You Are Probably a Criminal

There is a considerable chance that you are a criminal. I thought it best to let you know. You may have questions, given how hard you’ve tried to do good. Last week, you even paused on Market Street to give a grimaced smile in the vague direction of a half-remembered friend-of-a-friend. Yet British law considers only the actus reus, and the offence you may have committed is one of strict liability.

A television, receiving power from the mains. A remote, powered by AAs. A finger, pressing the ‘on’ button. The screen is animated with a rerun of Naked and Afraid. If you’ve failed to hand over £180 to the BBC, the nee-naw of a police car and the dull thwack of a nitrile glove await you.

Perhaps, inspired by The Traitors, you think you can get away with it under cover of a lamp-strangling Scottish night. Regrettably, the BBC has its best people devising ways to catch you. Agents will feel the back of your television for the warmth of Naked Attraction if you let them in. They will check a smart TV’s recent apps for iPlayer if you hand over the remote. Most importantly, they wage a psychological cold war.

Genuine detection methods are hard to discern from myths built to coax the one thing that secures prosecution: a confession. Allegedly, optical flicker sensors match window-reflected light to live broadcast data, and a fleet of detection vans locates unlicensed receivers. The myths do their job: at its peak, roughly 30% of all criminal convictions against women in England and Wales were for non-payment of a TV licence.

The absurdity extends to the rules themselves. Take your laptop charger out of the wall, and your parents' licence covers you; plug it in, and you are committing a crime. Sign a lease with friends and one licence covers the flat; put a lock on your bedroom door, and you owe the BBC £180 of your own.

The logic was sound in June 1946, when the first dedicated licence taxed a device owned by 20,000 households. The machine’s sole purpose of live broadcasting encouraged a single payment, soon funding the BBC's intravenous drip of Café Continental: a cabaret of showgirls in fishnets. Eighty years on, television has grown steadily bolder while the way we pay for it has remained unchanged. Josephine Baker’s Schiaparelli gown gave way to The Naked Chef in 1999 and, free of the 1948 Green Book morality guide, Naked Attraction in 2016. The licence itself is still wearing the demob suit of 1946, and bills you £180 for the nudity whichever channel it’s on. 

For decades, the television was the living room’s hearth. Chairs that once faced each other reoriented towards a screen; dinner tables became lightweight folding trays. Now, weekly reach for the BBC Scotland channel has fallen to 12% of Scots. Nobody abandoned it over the laptop-charger rule; the two are the same fact seen from different ends. One set watched by many has become many screens, each watched by one, each showing something else.

When John Cleese defended the BBC licence fee in a 1985 advertisement, he asked what the broadcaster had given us. Forty years later, a slick new ad sees Romesh Ranganathan asking what it has done for me. The pronoun’s shift from “us” to “me” tracks the privatisation of the public broadcaster’s relationship with its audience. The BBC wants to have it both ways: it uses the personalised language of Netflix while retaining the enforcement powers of the state. In this new commercial landscape, the criminal has officially been rebranded as the customer.

Few places are more exposed to this reconfiguration than St Andrews. There’s no central cinema, and students are siloed in whichever streaming service their parents pay for. Yet the appetite for a shared touchstone survives, unchanged since Café Continental: we like watching people get undressed, of clothes or of alibis, together. Forty students are currently playing a live game of The Traitors, borrowing from television what it can no longer guarantee: a reason to gather and distrust each other. By the BBC's logic, most of them are already Traitors.

Illustration by Alice O'Sullivan