Are TV Detector Vans a Myth? 

Some years ago whilst working for the electricity board. We were called to west Windsor for high voltage fault. The whole of west Windsor was without electric. When we arrived there my partner and myself spotted a TV detector van, operating. The two of us walked up to the van. And the operator had the back door open and was sitting there twiddling his knob, whoops, knobs. We asked him had he found any houses without a licence. Replied, "a few and that was only after twenty minutes or so." The two of us then explained to him that whole area had been off supply for the past two hours. Reaction. Closed the doors and drove off. 😁

My Dad was a TV repair tech in the 70’s /80’s remember them.!!! His mate was one of the supposed TV detector van operatives ,it was an empty van....🤣🤣🤣🤣

The irony of watching interesting RU-vid content on my TV without a TV licence because I only watch RU-vid.

When I was a student back in the late eighties my flatmates and I got out of paying for a TV licence by writing back to the BBC telling them that we were members of "The Brethren" (a religious sect similar to the Amish that doesn't allow television). It actually worked!

There has not been a single court case where evidence from a 'detector' has been introduced and used to support a prosecution. Go figure.

Simple solution: When the television detector man Mr. Bastard (his friends call him "Right Bleeding") knocks on your door; get Vyvyan to eat the tele. It worked on "The Young Ones".

For the last TEN YEARS I have done that, informed the bbc that I do not own or rent a tv, yet they still insist I am breaking the law by not having a license. Even when I invited the Inspector inside my property. NOW I just ignore their SCAM LETTERS.

I’ve not had a licence now for 10 years and the rule of thumb is if you ever get a knock on the door just close it as these goons have as much right to come into your house as a double glazing salesman and no communication means no fine. Even if they look in your window and saw you watching live tv it can’t be used as evidence just remember no name no fine and sign nothing and you can’t go far wrong.

You missed the single, most important point about any form of detection device - their evidence CANNOT be used in any court in the UK! This is because the BBC has always refused to explain how the devices work which means that a defendant cannot contest the devices accuracy therefore it is impossible for them to have a fair trial. There have been many attempts to obtain the technical details, including frredom of information requests but they have all been refused - this is why not a single court case has ever been offered "detector" evidence.

Biggest con was making people believe these vans or hand held devices could detect a TV. I used to see them all the time slowly driving down the street to terrify people with neighbours chapping each other's door to spread the word.

Bunch of bullies. We had an empty house (my nan's) and even after we'd politely phoned and explained it was an empty property they continued with the passive aggressive letters. Once we started ignoring them they got even more snotty! I eventually had to ring up and Impolitely explain the situation to get them to shut up and **** off

I had a friend who worked for the BBC technical services - He swore they didn't really exist ... Just a nasty fear campaign

A military spokesman was once quoted as saying that even they didn’t have the technology to detect an electrical device receiving radio signals, and even if it did exist it would never fit inside a van.

"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." As an engineer, that's hilarious bullshit.

I grew up with my parents owning a TV and Radio repair, sales and rental shop. My dad always said the detector vans were a load of rubbish. Now living on a boat, I don't have a TV, I haven't had one for over 10 years.

They did look pretty cool with those giant antennas on the roof, but the 1984-esque surveillance aspect is certainly pretty disturbing!

Hello from Denmark. We have the same licensing system, the same TV detector vans, and the same rumours the vans were just for show. There's a funny anecdote about the 1976 licensing campaign: It was a combination of a TV spot and two letters to the public. One letter, with a green dot, was sent to every houshold with a licens. When the postman came to a house that didn't get a green letter, he was supposed to give them the other letter which had a red dot. The green letter was a polite "thank you for paying". The red letter was a very stern reminder that owning a TV without a license - "dark viewing" (sort seer) - was illigal. All the letters were delivered on the very same day, and on that day (in the evening) the TV spot was aired: Popular comic actors played a family who received the red, threatening letter, and then the neighbor came by and reminded them of all the distributors on Danish radio. It only costs X kroner a day for all the great content. The campaign was a hughe succes. 150.000 new houshold signed up. But it was also very controversial. It's legal to send a letter to all your customers you have in your register, but when you use the postman to search out the families who are not in the register .... let's just say they never used the method again.

The BBC's quality dropped off a cliff when the cuts hit in the great recession. Don't have a license, don't want one, get all my entertainment online.

