The message
from Lurch contains these words:

Well I'm telling you from personal experience, having never purchased
any kind of receiving equipment at my factory, and being continually
pestered by them, that you're wrong

Well, I can tell you that I have never had a TV licensing letter in my
life, until I bought a Hauppauge MVP online and since then I've been
bombarded with letters.
There was a thread on uk.tech.digital-tv about this and I'm not the
only one.
Obviously they do, and don't, depending on something or other,
probably some random disorganisation.

I think you are both right.

Suppliers have had to report purchasers for yonks. Back in 1977 when I
was working in Walsall we bought a TV as a retirement present for
someone who had not previously had a TV. Unfortunately the person who
actually made the purchase gave the future recipients name to the store
and she turned up at work a few days later totally mystified as why she
had received an instruction to buy a TV licence immediately. Frantic
attempts to persuade the issuing office to hold off for the few weeks
till Lil actually retired where not entirely successful but ISTR that we
did manage to keep the gift a secret until presentation.

The following year when I moved to an obscure address in Yorkshire I
became involved in a saga that lasted off and on long enough for me to
build up a collection of warning letters well into double figures.

I think the problem originated with my predecessor who had at least 2
postcodes in use. The correct address was of the form house, parish,
town, etc (I said it was obscure) while the incorrect one had an
additional line relating initially to an adjacent block of houses but
somewhere along the line someone (presumably the TVites) managed to
translate that into a nearby road with a different postcode placing my
house in an imaginary position some half mile distant.

I can't remember the exact time scale but ISTR that the warning letters
came at regular intervals, perhaps every 6 months or a year. The first
was returned with a polite note pointing out their mistake, the second
with a rude note and the 3rd liberally annotated with basic anglo-saxon.
After that I didn't bother. The letters were kept but but I didn't
bother until notes started appearing in my letterbox. More basic
anglo-saxon followed and after (I think) 3 notes they stopped coming.
Why I haven't a clue. Having found my house they couldn't have failed to
see the aerial attached to the chimney and anyone dumb enough not to
have noticed that house was off a totally different road would not have
the nous to check their database to find that I had had a licence since
1978.

But perhaps I underestimated them and they did eventually twig in which
case they probably had the last laugh. Anyway it was about that time
that I started to receive other mail with bogus address on. Seems the
Royal Mail were making money out of an address database and a trusted
source (their words) had told them that my address had been recorded
wrongly. It took a considerable effort to persuade the dumbo at the
Royal Mail that his trusted source had been even dumber than he was.
There was even a slight bonus in this for me as my address is now
recorded with a street name which the voters list denys me as the street
is not actually in the same parish as my house.

I still occasionally get mail addressed to the bogus address. I don't
however recall a TV reminder for the best part of 10 years. I must ask
the postman sometime how it is I actually get these letters given that
neither the road nor the postcode are correct.

--
Roger