MANY people, I am sure, will support the call by Lindsay Hoyle, the Labour MP for Chorley, for the government to grant free TV licences to all pensioners, not just the over 75s.

But even though it may stem from the myth that all pensioners are poor - which is far from the case - I would not only go along with Mr Hoyle's plea, but would also have the TV licence scrapped for everyone.

For while the pretence is that the £102 annual fee is for watching all TV, the reality is that we pay only for watching the licence-funded BBC - which, with a guaranteed income of hundreds of millions of pounds each year and yet without the responsibility of having to earn it, is inevitably always going to be frittering away chunks of it.

Only last week, it was revealed how the Beeb was spending £100,000 of licence payers' money on filming a 60-second trailer for its news programmes in South Africa - using actors and fake scenes of news events rather than cheaper archive footage of real incidents.

Would or could it have spent the licence fees of 1,000 or so households - many quite possibly those of low-income pensioners - on something so ephemeral and unnecessary if it had to earn the money?

Rather than continuing the restrictive practice of the licence fee, the government should not even contemplate Mr Hoyle's proposed half-measure of elderly viewers being subsidised by the rest, but should halt the artificial funding of the whole BBC set up and make it earn its living like the rest of us.