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Standard British things that you don’t realise are creepy and authoritarian as fuck when you grow up in the UK.

These are meant to frighten you. You can safely throw them in the bin.

in reply to Sarah Brown

The silver lining in this is the joy you can obtain when you realise that they are like geese: they make a lot of noise, but if you make yourself look big and scream “go fuck yourselves!”, there isn’t a thing they can do.

As long as you never invite them in.

So they’re also like vampires.

Vampire geese.

reshared this

in reply to Sarah Brown

This has been the case in Austria, but as of January 2024 they're making the TV license fee mandatory on all households (which begs the question of why they can't just do it all out of taxation rather than giving me paperwork as insult added to the injury of paying nearly 200 euros a year for a "service" that's totally useless to me).
in reply to James Baillie

@James Baillie I think public service broadcasting should be funded by a broadband levy, collected through ISPs.
in reply to Sarah Brown

the very first letter to my newly built flat was a death threat from TVL. Stating they had written multiple times. Which was odd as a) the roof went on a month before and b) it didn't exist on the post office list until a few days prior...

I was livid

in reply to Sarah Brown

As an American, it boggles that anyone pays a direct tax (let's call it what it is) on public television. Here it's funded by donations and recurring support from various sources with maybe a smidge of tax dollars and to be blunt a good portion of it is BBC content, which I imagine the BBC is being paid for. And maybe that sounds horrifying and unstable, but it's really not. People pay into it and if they have a pledge drive every once in a while, they back it up with special content. It's basically the truest form of socialism we have here.
in reply to Sarah Brown

When you realize how fascist UK Socialism is, you see why Orwell was opposed to it. It's nearly as bad as Soviet Communism.
in reply to Sarah Brown

I once lived in a flat in a weird corner of two roads - two addresses were used for it interchangeably. We had a TV License for one address but got constant grief about the other. We decided to ignore it and they told us "we're freezing your bank accounts!!!" When nothing happened we realised they were liars and thought no more about it.
in reply to Effie

@Effie Yeah. They are full of shit. The problem is that they terrify vulnerable people with their toothless "we are the gestapo and we are coming for you and your little dog" crap.
Unknown parent

@MarjorieGotSmaller There's just a man in the back who has to spin the antenna by hand. "Please don't tell anyone"