They aren’t real. The vans existed to scare but the technology didn’t exist. There was a huge fidonet thread on this in the early 90s where telecom and TV folks let the cat out of the bag. They would see who didn’t have a license, park the van outside and ring the door bell and say “we detected a Tv in use within these premises...” people seeing the uniform and van parked outside were quick to own up to avoid larger fines.

Here in Italy they recently "solved" the problem by including the TV license into the electricity bill, claiming that now everyone with a smartphone can watch RAI's crap.

I got a look in a Commer detector van some time, I’m guessing in the early 70s, the big Ariel on the roof wasn’t connected to anything inside. My dad said the driver had a list of tv licences on a street and they drove round looking for a tv through the lounge window or an Ariel on the house.

This is almost Orwell-like.

Here's what really happened. A total of24 Commer Cob vans were modified for this work. It was intended that each of the 11 TV regions would get 2 vans. The remaining 2 would be kept at the Depot in Stanmore Middlesex as spares. The BBC tried to prosecute a Scottish viewer but the viewer discovered that politicians would not allow them to be deployed in Northern Ireland. The viewer screamed "Discrimination" and the judge agreed. The politicians refused to back down so the vans were scrapped. They were rust buckets and often failed their MOT test They didn't work either and as the aerials were made of polystyrine the snapped off if the driver exceeded about 40mph. .

Worked for the post office (as was) BT (as is) back in the early 80s. Never worked with the detector vans directly; however, the word in the company was that there were only a handful of vans that had real detector kit in them. There may certainly have been a number of others with non-functional or even no kit inside. It didn't matter that much. Word was that they just drove them around town centres, parking here and there and maybe doing the odd interview with the local press or radio on why they were in town. That was all they needed to do,

If everyone didn't put their TV by the downstairs window and didn't invite inspectors in, the TV licence would disappear. It's the people who let them in who keep that method going.

In Australia, we got rid of the license fee because everybody had TV anyway so they just used general revenue.

Thought I was whatching a ChilliJonCarne video at first!🤣

I remember seeing one during the early 00's, parked near the student residences in my university campus. Did seem like a prop to me, though, as the antenna never moved, nor there was any activity around it whatsoever, during the day it stayed parked in the middle of a field, near the aforementioned residences.

My favourite clip on TV detection was in the young ones where Vivian eats the TV to avoid the detector man.

I cancelled my subscription, and abide by all the rules for not using BBC services. The final straw was when they started charging me £25 per month in advance for two years payment period. That and some heavily implied political bias and cronyism

In the earlier days, it was certainly possible, even quite easy, to detect a TV. When colour TV came along, they transmitted even more hash and were even easier to detect, even if you couldn't generally detect the channel they were watching. Detecting the channel would mean looking for the local oscillator frequency, which is a relatively small signal compared to the hash coming off a 22" Decca Bradford hybrid TV from the early 1970s. Flat panel sets would be essentially impossible to differentiate from a computer monitor since they are more or less just that.

To force someone to pay for something they dont even use should be illegal. I wonder what would happen if Netflix removed the subscription and charged people even if they dont use it?

Significantly more money leaves me via Patreon for You Tube creators than a TV Licence would cost. I probably ought to cut back on that :)

Radios used to be licensed to fund the BBC but once they became portable and ubiqutous they gave up and just focused on TV licenses. TVs have followed the same fate -- what was once a relatively rare, large, power hungry box is now something that slips into your pocket, has numerous other functions and pretty much everyone has one.

keep the bbc independent of government and advertising....it's amazing value for money. i think the bbc should also look at international subscribers.

That white detector van was the type I saw once in the 80's when I was a kid living in Wales. It was driving around the country lanes next to no houses there huge fields, just the odd farmhouse. I'm sure they just wanted to be seen rather than actually doing anything. What I find curious in that all these years where people tell stories of what jobs they have worked in the past as far as I know there have been no online interviews or forum posts with anyone who worked on these vans.

Remember the days before tv was invented? You used to need a licence to listen to the radio!

TV detector vans always sounded like part of a threatening PR campaign - But hey, the BBC have always been good with props. :) Our family moved recently to a house which has both a name and a number - For some reason our TV licence is registered to the house name, but not the number, even though both count as the same address. We're currently getting angry letters from TV licensing, and for months they've been threatening us with a "visit" from an enforcer, normally using letters in red envelopes. It's a good thing we've still opted for a physical copy of our up-to-date TV licence, registered under our name and address, so we can wave it in front of them if they do decide to visit. It's disgusting that they've even threatening their paying customers, though. We haven't contacted them to correct them on this principle - It should be their responsibility to update their database and realise that both our house name and number are one and the same. It'll be interesting to find out what happens if they take us to court over this.

