Former Today programme editor Rod Liddle, in his column in the Sunday Times, rails against BBC management:

Auntie Implodes, a frightful new drama from the BBC

A humiliating grilling by MPs has revealed the huge pay gap between programme makers and ‘venal’ executives, fuelling seething resentment

The BBC is seething; it is in meltdown. The fury comes not from the extravagantly remunerated executives and the grand trustees whom you may have seen squabbling and dissembling last week in front of a frankly astonished committee of MPs. It is the other people in the BBC who are seething — the ones who actually make the programmes you watch or listen to. That’s where the fury lies. And as a consequence the corporation has become, in the words of one staffer, “bitterly divided”.

“I have never seen the rank-and-file so enraged. It is the angriest they have ever been,” one senior presenter with 25 years at the BBC under his belt told me. Another, whose career with the BBC stretches back to the 1960s, said: “This is much, much worse than [Jimmy] Savile,” referring to the back-covering farrago that led to the defenestration of George Entwistle as director-general. “Those sorts of crass editorial mistake are bad, sure, but also excusable — everybody makes mistakes. And while there’s always a feeling that managers are overpaid and inept, this is something different entirely. They have been revealed to be both venal and incompetent.”

The anger centres on the amount of money bunged to departing executives — the “sweeteners”, as Lucy Adams, the outgoing head of human resources at the BBC, put it. Or didn’t put it, depending on which bits of her equivocal testimony to the House of Commons public accounts committee you believe. In particular, just over £1m to ease the passage of Mark Byford, the former deputy director-general, into civvy street or retirement. And this at a time when programme budgets were being cut and the staff themselves were on low wages and short-term contracts.

Another insider at the BBC explained: “We have a broadcast assistant on our programme who is earning maybe £20,000 a year. She’s been there for four years, working all hours. They’ve [the BBC] told her that she must now go onto a staff contract and because this will give her added security, they’re going to have to give her a pay cut of £3,000.”

There has always been an egregious gap between the money paid to the people in the BBC who make programmes and the people who do not — the benighted managers. In my final year as editor of the Radio 4 Today programme in 2003 I was earning just over £60,000, which is decent money. But one step above that — once I had removed myself from programme-making altogether and taken some post with a job description that an ordinary human would find difficult to comprehend — my salary would have doubled overnight.

It would double to do a job less challenging, less exhausting, less intellectually taxing and much, much less important to the licence payer. Yet today the gap between those who make programmes and those who do not has become exponential. Many of the people who make the shows you watch do not know even if they will still be employed at all a few months from now. And they look at the money paid to Byford with utter incredulity. And then when the former director-general Mark Thompson says this amount was paid in order that Byford could remain “fully focused” on the tasks at hand, the incredulity turns to bitterness and wrath.

“The irony is, nobody knew what he actually did,” a well-known radio presenter told me of Byford. “You’d see him in the corridors and he’d be perfectly nice, but what he actually did, day to day, nobody really understood. He broke his leg very badly shortly before the [2010] general election, and was hospitalised for a long time. He was supposedly in charge of our election coverage. Mysteriously enough, it all went ahead perfectly well without him.”

This is the chief problem for the BBC, beyond the fact that its managers are not actually very good at what they do, as we have seen with both the Savile imbroglio and the latest crisis over executive bungs. There are far, far too many of these grossly overpaid and undertalented middlemen who kid themselves that they would get just as financially rewarding jobs in the private sector. No. They. Wouldn’t.

And the corollary is that the more of them you have, the more tortuous and embarrassing become the inquests when something goes amiss. Newsnight fails to run a feature about Savile’s offences and suddenly a whole raft of these creatures, these executives, are hauled blinking into the sunlight, delivering themselves of back-covering excuses — an interminably convoluted chain of command that, if we’re being honest, probably ensured such an editorial mistake would be made in the first place.

Let the programme bosses be responsible for what they put out, and if they get it wrong, slap them on the wrists or sack them, depending on the severity of the transgression. None of this referring up to people too scared to make the right decision; none of this ludicrous “compliance”.

The BBC is in deep trouble. Right now its top presenters are all out of contract because of the concerns that some of them used private companies to squirrel away their dosh (they were told to do this by those middle managers, incidentally). The staff are in open revolt. You sort of pity Tony Hall, former chief executive of the Royal Opera House and the current director-general, for what he has taken on. Someone give the bloke a magic flute.

In the money

£1,022,000: The severance package paid to former deputy director-general Mark Byford to ensure he remained “focused” on the job

£390,000: The severance package paid to Sharon Baylay, former BBC marketing director

£25m: The total severance pay for senior executives from 2009-12

£369m: The total severance pay handed to outgoing staff over eight years

£450,000: Outgoing director-general George Entwistle’s pay-off after his 55 days in the job

£320,000: Salary of outgoing head of HR Lucy Adams, who signed off golden goodbyes

According to WDR here,

"He (Sir David Attenborough) recalls his time as Director of Programmes for BBC Television in 1969 - "I think my salary was £15,000 a year".

MD (Tel) Danny Cohen's deputy is Mark Linsey, who will be soon on a £222,000 package. If you use the Bank of England inflation calculator, £15,000 in 1969 would have been equivalent to £210,000 in 2012".

For interest, the Bank Of England Inflation Calculator makes the £15,000 figure £209,082.96p in 2012.

To see what your personal figure would have been the BofE calculator may be found here.


Thanks to WDR for the tip.