Here, in the midst of current controversy, is some good news. The new leaders of both ITV and Channel 4 are both women (replacing men). More good news sees them not only succeeding on equal terms, but winning the same heady blend of salaries and add-ons. At which point, however, we encounter a few shades of grey.
Carolyn McCall, flying in from an easyJet hangar in Luton, is reportedly on course to make £25.2m over the next five years at ITV, if all goes well (an edifice built on the foundations of £900,000 pa). Her predecessor, Adam Crozier, has earned £24.9m since 2012. Alex Mahon, replacing David Abraham atop C4, can expect to hit his £881,000 a year, perhaps edging closer to a million if the ad revenue rolls in (as it did at the end of Abraham’s reign).
Too much, too rich? ITV, like easyJet, is a public company, but Channel 4 is taxpayer-owned, though needing to make its own financial way – a halfway house to Broadcasting House. And when you step inside the BBC, many more sucked thumbs follow (and not merely between various on-screen talents who feel neglected). Should Chris Evans earn five times more than the director general himself? Is Vanessa Feltz worth as much as £50,000 a year more than Charlotte Moore, supreme director of content? How can Jeremy Vine rate double the pay of Ann Bulford, deputy DG and supreme commander of financial performance?
It isn’t just the familiar comparisons with doctors, nurses and firefighters that seems to matter here as the bosses eschew salaries they might call their own in City or Fleet Street life. It’s the difficulty of constructing any sort of pay structure that makes the remotest sense. It can’t be done. The exercise, like its outcome, is a waste of time inflicted by gleeful politicians and hostile print editors – 11 pages of routine rant in the Mail, of course – to cause the corporation pain and embarrassment.
Mission accomplished, if you study the entrails of last week’s near hysteria (not helped by a predictably fat slice of BBC self-flagellation on day one). But the silliness remains in high season.
There’s the £150,000 the PM earns that acts as an easy benchmark – except that prime ministers habitually cash in after they’ve quit office, giving speeches, sitting on boards, writing memoirs. (Expect David Cameron’s any year soon. Ah! good morning Mr Blair.)
There’s the fogginess of the 96 figures themselves: Graham Norton without the Graham Norton Show; no light on how extra appearances – Mastermind, Dragons’ Den et al – count in the John Humphrys and Evan Davis totals; no information on where the 2016 Rio Olympics affected sports presenting rates; no information on how Clare Balding, for instance, splits her time between BBC, C4 and her BT stints; no David Dimbleby. You can produce many instant theses of hurt or cupidity if you will, but the devil is in the (missing) detail.
More confusingly still, the 96 fall into several different categories. We have a few revered veterans, kept over £150,000 for old times’ (and perhaps their contracts’) sake. We have soap stars whose agents, presumably, don’t ask them to soft pedal EastEnders rates because Albert Square is a public service area. We have disc jockeys who, even at the BBC, live or die by their audience ratings (the Chris Moyles memorial lecture). We have John McEnroe, paid up to £199,000 for 13 days of Wimbledon, because he makes Tim Henman look like a starched collar.
And then we have the real targets of politicians and their dutiful press axe-grinders: the interviewers, the news men, the correspondents, the pundits, the supposedly left- (or right-) wing stirrers of dissent, the Remain mob who need to be taken down a peg or three.
Well, of course, there’s one issue here that deserves to be tackled head-on: the perceived gap between well-paid men and not-so-well-paid women. Huw Edwards on £599,000 with the admirable Reeta Chakrabarti nowhere in sight. Jeremy Bowen be well worth his £199,000, but so are the equally brave and eloquent Lyse Doucet and Orla Guerin. If Jon Sopel rates £249,000 as US editor, why doesn’t his Europe opposite number, Katya Adler, even make the charts? And alas, poor Emily Maitlis.
It’s a discrimination charge to get BBC boardrooms shivering, especially when two-thirds of the 96 are men. But, again, it requires analysis, rather than agitation about male pay cuts. (Quite a few newsmen – Hugh Pym, James Landale – have beefs over these figures, too).
The BBC isn’t your average PSB operation. When the public pays for its licence, it wants great, informative, entertaining broadcasting in return. No one thinks in terms of “15,000 householders paying Chris Evans’ salary” (or whatever facile stab at transparency BBC critics devise) but people do demand something good for their money.
There’s the BBC’s core task as the salary silliness subsides. It is also a warning against too much structural meddling, as though Tony Hall were constructing a sub-governmental pay policy, rather than an outward-looking, audience-driven organisation.
Of course, there ought to be more, better-paid women. Of course, the pall of “Mock the Male Week” and “Have I Got Mostly Male News for You” lies heavy. Of course, Mishal Husain and Sarah Montague should get some of the big Today interrogations.
But the real point, for BBC managers as elsewhere, is to make sure that women get the same opportunities to rise and shine as the men across the desk from them. That’s what Alex Mahon did when she ran the Shine Group and Foundry company on her way to C4. That’s what my old colleague at the Guardian, Carolyn McCall, did long ago when we sat round the same board table.
She was intuitive, human and brilliant then, which is why she’s heading for ITV now. They’re both women at the top for one simple reason: they’re worth it.
