ninme

This is hilarious.

Telegraph 26/05/05 - I won’t pay to be abused by the BBC, By Boris Johnson

I want to save myself the price of a stamp or a phone call today by writing an open letter to Mr Richard Goodbody, the regional manager of the Swindon enforcement division of the TV Licensing Authority. I have no reason to doubt that Mr Goodbody is a perfectly pleasant man in private life, but in his public capacity he is, in my view, a blithering nincompoop; and if my language is intemperate it is because Goodbody has just sent me one of the rudest and stupidest letters I have ever received.

“Mr Johnson,” he begins, without any of the conventional civilities, and then tells me that he has obtained authority to visit my premises in Oxfordshire. Indeed, he says, he can come at any time during the day, the evening or at weekends. He can use any technology he chooses. He can caution me, take a statement, and file a report which may be used in proceedings before a local magistrates’ court culminating in a £1,000 fine.

All this, of course, because he suspects that I have a television in the house. As it happens, we do not have a television in the house, and nor do we want one. I have decided that everyone is calmer and happier and more productive without the constant mind-sapping burble of the television, and the temptation to slide from the table and watch Nip/Tuck or Celebrity Sex Paradise or whatever the latest offering may be. We have, in fact, written to the TV Licensing Authority to say that we do not have a television at this address, and yet this little tin god Goodbody is so drunk on power, and so crazed with the assumption that all human beings in Britain must want a TV, that he has obtained authority to surround my premises with electronic snooping devices until he obtains proof that a signal is being received.

I love this, because it’s so true:

Have the BBC journalists had the decency to congratulate the Tory Euro-sceptics on their prescience? No chance. The corporation is a cultural and political anachronism, locked in a pre-1997 mindset. It is also, of course, rather wonderful. The reason that it is so immensely politically powerful is that its Leftist message is subconsciously legitimated by association with things that we love and cherish and make us proud to be British: the Archers, the Shipping Forecast, “Lillibulero”, Doctor Who, the Proms - the list is endless. How could anyone possibly attack such a thing? BBC political bias is like the arms dump once hidden in the Parthenon. You could blow it up, but it would be an act of cultural vandalism for which future generations might not forgive you.

Heh.