N ever having watched Jonathan Ross, I have no opinion as
to whether he is worth £18 million over three years, which is what the BBC is said to pay him. But the news that the BBC Trust had just reported that the BBC was not distorting the market with its huge payments to such stars happened to come on the same day that I was telephoned to ask if I would appear on a BBC television programme. Having discussed the subject matter, I said, perhaps in rather a sarky tone, ‘Will I be paid for this honour?’ ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the researcher, rather as if I had asked him to remove his trousers, ‘Oh, I’ll have to find out about that.’ The BBC is the only organisation for which I have ever done any work in which the people who seek your services get in touch without knowing what they will pay you. This must be a deliberate policy, based on the generally correct assumption that you will say yes anyway. Eventually, I got an email promising me £75. When I last did Any Questions? on Radio 4 a few months ago, I was paid £222 (which includes the ‘repeat fee’). When I first did the programme, in 1984, I got paid, I think, £125. Can there be any other branch of journalism where the increase has been so small in a quarter of a century? The reason, presumably, is the desire to divert everything to Mr Ross and co. I would need to make 240,000 £75 appearances on the BBC to catch up with Mr Ross. Obviously, nobody cares about the plight of petty contributors such as myself, but licence-payers might note that the Trust has decided that the BBC must pay Mr Ross all this money because this is ‘competitive’, but that it is paying too much to news presenters because this is not. What it is saying, in other words, is that everything in the area of public service broadcasting should be done on the cheap and everything which resembles the commercial rivals has to be expensive. Brilliant!
By the way, even if it is a wonderful idea to pay Mr Ross roughly 30 times more (annualised) than the Prime Minister and 20 times more than the Governor of the Bank of England out of what is, after all, tax, it is obvious rubbish that this does not push up the market. If the BBC were not competing in this field, Mr Ross’s price to commercial channels would plummet.
TV Licensing (continued). As I have reported often before, the BBC even tries to tax you when you do not possess a television. I hear from the Master of the Pevensey Marsh Beagles that TV Licensing noticed that the kennels, which are inhabited solely by hounds, did not have a television licence. The threatening letters started to flow. The Master answered some of them, to no avail, and threw others away. Eventually he wrote and said, ‘The hounds do not watch television.’ To his surprise, the letters stopped.
It was a bad omen, when Robin Cook became Tony Blair’s first foreign secretary, that he ordered the removal of the picture in his office. It was an elegant painting of Jung Bahadur Rana, the first Prime Minister of Nepal. Jung Bahadur consolidated the independent kingdom of Nepal and forged a lasting friendship with Britain by coming to our assistance during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The portrait itself, by Bhaja Machu Chitrakar, is a synthesis of subcontinental exoticism with the oil-painting style used to depict British viceroys in Calcutta which Jung Bahadur much admired. Mixing vanity and homage, he presented it to Queen Victoria. The resulting long friendship between Britain and Nepal has produced many advantages, of which the Gurkhas are the best known. Today, the place is a mess. The monarchy never recovered from the massacre in 2001 by a drunken, disappointed Crown Prince Dipendra, who was being thwarted in his desire to marry a member of the Rana family. He killed his father, the King, his mother, other family members and himself. The King’s brother, Gyanendra, succeeded, and became so unpopular for his dictatorial behaviour that the new Constituent Assembly has just voted to abolish the monarchy, egged on by that old fool Jimmy Carter. The Maoists, although they got only 30 per cent of the vote in an election very poorly supervised by the UN, are now taking power. They have said they will abolish the Gurkhas, though they have now gone quiet on this, perhaps because of the economic damage which would be done. They have tied up with Naxalite (communist) extremists in several Indian states, so India, which has a 400-mile open border with Nepal, is nervous. So is the other big neighbour, China. I do not know whether a more Victorian British foreign policy could have helped save Nepal, but I am sure that Jung Bahadur Rana’s portrait, hung in that room, was a fine emblem of a policy which advances British interests by respecting what is now called ‘diversity’. I may be making this up, but I seem to remember that Mr Cook chose to replace the picture of Jung Bahadur with a mirror.
Woody Allen famously said that a stockbroker is ‘someone who invests your money until it has all gone’. The company that has been performing this role for me has sent us, its customers, a letter from its regional director. It seems to be trying to explain something untoward (‘speculation regarding staff changes... we do respect their decision to leave’), but you never really find out what. There will be a ‘seamless movement to your new Investment Manager’, the letter goes on, ‘who’s [sic] key objective is to ensure that we offer the best service for you going forward... I understand that change can be very unsettling... Finally let me reassure any concerns that you may hear regarding the management of your investments going forward.’ The office ‘will continue with its excellent reputation for personal service and look forward to offering an enhanced range of services than you may not previously have experienced and are tailored to your specific requirements’. What is really remarkable is not that a particular manager is bad with words, but that no one in this large and wellknown organisation appears to have read the letter and noticed that it does not make sense. Since the company’s employees cannot write English, I make the assumption that they cannot add up either, and so I shall not be using their services ‘going forward’. Actually, this may be a false assumption (after all, plenty of people who can write English cannot add up), but there is something bewildering about this combination of struggling so hard to keep one’s customers yet writing to them in what might as well be a foreign language.
On the Tube recently, I saw advertisements for mass meetings to hear ‘one of India’s most highly regarded living Saints’. Is there a caste system of living sainthood? Could one be a living saint and yet be lowly regarded?
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