Stop Wasting My Fucking Money!

Well, it seems our beloved government needs to increase our indirect taxes. This time through the TV tax - sorry, my bad - licence. According to Jowell and Brown – a duo I wouldn’t trust to lace their own shoes, let alone run the sodding country – we will be getting a below inflation rise to £135.45 from £131.50. A lot of people will probably say a rise of £3.95 is nothing to worry about. I would wholeheartedly disagree.

I suppose you could argue that there is choice with the licence fee – that if you don’t want to pay it you don’t have to, you just don’t own a TV (actually, this is a strategy adopted by at least two of my friends). But this is not realistic. Even if you don’t watch the BBC, you still have to pay the licence fee. It is a tax, pure and simple. It is just that the government (and previous governments from both parties) are not willing to admit to this.

It really pisses me off that I pay the licence fee when I mainly use my TV to watch DVDs (It’s A Wonderful Life at the moment, a festive favourite of mine, but this is a complete aside). In fact, the only thing I watch on TV is Doctor Who. So I pay (given there are 13 episodes a year) £10.42 per episode. Count the Christmas Special, and it is £9.68. Which is more expensive than going to the cinema. It would be cheaper just to piss off and buy the Doctor Who Boxed Set, which retails at just under £70. In fact, if it wasn’t for my pseudo-autistic obsession to watch each episode at the original date of transmission, I would probably abandon my TV and use the laptop to watch DVDs on and save myself a small fortune each year. And I would advise everyone I know to do the same thing.

I know that I do have very fussy tastes when it comes to TV, and if I could stomach bullshit like Eastenders or Strictly Come Dancing then I would be getting much more value for money. Unfortunately I can’t. But it doesn’t help that the BBC seems to be willing to piss our money away on stuff that has nothing at all to do with their reason for existing. Take a look at this on Disillusioned and Bored – I would feel very different if the BBC wasn’t pissing money away on drinking binges. I have no issue with people wasting money on getting twatted (as Notes From A Drunken Evening attests to) but I have a real issue with talentless DJ’s wasting the BBC’s money at a time when the Corporation is putting its hand out, begging for more of our money with menaces - sorry, asking for an increase in the licence fee.

If a business wanted an increase in revenue and profit, it would look at ways to increase the quality of product at the same time as reducing taxes. But of course the BBC isn’t a business, so it simply begs for more money gets the government to put up the licence fee. If we want a decent BBC then the government has a simple choice – stop putting up the licence fee, or privatise the BBC. I don’t care what they do, what I do care about is the government once again increasing the amount of money robbed from me to fund an outmoded, inefficient and failing organisation.