Listen up girls — here’s how you win the BBC pay game
... by the agent who got Claudia Winkleman her big break
THE scandalous ‘ revelations’ about the BBC’s gender pay gap are proof of what I, as a former agent to some of the bestknown names in television, have known for years: that the Corporation has long been ruled by misogynists — men who, despite their politically correct musings on equality, still regard women as inferior broadcasters.
That’s why I was delighted to see some of the best women in the business taking action this week with a letter to the Director-General, Tony Hall, demanding parity with male broadcasters.
Newsnight host Emily Maitlis, a signatory to the letter, has gone further, asking male colleagues to speak publicly in their support.
Good for her. It was an outrageous humiliation for her to discover last week that, at 46 and a stalwart of BBC current affairs output, her salary of under £150,000 was considerably inferior to those of some of her less experienced and less capable peers.
But sexism is something she knows all about. I used to be her agent and at the start of her career I approached one of the main news and current affairs bosses at the BBC and told him about this fantastic talent, a young woman broadcaster who spoke five languages and who, I believed, could succeed anywhere on the network.
He told me she’d never get a job in his department while he was in charge.
That turned out to be true — we had to wait for a regime change before Emily got her chance. That animosity was entirely because Emily was a woman, and not the right sort of woman. The BBC, you see, is very happy to hire female glamour and sex appeal, but it’s much harder for a woman to make her mark through sheer ability and professionalism. Emily has revealed that a BBC manager once advised her to go on Strictly Come Dancing if she wanted her career to progress. ‘I thought he was joking,’ she said.
He wasn’t — he was advising her to follow in the nifty footsteps of Natasha Kaplinsky, an exemplar of the power of glamour and how it boosts your worth to the BBC.
When I negotiated Natasha’s deal to join BBC Breakfast, I knew she was being paid less than her male colleagues. But she was getting her big break, the job that would make her a household name. The big bucks would follow.
Not that presenters can be relied on to know where to find fame and fortune. When Natasha was invited to compete in the first series of Strictly, she turned it down. I pleaded with her to reconsider.
‘I am a serious journalist,’ she insisted. I told her that in my book, you’re not a serious journalist until you’ve been shot in the backside in a war zone. She reconsidered... and won the first Strictly in 2004. After that, she had her choice of programmes.
That, you see, is the kind of woman male BBC bosses prefer — not those professionals who simply play it straight, such as Maitlis, or Sarah Montague of the Today programme, or Jane Garvey of Woman’s Hour, but those who also embrace the more frivolous side of things.
As the formidable Kate Adie said this week, for the BBC it’s now all about ‘ fame, glamour, publicity, celebrity’.
Of course, some women play into that stereotype. When Claudia Winkleman first came to me, she enjoyed a rapid rise due in part to her quirky personality and, I think, her industry background.
Her mother is Eve Pollard, a former Sunday newspaper editor, and one of her sisters is married to a minor royal. The BBC loves that aura of showbiz/media dazzle.
Within a couple of years, we’d landed roles for her on half a dozen shows, so I was taken aback when she announced she was leaving my agency. I got the impression it was because she’d attended two premieres that week and not one paparazzo had taken her photograph. Other girls were getting snapped — why wasn’t she?
I explained that she was a respected presenter, not an airhead who needed to flash her curves on a red carpet. Today she apparently conforms exactly to what females should, in the Beeb’s eyes, be, so no wonder she is its most highly paid woman. When the BBC suits are negotiating a star’s contract, they will try any trick to save money. And that’ s understandable — it’s the licencepayer’s cash, after all. With a woman, they will play on her insecurities.
Over an expensive dinner at a London restaurant, I once told the then Programme Controller that he was treating my client, the late Jill Dando, shamefully. That kind of tough talking is usual in pay negotiations, but Jill was sitting next to me. She shrank down in her seat and afterwards protested: ‘ Don’t you think you went too far?’
I didn’t think I’d gone half far enough. Jill was beloved by millions, yet the Beeb was stringing her along with halfpromises of daytime shows that would never get made. I could find her a far better deal on a commercial channel.
But Jill was loyal and the BBC exploited that. She couldn’t imagine defecting and she was penalised for it.
She should have threatened to walk out. Goodness knows, I urged her to. There are certain stars the Beeb believes it must keep at any cost, and Jill was surely one of them.
Another is Nicky Campbell. In 2008, when the BBC was desperate to entice some of its biggest names — many of whom were reluctant — to broadcast from its new MediaCity in Salford Quays, I discovered they would pay almost any sum to secure Nicky’s services on the Radio 5 Live breakfast show.
I kept waiting for someone to call our bluff and say ‘who else can give you such a prestigious radio show?’ but they SO never did.
WE took the money. As Liz Taylor said when she was offered a million dollars for a movie: ‘ They’re fools to pay me so much... and I’d be a bigger fool to turn it down.’
The BBC has some male stars, though, whose pay is so inflated even Liz Taylor would feel embarrassed. What does Gary Lineker do that’s worth nearly £2 million a year?
So now we all know what a duplicitous, hypocritical organisation the BBC really is, will things change? Despite Tony Hall’s promise to go ‘further and faster’ on equal pay, I don’t believe it will. For the Corporation to start paying all its female stars in line with their male counterparts would be impractically expensive — and I haven’t heard many of the men offering to take a pay cut. Some years ago, while negotiating a contract for the female half of a daytime news ‘double act’, I dropped a bombshell: my client was rejecting the deal, I said, because her male co- presenter had been offered twice as much. Jaws dropped. How could I make such an outrageous claim? When I pointed out that I represented both presenters, the BBC department head rose to his feet in outrage. ‘ How dare you use that information?’ he shouted.
The truth is that many of us in the business have long known the dirty secret of the gender pay divide — though not Emily Maitlis’s agent, apparently. Last week he tweeted that it was ‘madness’ she earned so much less than some of her colleagues.
Well, if he didn’t know, then he should have.
Jon Roseman is a former showbusiness agent and author of the memoir From Here To obscurity.