Life is Unreal

Over at the Belmont Club, Wretchard illustrates the insanity of government regulations:

Everyone who owns a television set, set top box or a tuner card for a computer in Britain has to pay the BBC for the privilege. "A colour TV Licence costs £135.50 and a black and white licence costs £45.50." Per year.

Never let it be said that the British regulators aren't fair, however. There is a generous discount for the blind:

If you or someone you live with is blind, you qualify to receive a 50% concession on the cost of your TV Licence. If the person who is blind isn't the current licence holder for your address, you first need to transfer the licence into their name. To do this, call us on 0870 241 6468 and we'll talk you through what you need to do.

Now, when I was young and dumb and full of, er, dumbness, I fractured a few laws, as Axle Foley might say. One of those was to alter my cable box so that I could watch HBO without paying for it. No doubt this is just one more item on my resume which will ensure me a room in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because it occurs to me that a tax on owning a TV set might tempt some otherwise law-abiding Brits to cheat the system - I mean, how is anyone going to know whether or how many TV sets you have? And this is where the story gets completely bizarro. Apparently, the BBC uses "detector vans" to ensure compliance:

Our TV detector vans and enforcement officers are equipped with state-of-the-art detection equipment which can tell in as little as 20 seconds whether you are using a TV. We have a range of detection tools at our disposal in our vans. Some aspects of the equipment have been developed in such secrecy that engineers working on specific detection methods work in isolation - so not even they know how the other detection methods work. This gives us the best chance of catching licence evaders. We can use a hand-held scanning device. These measure both the direction and strength of a signal, making it easy for us to locate TVs - even in the hardest to reach places.

As Wretchard points out, there is some debate over whether the detector vans actually exist - but the idea is just mind-boggling, isn't it?

Someone please tell me this is just an April Fool's Joke.