annoyed. Can you imagine if they’d come round to investigate? It all seems a little scary.

I’m not sure if I should be regretting the impatient tone of my e-mail to them – it’s probably been noted in a record somewhere, and in fourteen years time I’ll be dragged off to some detention centre in the middle of the night with a black bag over my head, never to be seen or heard from again.