Decision time...?

It'll soon be midnight and the start of a brand New Year, 2012, the year the Olympics come to London. Happy New Year to all my readers.

More significantly, at midnight my TV licence is due for renewal.

I cancelled the Direct Debit 6 months ago, as I was not sure that I wanted to renew the TV licence this year. Now I've got to take the final decision one way or the other. Do I renew my TV Licence for another year, and pay Brucie's wages, or do I take what feels like the very big step of getting rid of of the TV...?

Because I live on my own, I've got the option of doing so. It is a question that is worth thinking about.

Many readers, no doubt, will think that I'm crazy. How can anybody possibly live without a TV I hear you all thinking. That Worzel's a Looney...!

Well you may be right, but I've observed that over the last few months I've hardly watched any TV. And I haven't really missed it. Nothing really interests me that much. I can get all the news that I need by listening to the radio and reading the interweb, possibly buying a newspaper if something significant has happened.

I tend to watch maybe 15 minutes of TV news whilst I'm scoffing my evening meal, then I turn off the TV and it stays off for the rest of the evening, a monument to the 20th century these days rather than an integral part of my life.

Breakfast TV is dreadful.

Daytime TV isn't much better.

If I want to watch Andrew Neil in the Politics Show, I can always use Iplayer.

The One Show never challenges me intellectually...

Bloody Eastenders doesn't interest me in the slightest. Neither do any of the other TV soap opera's. They seem to drive societies decline rather than reflect it, so I won't give them houseroom...

TV documentaries seem to be very drawn out these days, filling two hours of airtime with 15 minutes of vaguely interesting new material...

Formula One is going to Sky and I'm certainly not going to pay Murdock to watch his channels if I've also got to buy a TV licence to keep Auntie's show on the road....

Dr Who completely lost me earlier this year, with some ridiculous plots. I watched the Christmas special which was OK, very Xmassy, but generally speaking Dr Who is no longer worth the expensive electricity that I have to burn in order to watch it...

Christmas TV in general was useless this year. Mind numbingly boring...

Top Gear has gone a bit silly, I'll miss the daft buggers, but they're not worth £145 a year..

I doubt I'll watch much of the Olympics, even if I had a TV. Athletics etc doesn't interest me. There are no events that burn petrol in the Olympics....!

News 24 and Channel 4 News will definitely be missed, but I think I can adapt to live without them.

The analogue signal is due to be switched off in the Meridian region in a couple of months time and I've been told that my old ITV Digital set-top box will no longer work, so I'll have to invest in some new equipment in the near future...

So not having a TV is not such a crazy idea, if I look at it rationally.

Trouble is, I've grown up with the TV. It has been part of my life for the best part of 50 years. Can I really do without it? It is a big decision, a life changing decision...!

One has got to question these things though, rather than carry on regardless because that's what everybody else does and what I'm expected to do.

Whatever I decide over the next few hours, I'll be playing it completely straight.
If I haven't got a TV licence, I won't have any TV receiving equipment installed in my house.
Anybody and everybody is welcome to come in at random and take a butchers.

My TV will be disconnected and stuffed in the cupboard under the stairs, stored carefully for somebody to take to the Antiques Roadshow in a hundred years time...

End of year update on that petition...!

Well it has taken a while, but my e-petition which proposes to "Prevent Councillors from serving on several Councils" has now amassed 50 signatures. There's still a long way to go, a very long way to go, but my thanks to everybody who has helped to get it this far, particularly Cllr Dan Clarke who has helped enormously with the last ten signatures, which have accumulated in less than a week...!

50 signatures is an important milestone.

Important because the petition has now reached the point where it falls into the first few pages of the e-petitions website, particularly if you filter down to view only those petitions for the Department for Communities and Local Government. That should mean that it is viewed more often when people are scrolling through the list of petitions. Sooner or later, it will gain momentum and attract signatures just through being somewhere near the top of the list...

My original posting on this subject can be seen here.

One thing that I hadn't realised at the time I launched the petition, is that there are other problems with Councillors serving on several Councils.

One of them quite unexpectedly came to light at a Council meeting I attended recently. It was something of a gift actually. I couldn't quite believe my luck.

One of the Councillors at the Town Council meeting quite innocently queried the minutes of the "Community & Culture" sub-committee, which appeared to be missing, whereupon it emerged that the meeting had to be abandoned because a quorum (of three) couldn't be raised. It then emerged that at least one of the Councillors due to attend had thought it more important to attend a Borough meeting which had been scheduled for the same evening.

Cllr Bloom clearly noted my presence and made the connection to my petition. I noticed that she tried to limit the damage (well done Louise, honour is due!), but Cllr Dan just walked straight into it. Any citizen journalist or professional hack worthy of their name would have reported this, maybe not on the front page, but it was an obvious story.

The full story is here, on Eastleigh News, which has blown up into a much bigger discussion than I ever expected when I reported the story. It is currently the second most commented-upon story in the history of Eastleigh News.

Which is amazing, because I just wrote about what happened at the Town Council meeting as factually and as neutrally and as boringly as I possibly could, and posted a link to the petition without any sort of promotional comment. I thought I had been quite restrained...!

What I hadn't realised, was that Cllr Dan Clarke was the Labour PPC for Eastleigh who defected to the Lib Dems in 2009, clearly annoying the hell out of his Labour colleagues who still have a few scores to settle. I don't blame them actually, as they'd clearly invested a lot of time, money and personal support into their PPC...

As you'll see in the discussion, I concede that it probably was the right decision for Cllr Dan to attend the Borough meeting, but the key point is that because the Town Council couldn't raise a quorum for the "Community & Culture" sub-committee meeting, it was unable to get its business done...

My argument is that if Councillors were only permitted to serve on one tier of Local Government, this sort of situation would be less likely to arise. Hedge End Town Council would have been more likely to raise a quorum for this meeting if it didn't have some of the Borough Councillors in its ranks...

Though to be fair to Cllr Dan, in this particular case the problem seems to have at least as much to do with some of the other Town Councillors simply not being bothered to attend...

But that's another story.

Things aren't quite as they should be in Hedge End...