On Monday, like some Tunbridge Wells Daily Telegraph Tory who puts his foot through the television in a fury and sends Lenny Henry and Clare Balding the bill, I went online and cancelled my television licence. Why should I subsidise the rotting corpse of the BBC? It was once an idealistic public institution, but the Gary Lineker saga reveals it as a cowed Conservative propaganda outlet with no objectivity or autonomy. What’s that, Fiona Bruce, ambassador for Refuge? Boris Johnson’s knighthood-pending father has broken his wife’s nose? That’ll do nicely, sir, and would you like to “continue hitting me, many times, over many years”? Nation shall speak peace unto nation, or at least whatever a BBC board stuffed with Tory placemen decides it should speak. Carve that noble phrase into the flaccid penis of Eric Gill’s Ariel and hang it above the door of Broadcasting House for passersby to admire. Inform! Educate! And crush the tofu-munching wokerati!
As my licence fee evaporated into cyberspace, I felt the same woke sense of relief I did when I finally gave all my Morrissey albums to the charity shop, hopefully making the day of a fan better adjusted to gloss over far-right drift. In cancelling my licence fee, I knew I had done the right thing, morally, despite my historical loyalty to the BBC, despite how it had shaped my world. I was made what I am by the 1980s alternative comedy of The Young Ones, Boom Boom… Out Go the Lights and Threads; by late-night 1980s Radio 1 music sessions from Tools You Can Trust, Xmal Deutschland and Roderick’s Integrated Semen; and by the imagination-inspiring fantasy wonder worlds of Clangers, Blake’s 7 and Triangle. I was informed, educated and thoroughly entertained. And who can forget Angela Rippon’s legs on Morecambe and Wise, back when everyone assumed newsreaders were just severed torsos mounted on bloody spikes?
