RADIO 4’S FLAGSHIP SHOW IMPLODED IN A SOGGY MORASS OF SMUGGERY
CARRIE Gracie! Carrie Gracie! Everyone was talking about Carrie Gracie yesterday, with those readers and listeners not fully up to speed soon capsized in a squall of confusion.
Though she may sound like a stricken trawler that’s lost its catch, she is in fact the estimable former BBC China Editor who has quit her position over the gender pay gap at the Corporation. She’s totally had it, she’s burned her chopsticks, she is outta there – and who could blame her?
Jeremy Bowen the Middle East editor gets more, Jon Sopel in America gets more, and Lord only knows what John Simpson gets for wafting about in a burka being pompous, but it is certainly not going to be thruppence less than our Carrie, that’s for sure.
So far, so fem. However, things started to get perplexing after Miss Gracie, 55, published a blistering open letter on her blog, declaring ‘enough is enough’.
She also accused the BBC of an ‘illegal and secretive’ pay culture, and vowed she would not return to China unless the mess was sorted out.
Then she calmly continued providing holiday cover on the Today show – and BBC R4’s flagship news programme promptly imploded in a soggy morass of self-righteousness over impartiality rules.
As her own story led bulletins and newspaper front pages yesterday morning, BBC guidelines meant that Carrie Gracie could not talk directly about the Carrie Gracie situation, except for a brief thanks for the support she had received from other women, which illuminated the ‘ depth of hunger’ for equal pay.
So in the studio, her co-presenter John Humphrys had to read headlines about Carrie Gracie as Carrie Gracie listened in alongside, then interview Mariella Frostrup about Carrie Gracie, while Carrie Gracie sat silently next to him.
Mariella did not disappoint. This Marie Antoinette of the airwaves phoned in from her country residence in a fashionable area of Somerset to boast that she is ‘an old socialist’, and ‘the child of a Seventies feminist’.
She added that she personally had always been paid well by the BBC. Which was nice.
The Open Book (R4) presenter then would not accept John Humphrys’ assertion that she’s handsomely rewarded because she is ‘a star’, nor his conjecture that when it came to high-profile talent like her, it’s much more difficult for the BBC to calculate the rate for the job.
‘I think that if you work for the BBC you turn your back on the market,’ said Miss Frostrup.
Mariella – and others like her – might insist she is not a star, nor interested in market rates, but she employs three agents to exploit her celebrity; a literary agent; an after- dinner speaking agent ( current rate £ 5,000£10,000 per speech) and a voiceover agent who sells her ‘smooth, sexy and warm’ tones to promote everything from crisps to face cream to the Guardian newspaper.
Yet all this hypocrisy did not stop her tartly stating that her Open Book programme earned her ‘a tenth’ of what Mr Humphrys grosses for his combined television and radio work, plus his 50 years’ of service at the BBC (£ 650,000). Shouldn’t loyalty, popularity and expertise count for something?
To be honest, I thought LetThem-Eat-Cake’s remuneration – around £65,000 if my sums are right – for an unchallenging 30minute weekly discussion programme about novels was more than generous.
Such unhelpful conflation between what celebrities earn and what correspondents earn at the BBC only confuses the important gender gap issue, while refusal to accept that market-driven economics do have a role to play does not help those who truly are being discriminated against.
Meanwhile, Miss Gracie seems like the kind of woman the BBC should be cherishing, not alienating. Clever and dedicated, she has worked for the Beeb for more than 30 years and speaks fluent Mandarin: she earned £135,000 per annum for working in Beijing. Her ex-husband is a Chinese rock drummer who speaks little English – but obviously fluent drum – and appears to be the primary carer for their teenage children at the family base in south-west London.
In September 2011, she left the BBC to have cancer treatment, but returned to work the following May. Now, she’s resigned from her position, leaving calamity in her wake.
The final surreal twist yesterday came once 9am had passed, at which point Miss Gracie was allowed to transition from Today presenter to Woman’s Hour guest where – free at last! – her words spilled out in a gush.
She was very touched, she said, by those BBC women who had tweeted their support, including Clare Balding, Kate Silverton, Kirsty Wark and Sarah Montague.
Yet the farce continued. Since Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey has been an outspoken critic of the BBC pay structure, impartiality rules meant she could not interview her chief guest, and someone had to be drafted in from the Guardian to do it.
Later in the day, an edict from new head of BBC news, Fran unsworth, decreed that all those Beeb women tweeting their support would also be banned from reporting or presenting items on the pay gap issue.
This means that only men at the BBC, most of whom have kept a deafening silence on the subject, will be allowed to talk about it. Progress!
For the moment the good ship Carrie Gracie sails onwards in rocky seas, and we pray for all those aboard.