AFTER just a year as director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie has been awarded a whopping £75,000 pay rise – 16.6 per cent – taking his annual salary to £525,000.
The increase was branded an ‘absolute scandal’ by pensioners’ groups campaigning against having to pay the statutory £159 licence fee, after the free licence for most over-75s was cut last summer to save £400million a year, affecting around 4.2million elderly viewers.
But Davie – who backed the free licence axe – is not alone in trousering mega-bucks. Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker is at the top of the ‘talent’ pay list, with between £1,360,000 and £1,364,999 a year, while radio host Zoe Ball is the second-biggest earner, on £1,330,000 to £1,334,999.
According to a BBC spokesman, Davie’s salary remains lower than what he earned at BBC Studios and is well below the pay of other UK broadcasting chiefs pay.
So that’s all right then – except that his rival broadcasting bosses are not paid out of the public purse. To earn as much as Davie does, he must have to work all day and all night. But if he does, there is no discernible effect on programme quality. I suppose though that he must be rushed off his feet, since he also has a chauffeur-driven car.
An ‘absolute scandal’ doesn’t begin to describe this sorry saga of greed and hypocrisy. It ill behoves the BBC hierarchy to award themselves massive pay rises while continuing to demand that pensioners pay the licence fee.
The elderly are the most ill-served of the population by a public broadcaster that bangs on about ‘yoof’ and diversity while those who most depend on TV for information, news and entertainment have to rely on the ‘repeats’ shown on other channels if they want real entertainment without the now obligatory woke lecture.
The only good thing about the elderly paying the licence fee is that without it the BBC would have no incentive at all to please its older audience. The corporation is already seen as a ‘cheerleader for assisted suicide’, and getting the licence fee for nothing would make us even more expensive old nuisances.
The BBC, which seems to think its is job to propagandise on behalf of the Remain (now Rejoiner) faction, to promote Covid lockdown and green zealotry, now has to deal with around 260,000 older viewers who have not paid their licence fee.
These face so-called ‘customer care visits’ from TV Licensing officials. What will these sinisterly Orwellian-named callers say to old folk on their doorsteps? ‘Give us your money and we’ll tell you what to think’?
Perhaps it is time to rename the BBC the Bullying Broadcasters Collective.
