A point I made to my MP was that while I’m a reasonably intelligent individual (and a former police officer to boot) and quite aware of my rights in law where the TV licence is concerned, had I been a partially-sighted frail and elderly individual then the letters from the BBC disguised as ‘official bills’ (complete with red borders) and the ones saying ‘We now suspect you of wilful evasion of payment’ would be, quite literally, terrifying.

Make no mistake, Capita (“TV Licensing”) work for the BBC. The BBC endorses their methods.

The then Chairman of the BBC, Michael Grade, wrote to my MP and myself: “This letter,” the one accusing me of ‘wilful evasion of payment’ for a licence I don’t need, “was intended to convey a very strong message to someone who may have been a licence evader…”

He goes on to justify this by saying that although the BBC recognises there are around a million people in the country who don’t need a licence, there are indeed real licence evaders out there.

In other words you are presumed guilty until you prove yourself innocent by letting a complete stranger into your home, a stranger who has no right in law to be there. A stranger who is paid on a commissions basis for each tv licence they ‘persuade’ someone to buy on the spot. And even if you are daft enough to let that Capita sales person into your home, that won’t stop them harassing you.

For many people, the BBC is just a channel on a telly or a radio, or a page on the internet.

For around a million others, the ‘human face’ of the BBC is the thuggish salesman dressed in pretend ‘official’ day-glo ‘uniform’ flashing an ‘Enforcement Officer’ badge from Capita, growling a rehearsed nonsense about the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and threatening to get a search warrant if you don’t let them in…

Here’s another conundrum the BBC have yet to explain to my satisfaction:

You don’t need a radio licence and haven’t done since 1971. You don’t need a tv licence if your tv receiving device has been modified to produce sound only (no picture) or otherwise incapable of producing a picture (ie Sky digibox connected to hi-fi system).

But if you’re blind and use an unmodified tv receiving device you have to pay £69.75 for a licence to listen to the programmes.

I suspect HWMBO would rather like me to get a license, although he’s more restrained on the subject than Ray :-) (And already has his own license).

What is still keeping my license free is not the principles, but the heavy-handed implementation:
1) If I were to buy by monthly direct debit, I would have to pay double for the first 6 months, and be 6 months ahead of myself for an indefinite period. Do I need to give the BBC 6 months notice of my death to get this back?
2) I receive exceedingly rude letters full of legal jargon with increasing frequency.

Having said that, I was visited by a very polite bailiff on Saturday, so at least there are human beings somewhere in the system!

Ingrid Betancourt on her captivity: listening to the BBC world service was “so important”.

Alan Johnston: Mr Johnston said he stayed aware of efforts to free him by listening to the BBC World Service on the radio.

It’s a disgrace that you work for the BBC and have only, since joining them reviewed your license situation – credit to you for sorting your shit out though.

Um, thanks? Not entirely sure why opting not to have a license is/was a disgrace though, since I was carefully avoiding doing anything that would require a licence. Or was your point a different one?

You are, however, correct in saying that your inane ramblings do sound pretty vapid and sycophantic.

I’m not sure that’s word-for-word what I said, but point taken. You’ll have to forgive me for actually liking the company I work for, despite their occasional problems and failures. :-)

Where have you been for the past 5 years? If all you were doing was listening to Radio4 then I can understand how you didn’t see much change (it has never been broke so they never needed to fix it)

Well, pretty much. A lot of Radio 4, some Radio 2, some very occasional Radio 1, the Internet Blog and a careful selection of catch-up viewing via the iPlayer. I’ve been more of a picker than a grazer for a long time now.

but in many people’s view, the standard of the BBC’s output, in particular the journalism across their various channels, has been in steady decline throughout the emergence of the digital age.

I expect we could both point to some good and some bad examples across all of the BBC’s output over the years. Of course, there’s more to it than journalism, but perhaps I feel this especially strongly since I work in the bit that makes television.

Is there really any value in the ‘Have Your Say’ section of the website which seems, to all intents and purposes to simply provide an outlet for pensioners and the unemployed to spout vitriolic messsages about whatever they’re being told to be outraged about in the Daily Mail?

Looking after social media for TV means that much of the work I’m doing at the moment is precisely to help people understand what it means to invite people to a conversation, and why and how people in TV (since that’s the area for which I have some responsibility) should do it sensibly. I won’t talk specifically about Have Your Say, since it’s for other people to address that, but I would agree that when reflecting and reporting the public’s input, both the BBC and the country should get some value from it. How to do this effectively is exactly the sort of thing that consumes my days.

How many people are employed full-time as ‘moderators’ sifting through …

I don’t know how it works for Have Your Say specifically, or why. More generally, I would say that moderating a conversation is very different from hosting it. (I doubt that this is universally accepted terminology, but the distinction is well-used inside the BBC, and it’s something Robin Hamman explained quite well when he was there.) My general attitude, and I don’t think I’m alone here, is that the BBC should outsource the moderation of everything it can; t’s something that an agency can (and does) handle very efficiently with a set of guidelines. The recent Kottke article about applying the ‘broken window’ theory online is pretty interesting when you think about both moderators and hosts. Moderation is a given at the BBC anyway, and in my experience a good host plays just as important a role in making the difference between a useful and constructive space and a derelict echo chamber.

Question it, challenge it, get wound up about it and then do something about it.

I absolutely agree. Thanks for stopping by and encouraging me.

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What I mean is that both the BBC and Channel 4 (as far as I remember) initally provided download-only services. It was only when they realised this was the wrong approach to attract custom that they switched to streaming-based services (screw the bandwidth, it works – for the same reason YouTube worked – Flash fixed the video problem: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000755.html).

