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Please do not write below the line

bbctvlicence.com

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Re: Please do not write below the line

#21

Post by technothrasher »

ChilledTonic wrote: post #2

Truly a perfect mystery. Perhaps at one point letters were expected to be returned, and this feature of the letterhead has been copied over the years without thinking? The OCR statement is confusing. It speaks of a customer manager trying to pass the buck down the line as quickly as possible

my thought was that they perhaps have to accept returned letters informing them of the lack of a TV at the address, but in a sort of dark pattern they don't specifically say that in the hope that you use one of the other, less administratively expensive options listed in the letter.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#22

Post by pjsg »

My guess is that they scan the letters that are returned by the post office and hence they don't want anybody writing below the line. I guess that they used to have a problem with squirrels opening up the letters and scribbling below the line. However, they seem to ignore the fact that squirrels can't read.

More likely is that whenever they print OCR'able numbers / barcode/ whatever, they assume that a person is going to return it -- and the special case of 'we only get returned letters when the delivery has failed and nobody has opened the envelope' escaped the testing.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#23

Post by Guthur »

TillE wrote: post #18
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.

What's when more mental is that they are essentially all funding state propaganda agencies and so you're literally paying to be propagandised.

Not that much of none state media is really that much better to be honest.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#24

Post by ajb »

gwbas1c wrote: post #16

Would be nice if the article had an example of the entire letter. The tiny sliver of image at the top of the article leaves very little context.

If you go to the home page, you will see they have collected scans of these letters for every year since 2006. Most likely they didn't expect anyone to go direct to this page

Re: Please do not write below the line

#25

Post by kleiba »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

In Germany, you cannot even legally listen to the radio without such a license (GEZ). It's also slightly more expensive than the UK TV License, coming in just under Netflix' premium plan (while offering mostly shite in return).

Re: Please do not write below the line

#26

Post by kamaitachi »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else.

It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#

Re: Please do not write below the line

#27

Post by jvanderbot »

stavros wrote: post #11
jvanderbot wrote: post #6

Because a returned letter must be associated with an account / account holder to be processed. Though they knew this information when they sent it to the author, presumably it would be laborious to manually associate the same information with each returned letter (one would have to look it up anyway), so they probably print the data on the letter that may someday be returned, to allow quick lookup in the event it is…

> Because a returned letter must be associated with an account / account holder to be processed. But they didn't ask for the letter to be returned at all .

Of course not, but they could have and that explains the use of data to associate a returned letter.

It's a form letter. In the event it's returned you want the data, regardless.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#28

Post by cooper_ganglia »

TillE wrote: post #18
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.

The lines that really got me in this post were:

> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.

and

>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.

Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!

Never change, UK, never change.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#29

Post by jvanderbot »

froddd wrote: post #15
stavros wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because a returned letter must be associated with an account / account holder to be processed. But they didn't ask for the letter to be returned at all .

Undelivered letters could be returned to sender. In which case… there would definitely be no need to instruct to not write anything below the line, as nobody would have opened the letter.

If only they knew the fate of the letter before sending, then
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