The map for Portugal is wrong. There's an about 3€ fee/tax added every month to every single domestic electricity bill to fund public broadcasting. It seems the assumption is that any household connected to the electrical grid will watch RTP content at some point and such draconian licensing as in the UK would obviously be deemed illegal as it's incredibly privacy invading

All smoke and mirrors, empty vans with dummy antennas on the roof!

I think the last time I had seen a detector van driving around our streets in Germany was in the early 80s, maybe as a kind of farewell as it was common knowledge that they couldn't single out a household with an unlicensed TV set in a city area. But as someone mentioned it below, Germany found a far more effective solution: tax everyone.

Does this mean the Cat Detector Van from the Ministry of Housinge ("I never seen so many bleedin' aerials") wasn't real either? ...

I'm just sitting here in the U.S. shaking my head in disbelief. Britannia, rule the (air) waves, I guess? Orwellian, indeed. there has to be a better way than to criminalize pensioners and single mothers trying to scrape by.

My late mum didn't like their attitude towards her, so she always refused to let them in or reply to their letters. She could have just let them in and they'd have seen she didn't have a TV or a computer, but she always refused. :)

We had them in Norway, now the state channel/radio is deducted from the tax for anyone with a normal income. For a time it was locked to tv purchase, so if you ever bought a new TV in your name. Now everyone with a job basically has to pay

They should make the bbc a subscription channel

There used to be a “radio receiving license” in Canada at one point but it was suspended in WW. II to encourage radio use, and was never re-instituted.

The BBC is a bargain next to other tv services and no adverts. It also goes to reduce the cost of other tv services in the UK. In America, you are lucky if you can get any free channels and the cost of satellite or cable is a lot more than they cost in the UK. 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🤠👍

Wait, you have to pay money to watch free to air TV? That’s so weird. I never lived in a country that has that.

I learned something new today. I had never heard of that funding system before

1 of the best things Australia did was in1972 we got rid of our tv licence ( to pay for our ABC ( like your BBC)) Instead our taxes pay for it . Like Sweden we had people knocking on our door . Pity our ABC is as bad if not worst than your BBC

Wait... What? UK still enforcing TV licence? In Malaysia it officially ended in 1999 but people weren't paying since early 90s anyway.

Fact is there has been NO PROSECUTIONS from "TV Detector" vans...

I haven't had a licence for years and I still watch live TV. The British Bullshit Corporation still haven't and won't convict me. I hope the BBC see this

In this video, Little car goes all 'ChilliJonCarne'. 😃😃

The only thing I can think of, when an analogue tv with an aerial connected, they look with a spectrum analyzer if they can detect the local oscillator signal from the tv tuner bleeding into the aerial. The frequency of that LO is in direct relation with the receiving frequency.

My father is not a radio amateur, but he still experimented with TV reception antennas. One day a car with antennas drove through the village trying to get radio directions. Father quickly ran to his system and unplugged the power supply. The van drove away. But there was also the story of the CB radio operator a few towns away. This had unlicensed hardware in use when transmitting, especially HF transmitter amplifiers. The authorities confiscated the transmitting devices. These vehicles with antennas can primarily locate transmitters. Either you are sending something illegally or a signal is being emitted unintentionally after a frequency conversion. But today it is hardly possible to locate something like that because there is a lot of high-frequency garbage in the air.

I don't remember the last time I watched TV. Almost everything I watch is on DVD or RU-vid.

They caught a lot of people because of the fact that TVs were either bought on HP or were delivered by the shop to the customer, so there was a name and address, this info was then submitted to the government, the smart money bought a 2nd hand TV, no records then

Just love these. Would you be able to do the Tamiya story. As a modle car fan for over 40 years that would be great to see 👍👍

After the failure with collecting TV fee here in my country they put the payment as part of the electricity bill. After many people just started to pay only the "electricity part" of the bill they pressed on the cable companies to charge each customer extra for the TV subscription fee effectively doubling the cable TV price overnight ☹

I'm astonished. I didn't know about this TV license-to-watch fee. And I suppose that TV stations still had commercial breaks for broadcasting publicity on top of that? Anyway, very interesting video, thanks for sharing for free! ;-)

Load of s**te. Not paid for a TV licence for about 4 years, still never been fined.

They did exist but I’m not sure that they could detect TVs nowadays. Cathode ray tubes emitted radiation that could be detected at some distance and someone could see what was on your screen. I was in communications in the Royal Navy and we used signal insulation around communications equipment compartments to block the emission of this radiation.

