T.F.I Payday.

In case you had any doubts I can confirm that Chris Evans has no shame. None whatsoever. But why should he? It’s clear that he is the ‘top talent’ that the BBC want and his tireless efforts to drive me to suicide should be applauded across the land. You see, if you are bestowed with the burden of ‘top talent’ the BBC are willing to pay vast amounts for you and indulge your every whim. Chris Evans is so talented that though the BBC fired him years ago for being unreliable etc they soon turned around and gave him another huge, yawning sack of cash and revitalised his career. Pity.

This whole BBC wages maelstrom is scandalous for a reason. We still pay a licence fee (well most of us do) and frankly I’m not very happy with the way it’s being divvied out. You shouldn’t be either. The gender gap in both wages and opportunity at the BBC is so fantastically huge it can’t be avoided and in that sense alone the government were right to order them to open their books. The BBC complained that in doing this wage demands would increase as competition to snare ‘top talent’ rocketed. In actual fact it should be the reverse.

This nation, so thoroughly addicted to the idea of perpetual entertainment, so sickly from a collective abandonment of imagination, has allowed a system to be generated whereby a few people with really very little talent whatsoever are thrown to the top of the money tree (not the ‘magic money tree’ of course) and then have their gaping egos stroked by all and sundry. In fact all these mediocre-at-best ‘top talents’ should have their wages crucified immediately and then be forced to earn them back by being actually entertaining.

Chris Evans would have to stop talking about his brilliant life (or just stop talking altogether), cut out the repetitive jingles and songs and horn honks that littler the dead air in his show and properly sweat for a living. He’s not the only one that needs to raise their game. Jeremy Vine is earning £750,000 a year and for what? For jamming the airwaves with steaming lumps of self-righteous manure and for hosting Eggheads, the most pretentious quiz show ever devised. Which does make sense.

Then there’s Lineker, who gets £1.8 million. £1.8 million. A year!!! He only works on a Saturday unless it’s the one Sunday a year that he co-hosts The Sports Personality of the Year Award: a programme so dull and devoid of any personality that I have long stopped watching it because it makes me die inside. Needless to say John Humphreys needs to be paid huge amounts so he can maintain the enormous hangar in his back garden where he keeps and polishes his sense of self worth.

And this could go on and on and on but let’s quickly divert to the women shall we? Although there are fewer of them at the BBC and they get paid less it doesn’t necessarily mean they should automatically be bumped up to the premiership division of ‘top talent’. I haven’t met a single person of any gender that rates Tess Daly highly. She’d be under-qualified calling out bingo numbers above a pub in Wigan. Winkleman isn’t much better but at least she’s no longer being paid to know nothing at all about any films in the history of cinema – a job she did brilliantly as the host of Film 2010 – 2016. Took them 6 years to work that out.

If you keep up with these posts you’ll already know that I have a very dim view of Vanessa Feltz, which is probably the best view to have of her and a view I am always willing to justify. If I had my way I would simply takes her current wage and halve it. Then halve it again. And again. And so on until it reached 1 penny. Then I would have that penny taken off her and demand she started paying the nation back for all the clueless pig-swill she’s made us endure over the years.

The only real surpise in all this is Clare Balding. The surprise is how low her wages are by comparison to, say, Vanessa Feltz. She earns between £150,000 and £200,00 a year (I should add that my wage fits somewhere in the massive gap there, the one the BBC decided to include lest we struggle with specifics). The reason this is boggling on many levels is because I had formed the impression, the measured assumption, that Clare Balding had a water tight contract that insists she appear in every BBC factual and sporting programme that’s produced. I can’t turn the BBC on without her popping up with her Lego hair. She must be exhausted and she should be paid far more for the hours she puts in.

All done. That took way longer than 15 minutes but then one man’s 15 minutes is another man’s £2.25 million.

G B Hewitt. 20.07.2017

Happy Birthday to me!