The holiday season brought another letter from the TV Licencing authority, threatening to send an inspector round as usual. And as usual I took great delight in putting it in the shredder.

I don’t know what’s on offer these days, but when I last watched television it was totally inane rubbish. With so many good books to read, great music to listen to, fine films to watch (on DVD I hasten to add) and chess games to play through, who needs to be bombarded with a steady stream of noisy garbage?

No doubt there are a few people who are avoiding paying the licence whilst watching, but I can’t help thinking that most of these letters are just bullying tactics. If they wanted to protect their service in a decent, opt-in way they’d scramble the signal and have people subscribe to through set-top boxes or similar. But my guess is that they know full well that if they left their fees to market forces their revenues would be deservedly devastated.

I long for a UK which is actually bothered by this rather than meekly accepting it.