As an act of sisterly solidarity, I’m trying hard to sympathise with the BBC women who are paid visibly less than their colleagues. Poor Claudia Winkleman “only” gets half a million quid annually: Alex Jones, of The One Show, a mere £400,000, and Fiona Bruce a paltry £350,000. Emily Maitlis of Newsnight is on a desperate £150,000 – while her co-presenter, Evan Davis (who also does radio), has £250,000 in his pay packet.
Now, we know the complaint is that the “gender pay gap” at the BBC is a scandal. (Chris Evans is paid more than £2.2 million and Gary Lineker £1.75 million.) And in the name of equality, they’ll have to sort this out.
But the wider problem is, surely, that we live in a world of glaring inequality, and that this is amplified in all professions which involve either performance, media or showbiz. People at the top earn in telephone numbers, whereas diligent folk lower down the scales are paid, by comparison, quite meagrely. Hundreds of BBC employees earn just £20,000 – one per cent of Chris Evans’s salary.
Also, the BBC sometimes pays nothing at all to programme contributors, saying that “there is no budget for a fee”. It is not just a gender pay issue.
The women are entitled to complain, but is the BBC entitled to continue with this blatantly unequal system, based more on a Hollywood model of tough agents negotiating for their clients than on Sir John Reith’s concept of public service broadcasting?
In an age which shouts loudly about “equality”, there is a lot of dire inequality going around. And I’m not sure that any of the big cheeses at the BBC, male or female, quite understands that to most of us, a “lowly” £150,000 is a huge sum of money.
……..
If you feel like doing a bit of penance for your sins, why not go on Twitter and post something in defence of Christian values? You’ll get a shoal of abuse, and this will enable you to perform an act of penance and self-reflection. A fairly typical example: in reply to some (I thought quite mild) tweet I posted on a pro-life point, I was told that I was “as vacuous and intellectually vapid on Twitter” as my published columns would suggest.
When I responded that evidently I must try to improve, the sender (one Aidan O’Brien) wrote: “Your writing, tweets or just the whole being a truly terrible human being? Because they all need a lot of work.” There was much more in this vein from various tweeters. This, I thought, was an apt opportunity to practice humility.
It occurred to me that any priest looking around for a useful penance to hand out after Confession might suggest: “Why not go on Twitter for a day and make a few points in defence of your faith?” The longer term outcome, however, is probably less constructive.
In the end, unless you’re a masochist, you just stop getting involved in anything relating to moral values via Twitter. And that constitutes another failing: cowardice.
Sensitive young people have turned to suicide after a verbal lashing on social media – whoever said “words will never hurt” was a fool. So the penance of “post on Twitter” should be restricted to more seasoned old skins.
……..
I was sitting having a coffee just by London City Airport when a woman from Transport for London (TFL) approached me, with a youth in tow, asking: “Do you speak Italian?” I murmured that I could manage a little, and a rather complex interchange ensued, involving the ticketing system for tourists using TFL. The young man spoke only Italian and had purchased the wrong kind of weekly pass.
I stumbled along in my café Italian, but in the end the transport regulations and the swiftly spoken replies were beyond my capacity and it was agreed that a more professional interpreter within the airport should be sought.
Still, the encounter was pleasing. The TFL ticket clerk was, with care and kindness, seeking to ensure that the young tourist was not being short-changed. And I was subtly flattered that I looked as though I might speak Italian. On such small incidents, faith in people is restored …
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