To avoid paying there TV licence,a wide range of excuses were;
A couple who wrapped their tele in tin foil to try to avoid paying their licence were shocked when anspectors knocked at their door lol lol
One family told inspectors they only used their TV for their cat to sleep on because it was "nice & warm" lol lol
One woman said she had never seen the tele before and her husband must have bought it for their son
eek
I wish I could pay a license fee and watch some quality TV. I haven't watched a single show in about 2 weeks now - $45 down the drain really sad
I only have it for the basketball now I think about it mad
I heard that they can't really tell if you have a telly on or not, that it's all a big rap! Does anyone know if this is true or not?
Yes "they" can tell if you have a tv on. They detect emissions from the local oscillator in your tv.
In practice though, they also have lists that tv retailers are legally obliged to give to them and other sources of information to track down non-payers.
They also have lists of who has a licence, so concentrate on those addresses with out. Many people are fairly stupid and detector vans are not needed as they put their TV in the front room, opposite the window roll
For the period of six months that I never owned a TV I had these people round my place twice!!
I just got the letter in the mail, saying Rumbelows had dobbed on me, and why didn't I have a license?
Fact was I was living in a shared house and my landlord had the license. You'd think they could cross-check the address roll
I remember it was like trying to get blood out of a stone when I moved here and gave my TV away, in order to get the license fee back but they did cough up in the end.
We got a refund on our unused portion of our recently paid license fee no problem. The cheque arrived in the mail within a fortnight of me leaving our house! grin
Debs x smile
A subject very near and dear to my heart.
My Dad spent his entire working life toiling for the post Office. A large part of his career was working for the part of the organisation responsible for TV Licensing.
To confirm what was already written, yes they most certainly can get a list from the TV sellers and yes they most certainly can detect not only the fac that you have a TV, but they can tell in which qudrant of the house it is located and which channel you are watching.
How do I know these facts? Aha! I'm glad you asked! Well, as an extra money earner for a couple of years, I drove TV Detector Vans! Yes, it's true. I would drive the van to a particular town and then drive around all the neghbourhoods in that town for a day. So, if any of you were in the Thames Valley area during 1993/4 and saw a detector van in your street on a Sunday, it was me!
It wasn't only the Thames Valley area, I drove around London and North of London too. It was awesome! This one time I was in Hemel Hempstead and I drove down a cul-de-sac with a big turnaround at the end of it. I parked up and read the paper for 10 minutes (of course, I wasn't allowed to actually activate the detecting equipment, but they didn't know that) and watched all the curtains in the street start twitching.
It was so much fun. People that were in the street doing stuff, like washing their cars or tending to their gardens, would stop and move quickly inside. I just knew they were all of a tizzy trying to find their licences. Anyway, when it was time to drive off, I couldn't get the bloody thing in reverse for some reason (it was one of the long wheelbase Sherpas). So, I started to get a little worried, because the people who had earlier gone inside to find their licences must obviously have seen that I was just some punk trying to find reverse. They started to file back out and I thought I was going to get lynched. I was ever so worried, but then as luck would have it, I found the gear and spun off, leaving a trail of diesel fumes and some rubber in their quiet street.
Oh it was fun!
My Dad has some excellent stories from when he was younger and his job was to knock on pepole's doors to cite them for having no licence and basically telling them they were going to court. He used to do this (they called it "the knocker") in some pretty interesting parts of East London (I always thought he was pretty brave, and in fact he got attacked a few times - but he's a big fella). I've heard the tinfoil story many times. The best one he told me though was a woman who's son came to the door. My Dad asked if his parents were there and he said sure, and shouted up the stairs to his mum.
A door opened and there was this huge Gilbert Grape-sized lady sitting on the throne, reading the paper and taking a crap. So my Dad, obviously perplexed, asked if she could tell her son where the TV licence was so that he could see it. All she could say was, can't you see I'm having a ****? There's no TV in here.
Ok, maybe it was funnier at the time, but I'll always laugh when I think of it.
Done.
Hey Laurence, when you were younger did you ever admit to your friends what your dads job was and did you get teased?
When I worked at a department store we used to fill out forms for all the people who had bought tvs and then send them off to the licensing people. Best idea was to walk off with the tv - not have it delivered - and then you weren't required to give your name.
At uni we were brave for a year in halls and did not have a license. My friend next door was so paranoid that he used to practise unplugging his tv and hurling it into the wardrobe incase he ever got "raided"....
In a shared house we were supposed to get one for each tv as all our bedrooms had locks which meant it was not communal roll
We got one for the tv downstairs and told them it was a communal house. My stupid goodytwoshoes flat mate went and got another one for her room without telling us though, which pretty much suggested to TV Licensing that we were all scamming. They never did anything, but a friend of a friend worked for them and when she did a check on our address it came up with MY details as being the person suspected of not buying one! Before graduation I decided to be done with it and took the TV back to my parent's house. I had only used it once a week anyway, when my flatmates refused to let me watch Pet Rescue in the lounge.
Ahhh, them were the days...
Stel.
PS.
Did anyone eversee that advert in the UK where the man has a video that makes his tv look like a microwave? When they come around to catch him without a license - he turns the video on and hey presto! a chicken being cooked... lol lol
It was so funny.
On 2003-06-26 21:17, cel wrote:
Hey Laurence, when you were younger did you ever admit to your friends what your dads job was and did you get teased?
:lol: It was an unusual thing for me to get teased. I'm 6'4" and I stopped growing when I was about 16. I guess I'm biased, but I love the TV Licence idea. It's value for money that you don't realise until you come here and pay for cable. I would gladly only have 5 channels to watch.
So why weren't you allowed to play with your equipment, Laurence?
TV Sponger?
Sponger
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: pilgrim_007 on 2003-06-26 23:50 ]</font>