The Spectator’s Notes | 13 February 2010

At last, the BBC has caught up with me. Readers may remember that I have been keeping and watching my television, but refusing to pay my television licence, for as long as the BBC continues to employ Jonathan Ross. (I sent the sum to Help the Aged instead.) The anti-Ross campaign has had some effect and Ross’s contract will not be renewed, but he continues to collect his £6 million a year from the Corporation until July, so I won’t contribute until he is off the books. I have just received a Summons, which begins ‘Brenda Curry TV LICENSING of TV Licensing, PO Box 88, Darwen, BBS 1YX says that you committed the offences listed on the following pages’, and tells me to appear at Hastings Magistrates’ Court on 1 March. That is only if I plead guilty, however. If I plead not guilty, the process takes longer and no date is yet fixed. I plead not guilty, on the grounds that the BBC, by broadcasting Ross’s torment of Andrew Sachs and not sacking Ross, is in breach of its Charter. I also have to make a statement of my financial circumstances. I notice that this is something that star performers of the BBC do not have to do. As I write, the Corporation is finally publishing the overall amounts (£70 million a year for the top earners, £230 million for all those who appear on screen and radio), but still treats individual amounts with the secrecy of MI6.

If Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill becomes law, I wonder what the BBC will do. If enacted, the Bill will impose a legal duty on public bodies to ‘have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities’. The authors of the book The Spirit Level, which lies behind the thinking in the Bill, hold up Japan as a model country.