Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.
> colour TV: £169.50 per year; monochrome TV: £57.00 per year; blind people: 50% discount
People who can't see their color TV at all pay more than people who can but have an old black-and-white one?
I've given this a lot of thought in the past. The best I could come up with is that "legally blind" could still allow for someone with _very poor_ (colour) vision...
Oh to be a a fly on the wall when the inspector has to explain the difference to a blind person.
I think it made a lot more sense in the past. The license is set up so it’s a consumption based tax rather than taxing everyone. So only people with TVs paid TV tax. If colour increased the costs, only people consuming colour paid those increases. I imagine it made much more sense before consumption was ubiquitous
If you're blind, you almost certainly qualify for a free license.
https://www.gov.uk/free-discount-tv-licence
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/for-your...
One single broadcast signal, and different capabilities of receivers.
I guess you _could_ have a modern digital receiver with SCART-out (if such a thing exists) to a B&W TV. This BBC article (2018) claims 7,000 people watching TV with a B&W licence – whether they were actually watching it in B&W is not known :-D
I don't know if the rules have changed since then, but if they are the same, then a battery-powered laptop would also be exempt (even in color.)