Earlier quoted context omitted.
The apartment thing...it’s very rare. Most likely to remind you to register at the PSB, I was always late and warned a few times, they never tried to fine me or anything. They aren’t really “checking” on you, honestly I’ve had worse experiences in Switzerland than China where they really do check on you (like the television tax guy entering my apartment to check that I really didn’t have a TV!). Beijing was actually…
Television licencing property checks are normal in the UK as well - I've had a few inspectors demand access to my home to verify that I wasn't watching TV illegally. For a long time there used to be "TV detector vans" that would drive around areas supposedly detecting TVs in use in unlicensed properties - I believe it was ( still is? ) illegal to publish any information surrounding the efficacy of these vehicles ( Ob…
In the days of analogue TV, they almost certainly did. Analogue CRT televisions put out a tremendous amount of spurious RF. The intermediate frequency from the receiver's local oscillator was easily detected from some distance, even with inexpensive amateur equipment. With more sophisticated equipment, it wouldn't be difficult to see exactly what was on the screen using Van Eck phreaking. With modern technology, you could build a working TV detector bicycle using nothing more than an Android tablet, an RTL-SDR stick and a home-made yagi.
I think that the secrecy was about how often TV detection technology was actually used. The BBC research department could have knocked together a working TV detector van in a spare afternoon, but it would have been prohibitively expensive to operate. Why send out two skilled broadcast engineers in a van full of equipment, when an empty van being driven by a debt collector will do the job?