Published: Thursday, 7th August, 2008 10:30
The BBC overpays its presenters, scams us, and we pay for it
By Maurice O'Brien
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Maurice O'Brien
THE BBC has been fined £400,000 for serial cheating on its phone-in lines.
The broadcast and newspaper headlines were unanimous, and utterly wrong.
That penalty, my fellow mugs, was levied on you and me and all the law abiding suckers who buy TV licences and annually feed the BBC’s profligacy to the tune of 3.1 BILLION quid.
Wasn’t it bad enough that the gullible were paying to be cheated and robbed by smarmy, overpaid DJs and presenters, without expecting them to pay their wages and fines too.
The BBC’s ruling clique could have coughed up the fine from this year’s six-figure pay rises, pension pots, and the bonuses they palm each other for occupying posts almost entirely divorced from economic reality?
Perhaps that’s the reward for rubber-stamping the supernatural salaries of Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Anne Robinson and their ilk. Only this week BBC bosses were hugging themselves with glee at only paying marginally more to retain these swollen egos. Would a genuine car fanatic really turn off Top Gear if Clarkson wasn’t there? Pop into a pub, or pass a school playground, and it won’t cost a penny to listen to someone spouting Ross-like smut. Would anyone really miss The Weakest Link?
Slashing those bloated salaries and telling the recipients to sling their collective hook would genuinely have provided value for money. Call their bluff and let the reality of credit-crunched commercial television set their true worth. Just ask Carol Vorderman what that is.
At the other end of the trough we’re also paying for twittering, narcissistic BBC local radio presenters to bore us with trivia from their mundane little lives. And why should we foot the bill to have some dullard, newsreading child tell us that “for more on this story you can log onto our website”, simply because the subject’s too complex for their pea brains, or nobody’s sufficiently competent to edit a bulletin to length?
Insulated by my licence fee, why should the BBC care that, from anywhere in the world, I can watch all the news and documentaries I want, Test cricket, the Premiership, Gaelic football and hurling, without touching one of their channels? And what the hell’s BBC7 anyway?
- SURELY only someone naive enough to think the BBC licence fee’s worth paying would believe the Government’s higher road tax scam is anything but another piece of stealthy money-making.
As you rush to swap your current model for a greener, lower tax version, don’t hold your breath waiting for a secondhand car dealer to take it off your hands. And what price the carbon footprint when everyone starts dumping them?
- EVERY time I see David Miliband he reminds me of tennis player Tim Henman; another one who didn’t quite have what it takes.
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