Virginia Blackburn

TURN on BBC television or radio in the past couple of days and you will have got wall-to-wall Weinstein. Shock, horror and outrage about Harvey it was all there in spades: hushed interviews with the victims, think pieces about sexism in Hollywood and the kind of more-insorrow-than-in-anger commentary that Radio 4 is so good at when it wants to set the high moral tone. What a load of sanctimonious old twaddle it was. Because while Weinstein was rightly being reviled for his repulsive and possibly criminal behaviour there is another massive scandal about the treatment of women and guess where it’s taking place? The BBC.

This is a perennial favourite: it seems hardly a day goes by without yet another example of the way Aunty treats its womenfolk. A while back it was grossly unequal salaries, now Ofcom has chipped in and had a go at the Beeb for driving women out after the age of 45. Sharon White, chief executive of the regulator, has said she was concerned women were “not progressing through the organisation” and that while the BBC has said it aims to have half its on-air roles filled by females from 2020 there is no similar target for older women.

When is the BBC going to get this? The issue of its treatment of the more mature lady is nothing new: just ask Miriam O’Reilly, forced out of Countryfile aged 52, or Arlene Phillips, dumped from Strictly aged 66. There was an outcry on both occasions and yet nothing has changed.

Faced with the later scandal about unequal pay, BBC director-general Tony Hall said he hopes to close the gap by 2020: the Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1970. The BBC is a