Woman’s Hour (Radio 4) | iPlayer
A Piece of Work (WNYC) | wnyc.org
The Spectator podcast | iTunes
Much hoo-ha over pay at the BBC last week. Everyone getting het up and embarrassed. As Anna Sale, presenter of the excellent Death, Sex and Money podcast has mentioned, of those three taboos, it’s money that we really find hard to talk about. In a capitalist society, pay is directly linked to both your self-worth and how others judge you, so a low salary is a personal comment. The BBC may as well have published a list of presenters’ penis sizes. And given how many women are on that high earners’ list, that’s only barely a joke.
Some observations. Experience seems to count: you could argue that John Humphrys’s long service for Today (as well as his Mastermind hosting) would account for his pay being so much higher than his colleagues (£600,000-£650,000 a year). Except that experience doesn’t always seem to count: Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey, with 72 years of radio presenting between them, did not reach the £150,000-plus list. On Radio 2, Ken Bruce is worth less than Steve Wright, and both are nowhere near Jeremy Vine (who also works on telly). On Wednesday, Dotun Adebayo tweeted that he is paid just £250 per show for a weekly two-hour programme (Sundays, 8-10pm) on BBC London that talks about the city’s diverse communities, and which he produces and books himself. He has been working for the BBC for 40 years, presenting that particular show for 20.
The BBC loves to self-flagellate even more than it loves Chris Evans, and many of its programmes took up the story, with Humphrys appearing on The Media Show and Jeremy Vine squirming when asked to justify his salary to a caller. Woman’s Hour, being Woman’s Hour, decided to discuss the issue around the table, like grown-ups. Jenni Murray, admirably cool, talked to Nick Higham, a BBC correspondent who works with its Reality Check team, and Suzanne Franks, head of the journalism school at City University, about the gender pay gap that was revealed by publishing these salaries.
Franks was horrified: “It’s far, far worse than I had anticipated.” Even Higham, who was circumspect (he noted that, overall, the BBC’s gender pay gap is 10%, better than the national average of 18%), said that “some of the amounts look extraordinarily arbitrary”. So now lawyers are rubbing their hands. Agents are being sacked. And Franks pointed out that next April, all large companies will be forced to publish gender audits on how much their employees are paid. This story is not yet over.
Shall we move on to higher things? Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame has a new podcast out. A Piece of Work is about art, and in each episode Jacobson goes to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to look at a specific work with one of her friends. It’s an easy listen: Jacobson, who studied fine art, is a warm and informed presenter. Unfortunately some of her friends are not. Tavi Gevinson was irritatingly glib, Hannibal Buress too laidback. Their observations added little.
This podcast is steeped in charm. How lovely if it were also steeped in a little more information. Aside from the MoMA curators and Jacobson, only Mark Morris, the choreographer, gave anything deeper than a hot take. He was scathing about Jackson Pollock (“a tantrum and a mess, I’ll show you!”) and insightful on Cy Twombly (“his queer identity doesn’t answer everything about his work”). A Piece of Work is fine, but it’s basic. An ideal art primer for a 14-year-old.
The Spectator Podcast is a standard news publication podcast: one journalist hosts and interviews other journalists about the story they have written. Last week, though, it offered Julie Burchill, whose short, funny contribution on her drinking was far livelier than anything else. Still, even before Burchill turned up, I very much enjoyed this episode, mostly because of its lack of dogma. Complicated real-life stories such as mass migration, UK slavery and how much alcohol is too much alcohol were treated fairly and with subtlety. It left me thinking and that’s always a good thing.
