Giles Broadbent, not unlike his Freeview box, has a meltdown about the State's institutional mistrust of its citizens.
So, a while back, when I was supposed to, I retuned my Freeview box. I promptly lost half the channels but they were the poor half so I figured I could live without them.
I could be culturally diverse and read Proust and create shadow puppets and learn the names of the bones of the body. ITV One thru Four had blocked my creativity long enough. This was my liberation.
But then I thought - best do it properly, best try again. And my Freeview box eyed me up and down and let out a plaintive cry as if to say - again? Seriously? Again? We've gone through this routine before and you know how fragile I am, what with my dodgy diodes and crackling cables and that thing I do if you change channels too fast. I'm an 100-year-old in an old people's home - you try to move me, improve me, badger me and I'm pegging out, right here and now in the middle of The Bill and that will just plain ruin your day. How lucky would you feel then, huh, punk?
And its afflictions and ailments were sad but true because, for many days leading up to the upgrade, the box had been pixellating almost everything - so, watching The Bill, I knew who the victim was and I knew who the officer was but the suspects were obliterated which, in some not so far-fetched future, will the norm under a new Data Protection Act making it illegal to possess a face in case it excites a paedophile.
And, so, at the third attempt, like the end of one of the Terminator movies, the little red eye at the front of my Freeview box blinked, issued forth one salty tear and finally died*.
(*One of these actions is a fiction - but not the good one, the useful one, the one that would meant I didn't need to stir myself and spend money and miss The Bill).
But that's not the point. This is the point -
I bought a new Freeview box at Tesco, where interaction, emotional investment and interest are, at best, minimal. However, this time it was different.
I was informed I would have to report my purchase to the licensing authorities. I had to fill out a little form there and then. The thin till girl gave me a fat pen and the little till issued forth a fat form and I had to fill it out while those waiting behind me with overfull trolleys tapped their feet and tore off chunks of French bread for sustenance.
So between packing away my Covent Garden Soup Company Leek and Potato and Tropicana Orange With Bits and Bachelors Original Mushy Peas, I told Gordon Brown that I was planning to replace a broken Freeview box and was that alright with him. Sorry to disturb and all that. Know you're busy.
And I thought this has gone too far. Seriously. They're hunting me down in Tesco now. I can't purchase a simple electronic device - a replacement for one that went before - without alerting the all pervading system to my activities.
Why could they not - I mean - why could they not - here's a thing, just a little thing - why could they not, I don't know, like - trust me or something?
Why could they not assume that the chances are that I wasn't a felon, a tax dodger, an itinerant, a gangmaster, a safe-cracker, a lowlife, an off-the-grid runaway, a ducker, a diver, a skiver, a shyster? Why could they not do that?
I mean, they know who I am. Every step I take, every move I make, they're watching me on their cameras. They know when I speed, park askew or for too long, fail to pay just the right amount of council tax (for too much is as tricky as too little).
They know when I haven't filled out my income tax return or beeped my Oyster or stood for too long or too strangely at the kerbside. They know all this. Why do they still want me goaded, perplexed, infuriated, inconvenienced, belittled, humiliated, distracted, delayed at the till at Tesco.
When did their hate become so all-consuming that the last vestiges of humanity went out like the light on the front of - ah, you get the picture.
Leave me alone.
Wouldn't it be easier if the Government fined us all £1,000 by default at the beginning of each week just for being alive and consuming things and having vague thoughts about seasides and teapots and moving from place A to place B and interacting with other humans and all the other activities that indicate we still have a degree of (dammit) freewill.
And then every other Friday we would line up Soviet-style outside the community centre and we would have to plead our case and account for our actions to some bureaucratic numpty in order to reclaim the fine back.
Like, like we could say: We know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but we did applaud your scrappage scheme; or, or we know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but we did buy a house at the second tier of stamp duty; or, or, we know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but my name is Baroness Scotland and I do declare this is a technical breach.
Is that what they want? Seriously?
At one point between the signing of the Magna Carta and my trip to Tesco to buy a Freeview box did we all sit round the table and fess up like some 12-step alkie that we weren't to be trusted, that there was a power greater than us and it would be best all round if we were treated like habitual offenders who would inevitably transgress.
When did that happen? When did we all become nine-year-old boys in a room with a vase of humbugs teetering on a coffee table edge, requiring of a stern warning, constant monitoring and enclosure in a general fog of mistrust? I didn't get the memo, the vote, the say, the pamphlet, the instruction, the talk, the telling-to, the telling-off.
When did the State start getting in my face about my home entertainment arrangements?
Why can't I - I mean - why can't I go and buy a perfectly normal piece of electronic television-receiving equipment in a dingy Tesco in Beckton without some rat-faced box-ticker in a breeze block office in an industrial estate in Reading twitching and stirring and sniffing the air and deciding that somewhere out there, in the real world, someone was doing something that the State needed to know about? Needed to get involved with. Needed to interfere with. Needed to delay and obstruct.
"Alert! Alert! Someone just did something. We need his form right away. Then we can add him to our database and cross reference him with other things he might have done in case some of them tally and we need him to fill out another form. Or some of them don't tally at all and there's an anomaly and we can fine him.
"Either way, let's monitor this piece of work because somewhere down the line I bet he's the kind of guy who puts out paper on plastic day. In fact, let's fine him for that ahead of time because - excellent - his name's come up on the new £2bn "He'sThatKindaGuy" database which proves my point."
Go away.
Leave me alone.
I just want to watch The Bill and eat unmolested mushy peas. It's not much. Can't you, can't you go next door or start down the other end of the street first or call me on a Sunday afternoon when I was only about to do some washing anyway and I'm grateful for the distraction?
Can't you do your thing and I'll do mine and let's see how we rub along?
How about that? Yes? What do you say?
