The BBC has announced that the TV license, currently permitting the use of TVs in UK homes, will be extended to other domestic appliances such as dishwashers, fridges and microwaves. It will be renamed "The Right to Live" license.

As a result, the license fee will increase from £157.50 per year to around £700 per month, roughly the same as the state pension.

The Right to Live license will allow the BBC to compete with the likes of Netflix and Sky on equal commercial terms so that they too can excel in the crucial binging-box-set market and 24 hour repetitive news sector.

Homeowners will be permitted unlimited use of all appliances as long as they are used for what they were designed for. For example, there is no need to pay a TV license if you are using your TV as a door stop, only if it is used for what you bought it for, namely to watch live TV on any channel, not just the BBC.

As with TVs now, all new appliances will be automatically registered with the Appliance Registration Stasi Entity (affectionately known as ARSE), and linked to the Internet via a built-in sensor that detects when appliances are switched on and off - for example to warm up a pizza or express wash your undies.

This "big data" will be collected by Google and Facebook to target you with appliance advertisements. After all, why hang around doing nothing while you wait for the microwave to do its job, when you can watch constant adverts from WeBuyAnyCar.com while you heat up a ready-meal. 

TV detector vans will be upgraded so that you will be caught if you try heat a tin of beans in the micro without a license. The new ARSE sensors are currently being tested on domestic toilets but eventually will be able to shut down any registered device if the license fee is unpaid.

A BBC activist from their licensing "think-tank" commented:

We think the Chancellor of the Exchequer is missing a trick in terms of raising tax revenue. Today's TV license fee is about the same price as a 32 inch TV. Think of how much money he could raise if annual road tax was set at the price of the average car or council tax at the price of the average house. All his budget problems relating to COVID would solved at a stroke with road tax at £12,000 and council tax at £248,271. He needs to start a big society conversation about this instead of trying to reduce the cost of the current TV license tax.

A spokesperson for national treasure, Sir David Attenborough told us:

We know this increase in the license fee will have a severe impact on the finances of poor old pensioners like David so we sympathize with their plight. But we would encourage pensioners to sell all their domestic appliances to help reduce carbon emissions and use the money to fund their own trips to the Amazonian rainforest or the Patagonian glaciers rather than just sitting around at home watching TV in front of the fire.