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People get paid for working, in some cases for those lucky enough they get paid a lot, sometimes when compared to the majority it’s a hell of a lot. Normally this isn’t a problem least of all for those getting the money but now that the BBC trust has waded in the BBC is going to have to come clean about how much it’s shelling out at the top end. This does raise a few interesting points, the first being whether it’s any of our business to know & if it is just how much we need to know? Is this just an exercise in good management & transparency or a way for the struggling commercial channels to gain a few steps on the public sector? It’s certainly true that if we carry on in this way then the capacity of the BBC to deliver the current quality of programming is bound to be affected if asked to compete with those who can pay what they like. It’s also subjective as well, we all have our favored personas & those we can’t stand watching, will this be the criteria needed to judge who’s worth what? & if it is who gets to say so? At this rate the accountants may as well be booking the performers which can only mean a much steeper drop into the realm of awful TV that caters only to the lowest common denominator.

I don’t claim that any of the people earning the big money are worth the big money, once you get to a certain pay-scale any notion of earning is fairly meaningless, it’s more that for some types of business & especially the media or sports related ones it doesn’t do any good to moan about the bills. If you’re not paying them as much as or more than anyone else is willing to pay then they go off & do what they do somewhere else, you could cap the amount a public body such as the BBC is allowed to pay but that wouldn’t help the viability over the long term. A lot of established people would just leave & any new discoveries would be easy pickings for the private companies, just look how the Premier League treats the lower leagues. On top of this is the issue that because the BBC is publicly funded we all get to have a moan about what should be done with it & this is further whipped up by the press, it may start out as a list of names & a lump sum but sooner or later there’ll be a breakdown in detail & we may as well be going through someones’ pockets. The BBC might well be dependent on the licence fee & answerable to minions but its’ employees are private people surely? I can’t see many of us being all that happy about the whole world knowing our personal details & since in the case of TV personalities they already have the papers to worry about with regard to their love-lives that probably goes double.

I think that it matters that the BBC is run well but I think it’s much more important that it runs completely independently of government interference than what it pays its’ top earners, those people can easily be judged by ratings to see if they’re worth it or not & the control for that should stay with the BBC. It’s a nice thought that this is all about getting a better value deal for the taxpayer but it isn’t, we’ll still all need a TV licence regardless & the cost wont be coming down no matter how much money they end up saving. All this is is an attempt to kick the shins of the BBC in a way that gives the private firms a helping hand, with too many channels & too few advertisers the sight of an independent public firm must have them tearing their hair out. We saw it with the banks, just because they were unsuccessful & became liabilities didn’t mean that they were left to hit the wall, commercial TV is in a bad way right now so they’re looking for a way to strip the BBC of a few quid to help out the companies with shareholders. It’s the buses all over again folks, leave all the stuff people will pay for in private hands & keep the boring stuff people just need in the public sector, & then whinge when the public sector is a trainwreck, it stinks but it’s the way things go, pay packets are just the start.

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