Vine wants more cash, plain and simple! How star’s agent swayed BBC
JEREMY Vine’s agent told the BBC to stop treating the Radio 2 presenter ‘like a chattel’ and give him a huge pay rise, it emerged yesterday.
Alex Armitage wrote to Corporation bosses: ‘Jeremy wants more money, plain and simple.’
The agent claimed he and Vine were ‘bored and irritated by being patronised, bullied and misled’ during pay negotiations. The BBC revealed the email exchange, dating from December 2007, as part of its employment tribunal gender pay battle with Samira Ahmed.
It said that during contract negotiations it had agreed to pay Vine a ‘top-up’ fee of £100,000 – for doing nothing if they could not find enough programmes for him to present.
Miss Ahmed says she was paid a ‘fraction’ of what Vine received for similar television work and is claiming arrears of more than £500,000. The email exchange between Mr Armitage and the then head of operations and business affairs for entertainment, Roger Leatham, provides a rare insight into the BBC’s negotiations with its highlypaid stars.
Mr Armitage wrote: ‘Stop saying there is no money as there is money for whatever you want it for, just find it and stop treating Jeremy Vine like a child as he is sick of it now.’
Mr Leatham, now director of business affairs at BBC Studios, claims he was told Vine had received offers from Sky and Channel 4, while ITV had offered ‘close to a seven-figure amount’. In a witness statement he told the tribunal: ‘I knew that Alex was aiming to keep Jeremy’s workload the same but to get him higher fees for doing it. The BBC was not able to do that.
‘I advised my colleagues to prepare a press line in anticipation of Jeremy leaving the BBC at the end of the year.’ Then directorgeneral Mark Thompson took the ‘unusual’ step of speaking to Vine personally in a bid to convince him to stay at the Corporation, he said.
Following a ‘rather colourful email’ from Mr Armitage, both parties finally agreed to a contract which included Vine presenting Panorama, elections, radio shows, Eggheads and news specials. Mr Leatham revealed that the BBC said it would find extra work for Vine ‘to a value of £100,000 or a guaranteed payment of up to £100,000 if they did not’.
Vine was subsequently offered £3,000 per episode of Points Of View. At 20 episodes a year, this allowed the BBC to offset £60,000 of the £100,000 top-up.
Mr Leatham acknowledged that bonus payments of this kind were not routinely offered by the BBC. When the deal was finally struck Mr Leatham emailed colleagues saying: ‘It’s been a long slog but we got there in the end.’
Two years later the BBC reviewed Vine’s contract and Mr Leatham reflected on what a ‘tortuous’ process it had been.
Miss Ahmed is taking the BBC to a tribunal over its alleged gender pay gap – she says she was paid £465 per episode to present Newswatch, the successor to Points Of View. Vine revealed in July that he agreed to a pay cut – from the £700,000 to £749,000 bracket to the £290,000 to £294,000 bracket – after learning of the gap between himself and female colleagues.
Vine, 54, who also presents a weekday show on Channel 5, told The Mail on Sunday at the time: ‘I should say I really was appalled at the disparity with my female colleagues, because I did not know anything about that.’
The tribunal continues.
‘Guaranteed a £100,000 top-up’