TV: Is it Worth It?

TVs help you procrastinate. They mean you don’t actually have to interact with your housemates. They’re expensive to buy and to license. They cause arguments, tension, bloodbaths.

On the other hand, they allow you to watch Countdown, Pointless, E4 reruns and Great British Bake Off at your leisure, so all that seems pretty negligible.

The only real sticking point is price, and even that’s negotiable. The enterprising student is a fully equipped scrounger. When begging a TV, relatives are the first port of call. After that, maybe try Freecycle. Our house’s was stolen from my sister. It’s deeper than it is wide, takes four people to carry, and has chips in the plastic from where we dropped it down a flight of stairs.

Next point of household contention is licensing. It’s worth knowing your way around the laws on this, so here they are:

• Licenses are £145.50 for the year, which is well worth it if you have a big house to share the cost. Plus, call it off when you leave and you can get a rebate for the portion of the year you weren’t connected.
• If you have separate tenancy agreements and lockable doors, you probably need a separate license for every room with a TV. Unless you’re loaded, don’t even consider it. Just share. Your housemates can’t be that bad.
• As long as you’re not watching live TV, you’re not in violation. Licenseless, you can still watch shows belatedly online. It got you through first year, didn’t it?
• You don’t need a license if you’re unconnected. That makes gaming, DVDs, and connecting a laptop to stream on a bigger screen, free. (The latter requires either a HDMI cable, or a Scart to HDMI.)
• I hear that without a warrant, licensing representatives can’t come into your house and search for a TV or, if they can, they can’t move stuff. If someone knocks on the door, throw a sheet over the TV and unplug it from the wall. Lie brazenly, then let me know whether it works.

Now we’re not encouraging anything, but if you see this van, hide.

Be canny, and getting a TV won’t cost you. There are loads listed on Ebay for under a tenner, so long as you don’t mind an older model and brain-numbing static. That’s definitely worthwhile. Otherwise you have nothing to point your furniture at and people avoid the communal space.

If you can’t live without The Big Bang Theory or Pointless, the TV license is probably worth it. Between six people, a license (not considering rebate) costs about two quid a month. We might be fresh out of our overdrafts right now but remember: £2 doesn’t go very far elsewhere.