I can sympathise with these folk. For years I didn't have a tv. I never watch programmes and I decided that there was no point in cluttering the corner of the living room with something I didn't use. But of course the BBC licencing people didn't believe me and I got letter after letter telling me that they were coming to get me. To begin with of course, I thought it was a genuine mistake and so I wrote back to them telling them I didn't have a set.
They ignored that and sent me another letter, a bit more threatening, so I wrote back explaining that I'd already explained myself in a previous letter, but in case they didn't speak any English I had written the same letter again but this time in French.
And you guessed it. It didn't work either. They sent me a very stiff letter pointing out that they were now going to send someone to see me (scary stuff).
So this time I wrote in Latin.
I mean you can never tell in these days of high unemployment when you're going to run into a classicist ... even in a pit of a company like the outsourcing giant, Crapita. But alas and alack, it appears that there was no one there who spoke a world of the ancient tongue, for the letters went on and on... ad infinitum, as it were.
In the end they seemed to have given up and I thought that the relationship was over. But then I got sick and had to have an operation. And when I got home I was a bit useless for a while and was persuaded to purchase a tv set to help fill the long days. Along with the television set, I took out a direct debit to pay the licence fee.
And you'll never guess what happened. OK, I underestimated you. You will.
Despite the fact that Crapita started to take £12 a month from my bank account and provided me with a piece of paper to say that they were doing so (I believe it is called a television licence) they had obviously missed our poly-glottal correspondence for started it up again, just like we'd never fallen out... and it continues to this day, bless them. We're on to Thai now.
Frankly, I'd not mind a few pounds out of their compensation fund for my own troubles. Writing letters in dead languages isn't altogether easy.
But they appear to have other, more deserving causes for our hard-earned cash in the form of their late and very much overpaid director general, Mark Thomson. They have, it appears, allocated the princely sum of £20,000 from licence payers' money to pay for a portrait of the man to be hung in Broadcasting House.
I'm not entirely sure how that is going to benefit the viewers or listeners in any way at all. Are you? On the other hand it would seem about the right level of compensation for all my troubles.