Correction. The Dutch Public service has adverts on it. They are shown between programmes rather than during. This is less intrusive and makes for better viewing (IMHO). Funding is partly by taxes. Nearly all of the country is served by cable TV. feeds for this are relatively low. Deepening on the service provider and package they can watch the various channels of the BBC.

The ad from 6:47 is from Ireland, not the UK. RTÉ is also funded through advertising.

Wow, that opening advert is super big brotherly.

Sweden has also moved the fee to a form of tax. One can wonder if there are any risks of the public tv network becoming more political when there is a possible chance for the politicians to put up conditions that suites their own agenda?

always wondered about this, but then again, since every household had a TV, you could just point at any domicile and say 'there's a TV in there' making TV detector vans redundant. Monitors were a grey area, so were satellite dishes and PC tuner cards. It was a bit of a mess. Pretty sure the Google Street View car counts as a detector van :)

May have worked in the past, detecting a CRT, but not now with all Telly's being flat screen LCD - and many just used as monitors for games consoles.

Nice shot of the Auto-Magic Car Park at 2:13. I parked in it this week. Sadly it's very dilapidated now. NCP spends just enough on maintenance to keep it usable but not a penny more.

You could probably detect a signal the Chroma crystal in a CRT TV set, that would allow you to differentiate between a B&W set and a colour one. The other possibility with CRT sets is the detecting the interference from the High voltage circuit for the Tube, in a colour set it is much higher than a B&W set.

All I remember about this advert is my Dad muttering bollocks whenever it came on and calling my Auntie soft for believing it.

It's only if you watch 'live' broadcasts that you need a licence for! Watching pre-recorded programmes & repeats should be free, right? The BBC get round that by saying that even if you don't watch 'live' tv - the fact that your set is capable of receiving 'live' broadcast leaves you liable to pay. The only way round it is to de-tune your set so that it is incapable of receiving BBC channels at all. I was told that by a tv licence inspector!

Total BS. Detection of a receiver is impossible. RF engineer 30ys.

I immediately thought of the Young Ones episode in which the TV detector turns up at the door, and Vivian has to eat the television.

In Germany before the general fee for all households, you also only had to pay when you owend a TV. But they did not use vans, they just knocked on your door. They could not enter, but depending on the daytime they had a good Chance to hear the TV running. Or they just mentioned that there has been a Problem with the Service and asked if the quality was back to normal....

"fund national broadcasting" - why not instead not fund national TV broadcasting using taxpayers money, problem solved now that the BBC or RTÉ or whoever can be privatised on the stock exchange so no more TV License/Tax

I am American citizen, however I heard about this paying for TV in the 80s as a kid. There was news story stating that the detector vans had been broken for years, but they just drove them down the street to scare people into paying their bills. I think the best way to handle a TV tax would be just a tax on all new television sets. Glad that PBS can't do this to us, however they just get 10% of their funds from our Taxes anyway, which is probably more wrong than what the BBC is doing.

It's possible to identify the use of a CRT by the electromagnetic emissions. It's possible to identify the use of some equipment capable of receiving live broadcasts but not whether the broadcasts are actually live.

Well, it breaks down like this. Not only do they not exist, but they would be entirely redundant. A device that detects a working TV would not be sufficient for the task, as you can own and operate a hundred TV's, and not need a licence, or you could operate zero TV's, but actually need a licence. The licence is not for the TV. It's for watching or recording live broadcast, or for watching BBC catchup. Simply put, TVL have a full list of UK addresses, cross-referenced with a full list of issued licences, so know which properties are without a licence. Armed with that knowledge, they dispatch a salesperson to visit the property. This is a sales and information gathering exercise, where the attempt is to persuade the owner to buy a licence, or to gather sufficient evidence so that a magistrate will grant a search warrant, and then hope they can enter and gather enough evidence for TVL to progress a court case. This person has no special powers beyond the next person in the street. There is no role such a detector plays in that dynamic, and not only have no warrants been issued on the back of one, they cannot be issued because then the BBC would have to explain to the legal authorities how they work, which they have persistently refused to do because doing so "would harm their ability to collect revenue". They may as well declare they have a crystal ball, and try to use that as evidence. They were, and remain, a scare-tactic intended to coerce the uninformed public into paying for the licence, which has become increasingly outdated. It remains one of the most scandalous cons of our time.

