…according to the latest threat from the BBC.
“Your town, your street, your home. It’s all in our database. New technology means it’s easy to pay your TV licence and impossible to hide if you don’t. It’s all in the database.”
You might not have seen it, but you wouldn’t have to think too hard to imagine it. Some blippy computer music, images from a 90s we’ve-just-discovered-the-internet paranoia film and a voiceover perfectly pitched midway between HAL and Charlotte Green.
Not quite as unpleasant as last year’s DVLA radio and TV adverts threatening to crush your car (and certainly implying that they really would have liked the power to crush rather more than just your car) but relying on the same “we’ve got a big database and you’re on it and if you don’t do what we tell you then we are going to get you” concept, the latest offering from the TVLA sits admirably with Big Gordon’s ‘make the vile populace quiver with fear’ philosophy.
Big Gordon, the Edinburgh loan shark, sitting comfortably in his genteel suburban semi gently stroking his cat Blears whilst reassuring us that he, personally, abhors violence, but unfortunately his colleagues T and D VLA have no such scruples.
Apart from the BBC’s very obvious need to keep Jeremy Vine in new cowboy suits, there are countless good reasons why both TV and vehicle licences should be paid. So why can’t the people who create advertisements for the various sub agencies of the state use them instead of immediately relying on bullying and threats?
What a stupid question. Because they are sub agencies of the state of course, and the state doesn’t believe that we, the ruled, can ever be persuaded by reason, only by threats. It’s a form of abuse and, like most abusers, the state will increasingly lose the ability to act in any other way in its relations with us. Expect ‘public service’ announcements soon telling us that our families are in a database and will be (insert your own nightmare here) unless we immediately stop (insert your only remaining pleasure here).
You have been warned…though fortunately for you I don’t give a toss if you care or not and anyway, I’ve mislaid my bloody database somewhere.
Tags: advertising, big brother, databases, dvla, liberty, privacy, tvla, uk
