Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 December 2009

It was half an hour before the Spectator’s Christmas carol service, at which I was to read a lesson, and I was just putting on a tie in my London flat.

It was half an hour before the Spectator’s Christmas carol service, at which I was to read a lesson, and I was just putting on a tie in my London flat.

It was half an hour before the Spectator’s Christmas carol service, at which I was to read a lesson, and I was just putting on a tie in my London flat. The intercom bell rang and a man said that he had come to see me. Then the receiver started squeaking with feedback and I could hear nothing more. The porter of our mansion block then rang me. Two men, he said, were on their way up in the lift. Since I had no idea who they were, I asked him to take them back into the hall and find out. He did so, and rang back. They were called, I think they said, Roger Spriddell and Denis Clayden, and they were from Capita. Capita, I remembered, is the company charged with the collection of the BBC licence fee. (It is interesting that the BBC and its arm, TV licensing, do not use their own names when doing the rougher side of the work.) So here, at last, were the people who had been threatening me for years with an investigation for the licence I don’t have for the television I don’t have in my London flat. I went down and said hello to them. They were burly but respectable-looking men in Barbours — ex-policemen, I judged. With a tactful cough, Mr Spriddell sought to conduct our conversation in private away from the porter, but I did not mind having it with witnesses. I explained that I did not have a licence and objected to the offensive letters. But Mr Spriddell said that this was not what he had come about.

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