What would they do if everybody just stopped paying ? In reality you have to incriminate yourself to actually get prosecuted

Back in 1981 you were supposed to have a license to use a CB radio and that you can detect because you are transmitting a signal but a tv doesn’t

I'm not sure about the original ones, but putting aside they would never work for blocks of flats, by the time of the commerce van it was all a psychological trick - I've been told this from multiple reliable (even inside) sources. As at least one other here has mentioned the vans were to scare people, in reality they just used their list of houses that did not have a license and looked for a tell tale aerial and/or flickering lights.

Very interesting content,I'm from Brazil,I never heard nothing like this,licence for watch TV !!!!

ALL A CON.

I used to have a job delivering unpaid fine reminders and the vast majority was for non payment of tv licence or evading buying railway tickets.

l have a bachelor of science degree in electronic engineering and have worded for the MOD as a RF engineer for 3 decades. I work at the cutting edge of Electronics. The science is very very simple,... electronic tv detection devices cannot detect a signal emanating from any dwelling. The most laughable of all is when you could purchase either a blk and white tv licence or a colour one. if you are able to detect the difference between either signal,... there is a nobel prize in science waiting for you

In the early 1970's and as a Telecomms Engineer working for the then Post Office, we had the opportunity to apply for a 'rotation' in the vans. When they were in our area they would park their vans in our Parts Depot and so I would pass them every morning when I went to pick up my yellow work van. They had two large detectors on the top which could be used to triangulate the exact position of the TV emmision.

Cancelled my licence. Rang them. Easy. Didnt even argue. I really dont miss the woke bbc. Happy with netflix, prime and catchup.

Have you the video of the call with a TV Licensing agent where he admits they do not in fact work and explains how it’s actually done with records and mailings?

Don't watch live TV - no licence needed. Must say I have not missed it one bit. The BBC does not serve the public at all, they need to be made to compete in the open market. We all know what would happen in that situation though...

I live in the USA so forgive my ignorance but I never heard of such a thing. All the airwaves are free here. There is no way I would pay for a license to watch TV. Especially when the broadcast companies make billions on selling time for advertising. It makes no sense. We have the option to pay for cable tv to broaden our viewing content but local channels are free. As for myself I don't watch TV. I prefer the internet.

I'm 60 and I've only seen one once in my life. That was in the 1970s. Even though they're meant to be unmarked now, I'm fairly sure there are none left. Retailers have to send your details to the licensing agency when you buy a set now and for a while recently, when a flat I owned was empty, they wrote to me relentlessly asking if the address needed a license. At my workplace, they block use of the BBC iPlayer on the company WiFi, so if I want to watch it on my lunch break I have to use mobile data.

I remember when we had to pay a annual fee to have a C.B. radio in Australia, about $22 AUD back then when I had 1 in my car. Of course I never paid it.

Now that you have to sign in to watch any live or catch up services on iPlayer, the BBC just correlate the address you provide when you sign up, with the addresses of those who have paid the licence. There's nothing to stop you providing the address you are currently staying at, where the home owner pays a licence, whilst watching iPlayer on your laptop at that address.

the optical device used was the mk1 human eyeball.

In Sweden, they started broadcasting TV on internet and thus claimed license from everyone owning a smartphone, or a tablet or computer with internet connection. One citizen appealed since he claimed it did not work on his 1995 i486 computer that he used for surfing the net, and he won i several instances. After that the fees were moved to the ordinary tax. If you have an income, you pay. Period. Since then fewer people have to work collecting the fees. We also used to have TV detector vans and, more common, people working around with antennas trying to detect signals. But most offenders were caught just ringing the doorbell and seeing a running televisions or asking the occupants. Or they phoned you up and simply asked if you had a television, most would politely answer truthful. We had no fines though, at least you normally didn't get any, you were just automatically reported to start getting license bills, and nothing stopped you from calling them up and claiming you no longer owned a television. But one intrusive part of the law was that the tv shop had to report name of anyone buying a television, making may people buy there televisions under fake name. It was also possible to rebuild you television so it could not receive normal tv signals, just satellite. But I think they removed that after too many started using it, especially since the public channels were available on satellite.

I have NEVER watched live TV yet if I had a device CAPAPLE of receiving, I had to have a licence. Now all that has changed. Each year I have to sign a declaration to say that I am only watching DVD's.

Once saw a TV detector van, a white Leyland Sherpa with the relevant labelling. It was parked in the local supermarket car park one evening. I suspect it was just an empty van, but unlike the one depicted, looked just like any other white Leyland Sherpa.