Stop all news – it's time for us plebs to be told about BBC paycheques! The BBC is trembling with excitement following the enforced publication of the annual salaries of on-screen stars earning more than £150,000 at the tax-funded broadcaster. Exclusive to all news outlets everywhere this morning (actual figures were embargoed until 11am to ensure that the key lunchtime news rush would be …
It is difficult to imagine what those top-earners do that could not been done as well for an order of magnitude less. Actually, it is done in other countries with a higher cost of living. Cutting top salaries by a factor of ten could leave room for more high-value productions and a lower licence cost.
And I do not think there would be a lack of top talent applying - there are not THAT many large and wealthy broadcasters around. The market for blokes kicking balls is unfortunately much bigger.
> Cutting top salaries by a factor of ten could leave room for more high-value productions and a lower licence cost.
Not so much as you might imagine. There are many very substantial costs to making a TV programme, including salaries for many other people, besides what laughingly call "talent".
The statistic is certainly valueless. Not only do you need to compare it to number of license (un) holders of each sex, but it also needs to be corrected against other factors like income, alternate facilites etc. If more women are prosecuted than men because women far more likely to be on minimal income, then that's certainly a problem, but not down to Capita or the BBC (unless of course we are talking about women who are working for contractors working for the BBC, and who are on mininum wage and minimum hours because all the money is going to Chris Evans et al)
There are fewer long-running TV shows than Radio. Chris Evans does a breakfast show for 40-something weeks a year. Which also has his name on it, and he probably does a lot of the creative work, as much as there is for a breakfast show.
Whereas a lot of UK TV drama things work in 6 episode series. The Beeb only do one soap, and they've got longer running drama things like Casualty. But then lots of their TV shows are out-sourced to production companies, from memory it's around 50% - and only the stuff in prime time is probably going to make the big money.
Chris Evans does a breakfast show for 40-something weeks a year. Which also has his name on it, and he probably does a lot of the creative work, as much as there is for a breakfast show.
One wonders whether the format of his show is licensable and whether he derives income simply for the format as much as the presenting. Clarkson and Wilman certainly did until they sold the TG format itself to the BBC. That was on top of their Presenting/Production remittance.
I hope all those gleeful competitors slamming the BBC for this gender pay gap are prepared to publish statistics for their own organisations.
This all seems a pointless exercise besides making the BBC look bad so the Tories and right-wing press can finally put them out to slaughter. The one advantage being that, hopefully, this will cause the BBC to start seriously working on the gender gap.
But let's be honest, this is nothing to do with fairness... There are ulterior motives at play. Which aren't even particularly relevant to whether there is any point in the license fee or not. I believe there is, and more than that it increases the quality of other TV (take advertising US tv for example). But then I'd rather have a subscription-based service if it meant having more features to the iplayer app, with more historical content too... I would easily choose that over something like Netflix, and maybe that is the direction entertainment will go towards. Ultimately I'd rather the BBC as it is, although I've noticed they're pushing for users to be registered now and things like that.
I'm not out to get the Beeb, but they have been taking the piss on pay in the last few years. As do many organisations, but then when you get public funding you get public scrutiny.
I doubt they seriously over-pay their talent though, given they don't control the market. It was more executive pay, that had been zooming up alarmingly. So I suspect this came out of the fall-out from how much they've been taking the piss on executive pay in the past.
Yeah. But a trained monkey could punctuate correctly with commas, and a colon when needed.
An untrained monkey could spell autocue, tinpot, or newsreader.
An untrained marmoset could recognises [sic] that the verb needs to agree with the number of newsreaders.
Do you have no sense of irony, criticising people for being overpaid for "just reading", when you are functionally illiterate yourself?
WTF emoji hashtag
Grrrr Licence Fee
Blah blah BBC
Rant rant rant salaries
Almost every comment is the same.What no one has mentioned yet is that the license fee does not only fund the BBC. All ITV regional programming and Channel 4 receive a good chunk of it. Lose the license and many quality programs on other channels will also be lost.
As a plus, many other countries also have a tv license of one form or another and yet not one manages to produce the quality of the BBC.
Is the highest paid?!?!?!?!?!?!
I used to argue strongly for the BBC because its independence of advertisers forced the commercial broadcasters to present largely independent news. Unlike the USA, where news has become highly influenced by advertisers.
Now I know that the ginger twunt is the highest paid, not so much.
In the private sector, it's very conventional to have no pay disclosure between employees - because we're British goddamn it.
Who benefits from pay secrecy between management & staff?
Hint #1:: The lower-paid person sees the market rate is higher than them. The higher-paid person doesn't take a pay cut.
Hint #2: *Management* never break pay secrecy voluntarily,. Employees sometimes do
Hint #3: Workplaces with pay transparency of pay-bands are largely public-sector and/or unionised
Tories just pulled the trigger on massive pay-inflation.
Because they're idiots who inherit large businesses and turn them into loss-making ones
[Hey George, how's the wallpaper business going? Did iddums make a fat loss *again* for the Nth year in a row....Ooopssyy.
Compared to the BBC who make a large *profit* for the UK.
E.g. ARM = Acorn = BBC Micro....]
Fair enough we need to look at gender pay gaps, but the data presented doesn't make allowance for the number of appearances, number of shows, time spent preparing, audience figures the "stars" draw in - how are we supposed to compare the on screen talent's value to the viewer regardless of gender when the data is presented in this way?
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