C4 boss gets £855k payday as ratings fall
THE boss of Channel 4 has been awarded a 16 per cent pay rise – even though his channel’s ratings are at a 30-year low and advertising revenues lag behind rivals.
David Abraham received £855,000 – the equivalent of £ 16,000 a week – after taking the maximum possible bonus.
He is now on nearly double the pay of Lord Hall, the BBC’s director general, who earns £450,000 a year for running an organisation four times the size.
Channel 4 attracted just 5.9 per cent of viewers in 2014 – the lowest share since 1984, its second year on air.
Shadow Culture Secretary Chris Bryant condemned the inflation-busting rise. ‘This is startling stuff – what with MPs’ pay rises and boardroom pay rises and now Channel 4 pay rises, whilst most of the public sector have seen their pay stagnate for years,’ he said.
‘The truth is that most ordinary people will conclude that there is one rule for those at the top and another for the rest.’
Helen Goodman, the Labour MP in the running to become chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, added: ‘Channel 4 is publicly owned and [this sort of pay] is not acceptable.’
Mr Abraham was not the only one making the most of Channel 4’s largesse.
Jay Hunt, its chief creative officer, enjoyed a 17 per cent pay rise to £581,000, including a £123,000 bonus, for overseeing shows such as Benefits Street, Goggle Box and Indian Summer.
Jonathan Allen, Channel 4’s sales director, received a 21 per cent increase to £ 483,000, including a £ 102,000 bonus, and Dan Brooke, its marketing and communications chief, saw his pay climb 22 per cent to £437,000.
Overall, the taxpayer- owned broadcaster paid out £478,000 in bonuses, more than double the £221,000 paid out in 2013.
Lord Burns, Channel 4’s chairman, said the remuneration committee had decided to hand out the enormous bonuses because the broadcaster could not have done any better creatively. ‘They looked at the two sides of this, one which was the creative performance and the other which was the financial statement,’ he said.
‘They came to the view that on the creative side, it was probably as good as it can get.’
It was hard to strike such an
‘This is not acceptable’
upbeat note about the rest of Channel 4’s performance. When its portfolio of channels, such as E4, More4 and Film4, are included, its ratings share slipped from 11 to 10.9 per cent.
Alongside those figures, the company – which is wholly owned by the taxpayer but funded through advertising – managed to increase its ad rev- enues by only 2 per cent. Bosses praised this achievement, despite the fact that it lagged dramatically behind the market average of 5.6 per cent growth.
Mr Abraham blamed the discrepancy on the World Cup, claiming that the football tournament had mopped up a lot of television advertising revenues last year, and that once that was stripped out Channel 4 had done as well as anyone else.
He also argued that Channel 4’s performance was strongest among 16 to 34- year- olds, who are particularly valuable to advertisers.
Overall, the company moved back into the black as it delivered a £ 4million profit, or ‘surplus’ as Channel 4 refers to it on account of the fact that it is technically a publicly owned organisation.
However, that could change. The broadcaster, which launched in 1982, has escaped repeated calls for privatisation in the past, but may be sold off for £1billion as part of the latest round of austerity measures.