The TV License is a brilliant way of funding the BBC, and I’d always defend its continued existence.

TV Licensing, though, is a vicious set-up that mercilessly hounds innocent individuals. Every three months or so for the last two years they have been threatening me with action over the fact that I don’t have a license. And why don’t I have a license? Because I don’t have a TV. You tell them this and they go quiet for a while but then, three months later, they start again, because they will only record the fact that you don’t have a TV for three months. After that they assume that you must have bought one because, naturally, nobody could possibly live without I’m a Celebrity, Big Brother or anything on Channel 5.

They’re wrong.

The latest threatening letter arrived yesterday, and they’re getting serious this time. They’ve even changed the font to a more threatening sans serif like you’d get on a bank statement.

OFFICIAL WARNING, it says at the top, in big capitals, and underlined.

Enforcement Officers have been authorised by us to visit your address to interview you under caution in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or Scottish Criminal Law.

If we find that you watch or record television without a license, your statement will be the first step towards prosecution. Should you be convicted, your name will be added to our National Enforcement Database and the magistrate can impose a fine of up to £1,000.

Officers from our Enforcement Division catch 82,076 people every year.

To avoid a potential court appearance, you are strongly advised to call 0844 800 6750 now, to purchase a license.

What I really object to is the assumption not only that you must be breaking the law by buying a TV and watching it without a license (a classic case of being considered guilty until proven otherwise) but the idea that even if you don’t have a TV you’d be sufficiently weak as to be brow-beaten into buying a license just to stop them harassing you.

And what happens if you do have a TV and end up in court accused of not paying your license? Well, according to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, even if you are convicted the court cannot demand that you pay arrears. The fine you’ll receive is also very small.

TV Licensing claims you can be fined up to £1,000, which is true, but according to this PDF from the National Audit Office, it’s often about a tenth of that amount. In its report ‘The BBC: Collecting the License Fee’ covering 2001 – 2002, it says on page 30 that:

The maximum penalty for licence fee evasion is a fine of up to £1000. The level of fine imposed in any one case is a matter for individual courts, informed by sentencing guidelines issued by the Magistrates’ Association which aim that penalties should be proportionate both to the offence and the offender, taking into account the offender’s ability to pay. We analysed data provided by the BBC on the penalties imposed by different courts across the United Kingdom. The 128,894 people convicted in 2000-01 were together fined £12,923,610 (an average of £100.26). In addition, costs were awarded totalling £5,228,791 (an average of £40.57).

So £140.83 in total. That’s about £5 more than the cost of a license.

It’s all a bit toothless, really, and even the letter’s warning that you’ll be questioned ‘in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984′ relates more to the way in which your rights will be upheld than the trouble you’ll be in when it’s applied. It sounds scary, but the Act does a lot to preserve the rights of the citizen while being interviewed by the police, store detectives or others in an investigatory position.

I have had the TV Licensing people at the door before and they seemed singularly disinterested in coming in to have a look around. They just asked if I had a TV, I said no, and they went away. If they did want to come in, I could have refused them entry (not that I would) and they would have had to go and get a magistrate to grant them a search warrant, but even then they would have to prove reasonable grounds for suspecting that I was breaking the law by watching TV, which probably wouldn’t be satisfied solely by my absence from their database of legally addressed homes.

It’s a shame that tactics such as these tarnish the image of the BBC, which contracts out its license collection needs to third parties, who in turn send these letters.

I remain a staunch supporter of this method of funding our public broadcaster, and believe that it benefits ITV, Channel 4 and the other commercial broadcasters, too, as they don’t have to compete with the BBC for a limited pot of advertising revenue.

All the same, receiving this latest, most threatening letter yet is particularly annoying in that it came on the same day as I ordered a TV and bought a license to go with it. Any day now, they’ll be ticking the compliance box beside my name on their evil database and patting themselves on the back, convinced that their poisonous letters have bullied another individual into buying a license and that they were right about me all along.

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bbc, tv+license, tv+licensing

Have you got an iPhone? Then buy The Independent Guide to the iPhone. It’s the first time I’ve actually had my name on Amazon. The last book I wrote made it onto the site (and it’s still there today – see the grab below), but the publisher went bankrupt before they got it to print.

I wouldn’t have minded so much had it not been such a painful thing to write. Endless proofs, amendments and meetings with publishers, all for it to end up being left on a shelf. The iPhone one, on the other hand, was far easier, and the model of what doing books really should be.

Technorati Tags:
iphone, activology, books, publishing

I’d drawn a mental line under the spending. When the last workman put his key through the letterbox and drove off down the road I somehow imagined it was all done.

But no. Freezer. Microwave. Dining room furniture. Bedding. A TV and license. A phone line. Broadband… I’ve got a list that scrolls right down my screen and I’m ticking them off one point at a time.

Fortunately, apart from the supplies for the outhouse and kitchen cupboards, most of it is stuff you buy once and then use for years and years, so it averages out over time. The worrying thing, though, is that by buying them all at once (and of course the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine and tumble dryer are only a few months old) they’ll probably all go wrong at about the same time, so it could be a cyclical thing where you get hit by a big fix-up bill every five years.

Still, it’ll be nice when it’s all in there are ready to go, and it feels good to be finally getting the place kitted out as these jobs seem to have been hanging for weeks, and I wasn’t convinced that they’d all be done in time for Christmas – the dining room furniture in particular.

Fortunately that one was solved by a trip to the old ice rink in Norwich, which is now home to Country and Eastern, a snazzy-pants furniture shop selling 300 year old Chinese trunks, Indian temple doors, Russian samovars and Japanese cushions. All very interesting, and interspersed between much more conventional items that you could fit into a regular three-bed semi.

