On his vast salary, Peter Salmon could buy Wigan, says Rod Liddle. But he and the rest of the corporation’s managerial elite will not be abandoning their cosy London lives any time soon
Do any senior BBC executives wish to move to Salford, as is being urged upon the corporation’s exponentially less well paid staff, i.e. the ones who make the programmes you watch or hear?
Peter Salmon is the latest exec to announce that he would rather hack off his own face than move his family anywhere remotely near the north. This is a problem because Peter is ‘Director BBC North’, a post given to him presumably because he is married to a woman called Sarah Lancashire. Lancashire is in the north, isn’t it? About as close as the BBC gets, anyway. I didn’t even know the BBC had a Director BBC North; I knew it had units to deal with black people, Asian people, Roma people, homosexuals and so on — so I suppose it’s fair enough that northerners get a look in somewhere. There is also, I understand, a Director BBC White Middle-Class Very Liberal People Living in Islington — but he’s known as the ‘Director General’.
The BBC is to move 1,500 people to Salford, including the staff and presenters of its fabulously witless morning news programme, Breakfast. But very few of the execs involved in this move — whose salaries are a quite staggering cost to the licence payer — wish to follow the lead they have set. Not the former management consultant Richard Deverell, for example, who was in charge of the move to Salford and paid £232,000 of your money for his trouble. Nor Adrian Van Klaveren, the boss of Radio 5 Live (who, in fairness, is probably the least northern person I have ever met in my life. I suspect he starts to bleed from the ears if he’s ever forced to go as far north as Harrow). And best of all, Salmon — who is paid an inconceivable £400,000 per year. For what? What does this gink actually do? It seems his sole role in life is to piss off northern people. Salmon has announced that he won’t be moving permanently oop no’th because his children are at a crucial stage in their education and should not be disrupted in their studies by having suddenly to deal with whippets, pies and poverty.
But what of the BBC staff in London on lower wages who feel similarly? They will be ‘redeployed’ or in extremis made redundant if they don’t get their arses up to Salford double quick. Why don’t they do that to Salmon? The truth is that on his salary he could buy Wigan, say, and turn it into an extraordinarily well-equipped school just for his brats. They could have the Wirral as playing fields, maybe on a lend-lease arrangement.
You look at Salmon’s salary — £400,000 — and see, glimmering in the very close distance, the death of the BBC. He and the hundreds of others on similarly inflated wages will tell you that they could earn ‘even more’ in the private sector. No, they couldn’t — that is a lie, or an epic delusion. Probably none of them could, and certainly not Salmon. Or Deverell. Or Van Klaveren. Or all the human resources managers or the marketers or the heads of policy and heads of strategy or the middle ranking munchkins in-between, paid something around the £200k mark for being dull yes-men, bereft of wit, wisdom, talent and imagination. I suppose we might be able to find a job for Alan Yentob somewhere, maybe in a provincial museum. The one at Tring, for example, which specialises in showing dried excrement to children and is an interesting offshoot to the Natural History Museum.
There is nothing wrong with the BBC wishing to move its staff to Salford; never mind the money saved, it is about time our national broadcaster attempted to reflect the views and aspirations of those British people living beyond the north circular. For a long while the BBC has seen the north simply as a place where people go berserk with guns every so often. They will find, I suspect, that politics is seen very differently outside London, that the things they took for granted as being certainties are not necessarily so. In fairness to the BBC, this is true of much of our media. There is a political chasm opening up between upper-middle-class London and the rest of the country which does not easily correspond to the old derogations of left versus right.
The north is badly represented and I suppose it is to the corporation’s credit that it recognises this. So the former Labour minister Hazel Blears is absolutely right when she argues that BBC Breakfast presenters who do not wish to move to Salford should be expunged from our lives and their well-remunerated jobs given to burgeoning local talent. We will not grieve for too long over the departure of, say, the vacuous idiot of a sports presenter Chris Hollins. If Chris and his colleagues go, because they cannot abide to be away from London, let them go and work for hospital radio, if they can master the techniques required. If I were still at the BBC, I would relish the opportunity to move northwards, for a better quality of life and a nicer class of friends, frankly.
But none of this excuses the epic mismanagement which has accompanied the move, and the notion that the corporation’s most useless and reviled contingent — the managers and the middle managers — should be excused the move because they are somehow better than the rest. It is ever more the case that the BBC is staffed by talented people — researchers, producers, reporters, journalists and so on — who are paid far too little, and a comparatively small tranche of boss-class idiots who are paid way, way too much. The Salford move has thrown this disparity in stark contrast. Every Director General who has come in (aside from Birt, of course) has pledged to reduce the bureaucracy of the corporation; all have failed. And right now the only people in the corporation who seem to matter are those at the top. I think I will withhold my licence fee until Peter Salmon has been sacked. Rather Jonathan Ross than him; at least Ross gave some people a degree of pleasure.
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