The joy of writing a blog is the feedback. In recent weeks I’ve written about giving your favourite book to a friend, with the result that an old school chum is threatening to send me his favourite book on cricket. An exploration of the paranormal prompted an invitation to a reincarnation weekend, which I declined on the grounds that I’d attended one in a past life.

The record was last week’s blog about digital television. It wasn’t the technology that got my correspondents excited, it was the idea of ditching the TV license. “You can’t do that!” they all cried, which translates as: “If you do that we’ll all be jealous and upset!” Well, noisy readers, you can relax. After further research, it looks like the only way to avoid the BBC tax is to join the Amish or go live in a cave.

The TV License Authority can’t yet demand you have a license just because you have broadband. The Beeb has only recently started streaming programmes live over the web. Hitherto, the iPlayer was a playback service, an online video which self-destructs after seven days. Running a couple of hours after the event kept it exempt from the license fee. That loophole’s days look numbered.

Elsewhere, the license fee looks increasingly like a relic from a previous age. The latest tangle is created by the Beeb pushing video to mobile devices accessing local wireless networks. Technically they are watching live TV and need a license. If you do it on batteries, your home must have the license. If you plug your netbook into the mains as you sit in a hotel lobby, the premises supplying the electricity has to have the license. No getting round it by sitting in the street with your TV dinner watching The Sopranos via a Starbucks wi-fi network.

The TV Licensing Authority claims that all TV viewing has to be licensed. Up to a point. Not if you watch non-UK sourced TV via satellite (it’s not just Sky up there, you know). I get the impression if they had their way they’d license our eyeballs.

It’s easier to pay the thing and consider it an unwelcome addition to income tax. To be honest, I only wanted rid of it as a gesture of defiance at the increasing levels of dross on the box. I probably get my money’s worth out of umpteen hours of Radio 3 and 7 every week. (I also listen to the World Service but that isn’t funded by the License Fee.) Probably. Did I mention that the license fee has gone up this month? Or that European state subsidies to public broadcasting total 22 billion euros, making it the third largest after agriculture and transport? If I was inclined towards left-wing paranoia I might think politicians are putting an awful lot of money into keeping the masses doped.

Fortunately I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. They’re just a plot to distract us from what’s really going on.