BBC stars being forced to reveal their salaries is a bit of a non-story isn’t it? Is it really a surprise to anyone that Gary Lineker isn't on minimum wage, or that Jeremy Vine earns more than a junior doctor?
Of course it's not. This has been at most an open secret; more realistically it is common knowledge. People on the telly get paid shitloads, and the majority of the high earners are white men. That is what we have learnt today. Who knew, eh?
The real story here is the government of the day getting a dig in at Auntie Beeb, and our attitude towards public funding.
All governments seem to end up resenting the BBC, at the very least since the early 60s where ‘That Was The Week That Was’ showed the first signs of the dog biting the hand that fed it. Tory governments make more natural enemies for it because the BBC tends to be quite liberal, but Labour governments usually end up resenting it too; possibly because when they are in opposition it seems like the BBC is on their side, only to find out when they are in power they actually aren't. Alastair Campbell famously met his match by going on a crusade against the BBC over the Iraq war, and losing because (according to Andrew Rawnsley’s book ‘End Of The Party’) people don’t just see the BBC as a news outlet but also as the people who make Eastenders and Cbeebies.
Theresa May is a Prime Minister who badly needs some heat taken off her and has found a convenient way of doing it, at least temporarily. The reason why these salaries are being publicised is that May, and Cameron before her, demanded them to be. That’s fair enough to an extent, it is public money after all, but the way it has been done is very obviously an attempt to shame the BBC. It won’t work. In the short term, some pay cuts may be made to some of the more bloated wages. In the long term, to be honest probably in a day or two, people will go back to hating the politicians again. The BBC makes things that people enjoy and politicians don’t - the BBC will always win a fight for the public’s heart against politicians. This is a desperate act of spite that will do nothing except embarrassing a few people who are media-savvy enough to take it.
And pots, kettles, etc - who on earth are politicians, of all people, taking the moral high ground on this issue? They’re hardly all scrimping and saving with the rest of us, the JAMs that Mother Theresa has done so much for. We might be putting public money into the BBC but at least we get something we enjoy watching out of it, which is more than can be said for PMQs (they need a new showrunner there…) They probably win on points regarding gender equality, but I’m pretty confident in saying that Westminster is not a hotbed of forward thinking feminism.
We do have a love/hate relationship towards public funding - no one enjoys being taxed, but most people enjoy the free healthcare and free entertainment that goes with it. The BBC obviously isn’t our only source for entertainment - out of the old school main channels, there’s also ITV and Channel 4. ITV commands similar ratings for programmes that to my eyes are much lower in quality. Channel 4 - which is partly publicly funded as well - also produces interesting programmes. However, it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that for many the BBC produces the majority of the media they consume, and that is because of the quality of the programmes it produces both for TV and radio.
It is extravagant to pay millions of pounds to a small group of individuals. It’s perfectly valid to wonder why the hell society seems to have always thought it perfectly sensible to pay actors and presenters more than doctors - that has always baffled me. But that’s not the BBC, that’s how it is everywhere, and the BBC has to compete within its market or settle for having less talent than its competitors. It obviously pays less than other organisations because there’s always BBC stars ‘selling out’ to other channels for more money - and usually immediately losing their audience because they’re no longer producing something people want to watch, like those two off the One Show who went over to ITV and dropped off the face of the earth.
Would I pay Chris Evans over £2m for presenting Radio 2? Fuck no. I wouldn’t pay Chris Evans to do anything, apart from to get the hell away from me. Even if I liked him, I’d probably say £2m is too much. However, most of the salaries on the list don’t seem batshit crazy when taken in context of the industry - it would be interesting to see them compared with their ITV or Sky counterparts but that’s not going to happen. I suspect it’s a whole lot less, maybe comparable to wages of a private and an NHS doctor. As far as I’m concerned the BBC has consistently good results in many areas and I’m happy with what they do.
Which is more than I can say for this government. If you don’t like the idea of people being massively overpaid, don’t take your eye off the ball like May wants you to and instead think about how much public money she earns, and more importantly how much she spends - and in whose interests it is spent in.
No comments:
Post a Comment