Television licensing in the United Kingdom
TV Licensing (TVL) is the official name for the BBC's Intimidation Department. TVL's agents frequently scan the streets with detector vans; send intimidating letters to innocent, law-abiding citizens; and they occasionally raid and pillage entire cities. As of 2024, TVL have so far decimated 214 cities across the Commonwealth, killing an estimated 724 million people.
Methods of Investigation[edit | edit source]
The TVL utilise two techniques:
Detector vans[edit | edit source]
Detector vans frequently patrol the streets. According to TVL, every second you watch TV without a license, a fairy dies. The detector scans for dead fairies. There are huge circles of fairy corpses around unlicensed households, and these are easily detected by the sensors.
But an undercover study by the IMF has revealed a simpler explanation: the vans actually contain a simple periscope, which allow the van operator to easily and stealthily look through living-room windows.
However the vans work, once a van detects an unlicensed TV, the crew have two options. They either file a report on the household, with a letter being sent at a later date. Or they blow up the house with the BGM-71 TOW Missile launcher built in to the van. Usually, they choose the latter option.
Intimidation-letter Writing[edit | edit source]
Quite often TVL agents send intimidating letters to random people who either have a TV and a License, or no TV and no License. An example of the standard letter is shown below:
"Feeble Citizen, You have been detected watching an unlicensed television set. The correction squads are on the way. Please appoint one member of your family for sacrifice. Also be prepared to evacuate your house as we may decide to blow it up.
Random Raiding and Pillaging[edit | edit source]
TMF special forces (mobs with flaming torches and pointy helmets) occasionally raid cities, slaughtering everyone who is worth slaughtering, burning anything that is worth burning, stealing anything which is worth stealing, and generally messing everything else up. The reasons that they do this for are unclear. They claim that some of the slaughtered people were license-evaders. No one believes them.
Subliminal Messaging[edit | edit source]
TVL implant subliminal messaging into a lot of things. For example, if you take the binary code for their logo:
And you reverse it, the resulting image is the following:
Record-keeping[edit | edit source]
I once temped for the TV Licensing people as a data entry person. I lasted two days. I left of my own accord to do something less like being a trained monkey, and I wonder whether they ever found out that my entire second day was spent entering random numbers into random columns, repeatedly, until the error messages went away.