YOU might remember the commercials. Sinister van prowls suburbia, bloke in the back in headphones twiddles knobs while his mate in a flasher’s mac knocks on the door and some dear old soul’s left looking as if she’d been caught with an orgy of naked opium dealers in the corner of the living room and not just her black and white telly.

The commercials and press releases are more subtle and targeted these days, but it’s rumoured they’ve actually scrapped the detector vans; just pretending they’re out there, instead taking five seconds to scan a whole district through the computer and locate all licence refuseniks at once.

And believe me it’s much tougher proving you’re an ascetic, or simply don’t have a telly, than it is to explain an adherence to strange tribes of orange-skinned young people with plucked eyebrows, rigidly plasticised bosoms and impenetrable accents, or indeed being disciples of neo-gods Cowell or Clarkson.

Mothballing detector vans might even be a ploy the MoD finds handy for Britain’s armed forces. Stripped of manpower, tanks, ships and warplanes, using wee Willie Hague’s gurgling bluster as a substitute was never going to make pal Putin dash for the post office with his equivalent of £145.50, let alone abandon Crimea.

In days past I’d sit in magistrates’ courts watching sorry processions of licence defaulters wheeled in to pay their fines and costs. Mostly women of various ages and nationalities or pasty faced teenagers - the mugs left at home immersed in domestic drudgery or minding the baby when the detector van drove by.

Now Justice Minister Chris Grayling, forever having brainwaves which don’t wave, and Culture and Media Secretary Maria Miller, whose property dealings might make her a tad nervous to even be thinking about courts, have let it be known licence dodgers shouldn’t be clogging up the system.

Supported by 100 back benchers with nothing better to do now the maternally all embracing EU takes care of everything important, meaning Dave and the dummies have run out of legislation, the idea is to treat non-payment as a civil matter and stop prosecuting it as a criminal offence. Of course you’d still be clogging up some different courts but, just like ASBOs, the problem will have very neatly been shifted somewhere else.

Yet surely the best way to decriminalise non-payment of the licence would be to scrap it altogether; if nothing else it might help cull some of those 100 self-serving BBC executives trousering six figure salaries.