THE BBC SEEMS, under the impact of ITV's com- petition,
to have lost its sense of proportion en- tirely. Mr. Sid Caesar, the latest—and by no means the most distinguished—American comedian to appear on its screen, received £3,000 for a half- hour performance on Tuesday night. It is no kind of argument to say that this is the sort of money that Mr. Caesar can command at home; the only criterion should be whether the viewers on this side of the Atlantic are getting value for what is after all their own money. In this case I should have thought they were demonstrably not. But the 5,000 guineas which the BBC is to pay to Field- Marshal Montgomery for a series of six reminis- cent lectures of thirty minutes each strikes me as being even more absurdly extravagant. It is said that the BBC had to pay this sum to beat the offer made to Lord Montgomery by ITV.There was one obvious way out of their difficulty, which was to let ITV have him; but the real criticism of this kind of largesse is that it unbalances the general structure of payments on the BBC's notoriously mean television service: Field-Marshal Mont- gomery's appearances will no dotibt be more interesting than those of performers paid thirty- five guineas a half-hour. But twenty-four times as interesting? I doubt it.
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