I have to say the BBC have done a pretty decent job of iPlayer. It’s still a bit shaky in places, but by and large works in a pretty stable manner. Channel 4′s offering is a bit more flaky and relies on Windows/IE-only technology (AFAIK).

You are, however, correct in saying that your inane ramblings do sound pretty vapid and sycophantic.

I am incredulous that you actually believe that the BBC is improving its output. Where have you been for the past 5 years? If all you were doing was listening to Radio4 then I can understand how you didn’t see much change (it has never been broke so they never needed to fix it) but in many people’s view, the standard of the BBC’s output, in particular the journalism across their various channels, has been in steady decline throughout the emergence of the digital age.

I’m not talking about the layout or look’n'feel of the website or the iPlayer or any of that shizzle, I’m talking about the basics of providing insightful and impartial journalism of high quality.

Gary2 is spot on here and according to other recent reports, 60% of license fee payers feel that the license fee is a rip-off and would be better off being distributed across other media organisations.

The main question that I struggle to answer is what is the BBC’s remit these days? What societal function does it fulfill that is not being addressed by any other organisation?

The list of ‘celebrities’ earning top dollar grows ever longer in the pursuit of viewing figures begging the question of whether the point of the BBC is to become the most watched/listened to media organisation?

Is there really any value in the ‘Have Your Say’ section of the website which seems, to all intents and purposes to simply provide an outlet for pensioners and the unemployed to spout vitriolic messsages about whatever they’re being told to be outraged about in the Daily Mail?

How many people are employed fullt-time as ‘moderators’ sifting through this pile of incoherent, bilious tripe before deciding whether what someone can say is valid?

As for Stephen Fry’s remarks on the BBC I am guessing that you are one of his avid twatterati followers hanging off his every, pointless, update (“I’m just going to evacuate my bowels everyone!”) staring awe-struck into his cyberspace like a brain-addled child who has drunk too much sunny-d and lost the ability to form any opinions of their own. Of course he’s going to defend the institution having been handsomely rewarded by it throughout his career you dolt.

Question it, challenge it, get wound up about it and then do something about it. Just please don’t waste the goggle-box tax that I am forced to pay any further.

Of course my newspaper allegory wasn’t an entirely accurate model, but it makes a point.

As does Mr Fry when he admits that the BBC asked him to make that speech in defence of the licence fee. He’s hardly going to bite the hand that feeds him, one which has indeed fed him for some considerable time now. One might admire the fellow’s talent without having to accept his glowing testimonial, his personal opinion, as gospel.

I remember “Watch with Mother” (on my next-door neighbour’s set, we couldn’t afford one back then) when there were just 3 TV channels, two of them from Aunty. In those days the fee was £10 a year (colour) and it paid for 2/3 of the available content. The aerial on the roof was a bit of a give-away back then.

Today the fee’s £139.50 and since the last time I visited a friend’s house and saw how many channels of ‘stuff’ he had to choose from, I’ve no idea what the content quotient is. A lot less than 2/3 though, particularly if you include the internet and cellphone delivery.

The Beeb ‘a national treasure’? Again, a matter of opinion really, one which hardly stands up to recent scrutiny and which makes a good case for voluntary subscription rather than a compulsory tax. Certainly, the Beeb is a far cry from the late sixties and seventies, when it upheld certain educational and moral standards (back when I was far too young to understand that Mary Whitehouse might actually have a valid point).

I suppose it all boils down to what is a Public Broadcasting Service, is the BBC one, and how much is it needed in the age of the internet? But again, those questions too are usually answered by personal opinion, ‘standards’ being as fluid as they are these days. Most people, I’d suggest, just like the fact that the only adverts on the Beeb are for its own products and services and don’t interrupt programming.

Myself, I opine the fee isn’t worth it (how many times should one have to pay to see Dad’s Army and The Good Life?) and in the 10 years since I binned the TV I’ve learned to read music, play four musical instruments, written half a dozen bad novels, and disenfranchised myself from all the conversations that begin “Did you see that thing last night…” And sad to say, there are so many of those.

A very large number of people don’t agree with my opinions though, which is probably just as well.

Yay for me! One down – one to go – I want a baby too! ;-)

Your Times/Sun comparison is slightly tricky; in your hypothetical situation, both the Sun and the Times are publicly owned public service broadcasters (or rather, newspapers) but while the Times is able to raise money by advertising on its pages, the Sun has to be “free from both political and commercial influence and answer only to its viewers and listeners” (um, readers) and in any case, a great many Times fans will at least occasionally make use of some of the Sun’s prodigious output.

If the Sun was a public service paper, both gathering news but also offering a range of non-commercial entertainment domestically, which make (many) people describe it as national treasure, then although I’d commiserate for the few people who never got any value or benefit from the existence of the Sun, and for whom it was the price of only getting the Times, I’d probably think that many of the alternatives would be worse.

I’ll confess to not being 100% sure of my own thoughts on the issue yet. The ‘unfairness’ (to Channel 4, etc) of the licence fee is certainly running counter to a market in which was pay for what we use. I think there’s something special that needs to be preserved (even if it’s in a different form to what we see today). Stephen Fry’s talk about the BBC and the licence fee ended with these words:

the BBC enriches the country in ways we will only discover when it has gone and it is too late to build it up again. We actually can afford the BBC, because we can’t afford not to.

While I still need to think about it a lot more before I’m anywhere near as eloquent as that, I’ll let Stephen’s words speak for me for now.