It got delivered in record time, which was impressive, but not quite as impressive as the speed at which you can get a phone line these days. I called up BT and sat on hold for 31 minutes, but within 10 minutes of getting to speak to someone they’d remotely tested my line, assigned me a number (a nice easy one, too), done a credit check, signed me up for broadband (with the world’s easiest ever password, the fools) and ordered the digital TV service that won’t work in my area and the VoIP phone that will.

I remember times gone by when you had to have a man in overalls in your house just to get a dial tone sharpened up.

Marvellous stuff.

Technorati Tags:
bt, broadband, furniture

Back at the house tonight I found the builder had been in and finished off the floors. That’s it. The end of the indoor builders jobs. The only thing that needs doing now is the shed, which is an outdoor job and will be done on Friday.

I had assumed that the builder would – naturally – pick the best tools for the job, and perhaps he did, but even so I’m a bit worried by the empty tube of fixing gunk he left on the kitchen worktop with suspiciously Desperate Housewifely-looking women on the side. It’s Edie Britt and Gabrielle Solis, surely, and they seem to be holding their tubes of Gripfill like some kind of lethal weapons.

Below them, a competition to win a photoshoot with the G-Force Girls. Please tell me that’s not why he bought this brand.

Me, in 2003 (left) and 2007 (right)

Danny Bird took us some new pictures for the mag. The last time he did it was 2003, and I was shocked to notice, on looking at these new ones, that I wore the same jumper in both sessions.

I had considered that jumper to be one of my newest. If not actually my newest.

So, there they are, side by side up above. Four years on and the hair has crept back a little. I wonder what changes the next four years will bring.

The house is almost finished. There’s a little gap in the kitchen floor, and I still need a couple of pairs of curtains and two light shades, but its now tidy and clean and, more importantly, warm.

That was important, as the heating at home decided to pack up on Friday and has done the same again today.

Anyhow, as Sal, Dan and Will were over I spent the first long weekend – four nights – sleeping at the house since buying it, and for the first time it actually felt like somewhere to call home. It made for an easy walk to the station this morning rather than a long and irritating drive across town, and meant we could get up on Saturday morning and pull the spent bean and pepper plants out of the plot right after breakfast.

Since the return of the frosty mornings, the garden has really taken a hammering. The squashes – even the one in the greenhouse – have all been killed off, and the peppers haven’t taken kindly to being frozen on the branch. Even the can full of water in the greenhouse, which I’d put on a shelf a good metre and a bit above the ground, had a centimetre-thick layer of ice on top of the water.

So anyway, the house is almost done and it feels like arriving at the end of a very long project. It was frustrating at times, until I learnt to just go with the flow and accept that it’ll take as long as it will take, but now, looking back, it feels thoroughly rewarding.

But I’m not sure I’d do it all over again.

Despite owning the house for almost eight months now, I’ve still not moved in. Since the end of March, it’s been an unbroken stream of workmen through the door, fixing, repairing and improving every room. It should have all come to an end yesterday when Michael, my long-term plumber and builder, finished off the downstairs cloakroom, but somehow it didn’t.

My new flooring in the kitchen, it would seem, had cracked, and so it had to all be taken up and started again from the bottom. By Monday it should be dry enough to finish off.

So today was a mammoth day of doing everything except finishing off, mainly involving copious quantities of furniture building, carting boxes up to the loft, and scraping builders’ dirt from just about every surface. The more we cleared, the better the place looked, and by the time the four of us left – feeling achey and grubby – the whole place had a nice livable-in feeling that it’s not had since the day I bought it.

Only trouble is, far as we might be with building that furniture, there’s still a whole lot left to go – more than we have done so far, in fact, and that’s allowing for the fact that the only rooms with any building to be done are the bedrooms.

Far as we may get each weekend, this house is still never quite so close to done as we may like to think.

Shibboleth at the Tate ModernLike most weekday Londoners, neither Rich nor I has much interest in a weekend commute. However, free tickets to the MPH Show, which would otherwise cost £33, lured us onto the trains and tube for a busy day in the city.The Show was good. It was an hour and a half live edition of Top Gear, more or less, punctuated at regular intervals by stunt driving, explosions and silly games. Ourside of the Show, the static cars were less interesting, so after an hour or so of walking around, jumping into and out of the dinkiest Italian motors, we took the Tube back into town to have a look at Shibboleth.It’s a 167-metre crack in the floor.Now you wouldn’t imagine that could be particularly impressive; you can see cracks that long all over the motorway. But this is different. For starters, it’s been dug – deliberately – into the floor of a gallery. The usually solid floor of the old power station’s turbine hall has been torn from end to end by a fissure that begins as a tiny hairline crack and widens and grows as it crawls down the lazy broad slope, splintering off here and there and pulling sharp jagged corners.At its widest point you can slip a hand or a foot down the hole, but you can’t see the bottom. Some clever sculpting of its internal walls means you’ll never know how deep it goes, and that seems to disconcert some visitors at first, as they stand back a couple of feet and gingerly lean towards it. A couple of minutes later, they’re poking in their feet like the rest of us.Whether it achieves its aim of talking about racism I couldn’t say, but it’s bizarrely impressive. Perhaps that’s principally because it is a technical desecration of an important London building, but for me it’s also because I can’t quite get my head around the work that must have gone into cutting such a long hole and then so effectively obscuring the bottom.It’s far more impressive than Louise Bourgeois’ fearsome spider standing out front, which by comparison looks positively pedestrian.Go see it now before someone trips on it and breaks an ankle and the whole thing has to be concreted in.Louise Bourgeois’ spider at the Tate ModernTechnorati Tags:london, shibboleth, tate, tate modern, louise bourgeois