The Spectator's Notes

12 April 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

By chance, my latest threatening letter from TV Licensing (see many previous Notes) arrived with the same post as a direct mail shot from Sky TV. The TV Licensing letter attacked me for not responding to ‘our recent warning’ that I was soon to receive an ‘enforcement visit’. I may suffer a court appearance and a fine, it went on, and concluded: ‘You must not ignore this letter.’ I shall ignore it, however, since my reason for not buying a television licence is that I do not have a television. The Sky TV letter was much more cheerful: ‘Your flat’s all set up for Sky TV’, it announced on the envelope, and offered me TV, Broadband and Sky Talk landline calls for £16 a month all in. The first sentence of the letter says, ‘We believe that your building has a communal satellite system, which means you could enjoy all Sky has to offer in your flat without having your own minidish.’ The two letters almost perfectly illustrate the difference between a free-market system and a government-ordered one. Both want my money, for comparable services, but the agency of the BBC has to claim it by law and demand it with menaces, whereas the free-market Sky knows that it can only get it by being nice to me and offering me something I might want. I shall not pay money to either, as it happens, but, unusually (see above), I find myself having a warm feeling about Rupert Murdoch.

In fairness to the BBC, however, have you noticed how good Radio 4 has now become? It is starting once again to give meaning to the idea of public service broadcasting. The programmes look behind current trends, asking interesting questions. They tell the listener about other people, other places, other times. Without being obscure, they are intelligent and educated, and assume a desire to learn on the part of the listener. I would specifically praise this change as the work of Mark Damazer, the Controller of Radio 4, if I didn’t think it would damage his career.

Weather forecasters constantly talk about temperatures ‘struggling’, but they are always represented as struggling in only one direction — upwards. This is a version of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in which human beings attribute their own feelings to forces which cannot feel. As we built a five-foot snowman in the garden on Sunday, I was convinced of the opposite: temperatures are resolutely struggling downwards and, judging by the rest of the week at the time of writing, succeeding.