PETER HITCHENS: I still cough up the licence fee, but I really can't see why I should as TV slowly dies By Peter Hitchens for The Daily Mail Published: 17:12 BST, 7 August 2024 | Updated: 17:12 BST, 7 August 2024 e-mail View comments The other day I had my TV aerial removed. The builders were on the roof anyway. So, as I have often wondered if some violent wind would one day rip the wobbly antenna down, taking the chimney with it, I asked them to do this simple job.
It crossed my mind that none of my TV signals came into the house through this array of grey metal any more, so what was the point of leaving it there? Many of my neighbours in our Neville Chamberlain-era road have done the same. The houses all look far better without aerials and an amazing thing happens once they are down. Albanian scrap merchants appear, within half an hour, as if they have smelt the newly-downed apparatus from afar, begging to be allowed to take it away for nothing.
Perhaps, like catalytic convertors, they contain some precious metal. Anyway, they are gone, and it symbolises the end of an important part of my life and of the life of the nation. TV watching, once universal and communal, is fading away, supplanted by phone and laptop.
Peter Hitchens notes that from the moment he began watching TV, his imagination and concentration began to shrivel I am a child of the age of TV. While my boarding schools took a stern view of the device, my parents quite quickly discovered that they could leave my .