I’ve supported the BBC for as long as I can remember despite not having watched much more than Doctor Who for as long as I can remember. You name a BBC TV show from the last 5-10 years – other than Doctor Who – and I’ve almost certainly either never seen it or not watched more than a couple of episodes out of curiosity. Strictly? Never seen it. Masterchef? Never seen it – since the Grossman years anyway. InsertShowHere? Nope.

But, for Doctor Who, and for the occasional thing here and there on iPlayer just to see what the fuss was about, I stuck around paying my license fee. I supported the BBC, I felt it was right to pay it.

But I no longer watch live TV, Russell T Davies’s tiresomely thin writing has killed my enthusiasm for Doctor Who as dead as a doornaiI, and I no longer feel any particular obligation to support the BBC generally. So, I’m out.

Here’s how easy it is to cancel:

1. If you have a direct debit going out, go to your bank and just cancel it now. That sorts out the biggest issue, that they’ll try to take the money anyway. TV Licensing will email you within the week to say they’ve noticed and start putting the frighteners on you. Ignore it.
2. Go online and try to cancel – here’s the link: https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/cancellations-and-refunds-top7. You’ll need your license number, which I got from an email confirming my last renewal. You’ll need to choose a reason. I told the truth about no longer watching live TV. And of course for this option they will refuse to cancel you without speaking to someone on the phone. Classic effort to increase friction and put you off. Do not be put off.
3. Call the number and once you get through, wait – do not hang up, they do answer eventually. A recorded message will almost inevitably spin you some variation on “Due to unexpectedly high call volume our wait times are around ten minutes” – almost as if literally everyone that calls is put into a ten minute queue no matter what, eh? I waited almost TWENTY minutes so I got on with some work while listening to the same short clip of ‘music’ play over and over and over and over and over…
4. Be as nice as you can to the person on the other end. It’s not their fault, it’s just a job and they have a script. I tried to speed things up early on (“I’m just trying to save us both a bit of time here”) by saying that it didn’t matter what the script said, the answer was going to be the same, but she had to go through it anyway. It only takes five minutes, just put up with it.
5. You’ll need to repeatedly confirm the same basic concept asked in a variety of ways. They’re trying to find something, anything, that you do which will require a TV license. I confirmed that:
   • my TV isn’t connected to an aerial and I haven’t watched Freeview in over a decade
   • I don’t watch any terrestrial TV at all (BBC, ITV, C4, 5/five/5ive/whatever)
   • I don’t watch live events on Netflix or any other streamer (as soon as you mention Netflix etc they will leap on it like they’ve got you, heh);
   • I don’t use iPlayer, nor have it installed
   • I don’t use ITVX or 4OD (or whatever they’ve rebranded as this month) for live or streaming TV, nor have them installed
   • I don’t watch any foreign networks broadcasting live through any method at all
   • and the same answer applies to all forms of transmission, on any device at all
6. Then you have to listen to and agree with a statement outlining the offence you’ll be committing if you do any of these things without a license; and that someone may come to your home to verify your statement. I’m very comfortable agreeing with this because I don’t watch live broadcasts of any kind and nor do I use iPlayer. Also, I think it’s kind of ridiculous to claim someone can verify this by knocking on my door (I really do hope they swing by, I’d love to have that chat) but by all means waste your time folks.

And that’s it. Done. I actually have four months left on the license since the DD was in November, and maybe I’ll chase them for a refund but I’m not sure I can be bothered. I appreciate that it must be nice for me to be so blasé about the £40 or so they technically owe me, but they can keep it.

So, why don’t I support the BBC? Well, it’s not just because “they harbour paedos and sex offenders!” because even though I believe their management absolutely do protect them until they can’t protect them any longer (Saville, Edwards, and Wallace spring to mind) I don’t think they protect such people any more than ITV or any other massive corporation does.

For example, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone working in the London daytime TV industry who didn’t know what Schofield had been up to with his ‘assistant’. It was one of the worst kept ‘secrets’ in telly. Some of the things some colleagues of his said about being shocked by ‘his lies’ are breathtakingly two-faced given that, I say again, it was not much of a secret to crew, let alone his colleagues. And if the crews knew, management knew. Which would suggest they did nothing about it only until that stopped serving the corporations interests.

So yeah, it’s not that, but it’s contributed.

Is it because the BBC management are blatantly Tory shills? Well, yeah, partly. I don’t think the BBC itself is inherently Tory. Same as I don’t think it’s inherently a corporation of paedophiles and sex abusers. After all the BBC is accused of being sympathetic to the far right as often as it’s accused of being a lefty liberal cesspit.

But the people at the very, very top have long tried to push it to the right, and there’s no more obvious symptom of that than their constant, embarrassingly persistent platforming of that absolute cunt Nigel Farrage (which rhymes Carriage in my world, it’s so much funnier to say) despite him not even scraping an MP role until last year.

And it’s not about them firing that guy that co-presented Masterchef (Torrode?) because he sang the full lyrics to a Kanye West song that was playing in a bar during after work drinks. What’s the crime there? Well, the lyrics use the n-word twice, you see, and that means Torrode is a vile racist WHO MUST BE STOPPED.

Bullshit, BBC. You’d been caught not giving a single fuck about the complaints of many, many, many women who complained about Gregg Wallace’s egregious behaviour, and in a desperate bid to seem like “no really we’re dead against it, down with this sort of thing, we’re really caring and right-on, no really we are” they massively overcompensated in firing Torrode for something that, if accurate, doesn’t even come close to the level of despicable abuse that Wallace got away with for FUCKING YEARS.

So it’s none of these things individually. But all of them together.

And also, I just don’t watch live broadcasts. So yeah I’m sorry. I’m out.

EDIT: Am I worried that the BBC will eventually fail if enough of us mount the same sort of objection to paying for something we don’t use, to the benefit of a corporation we don’t necessarily support? Yes, I kind of am.

As a nation we do need something like the BBC, that can make programmes without worrying too much about how commercially viable they are.

That has always been the single most important reason for the BBC to exist. Turning them into a subscription like Netflix, or putting commercials on like ITV/C4 etc, would almost certainly spell the end of everything valuable about the BBC. Their news output is important. It is flawed,,,,, but I feel considerably more objective than stuff like Sky News.

But… I’m sorry, I simply do not support BBC TV as it currently exists and is managed. Bake the fee into an unavoidable general tax and I’ll suck it up, because I won’t have any choice. But right now, why pay for something I don’t use or support?