£2m pay cut for Graham Norton... leaving him on just £3m
‘Am I still cashing the cheques? Yes’
GRAHAM Norton has seen his pay slashed by more than 40 per cent, according to figures released by his production company.
The BBC presenter is a director of So Television, the company which produces his long-running Friday night chat show, which paid him £2.97million last year.
But this was a drop of more than £2million compared with the previous year, when he raked in £5.19million.
Figures released by the company show that Mr Norton earned £2.97m from ‘ presenter fees’, ‘ production fees’ and ‘royalties’ in 2018.
The money, for ‘ presenter fees’, ‘production fees’ and ‘royalties’, is understood to include his pay from presenting The Graham Norton Show, as well as a large part of his earnings from his other BBC work. But the exact details of where the money has come from are not disclosed in the documents.
The BBC’s pay report, released in the summer, showed that the presenter was paid up to almost £615,000 for his work for the corporation, but this did not include his fee from The Graham Norton Show. His other BBC work includes a Radio 2 show and presenting the Eurovsion Song Contest.
The figures from So Television, which includes what Mr Norton has earned from his chat show being sold around the world and other payments, will lead to speculation that he has taken a pay cut.
So Television was bought by ITV in 2012 but Mr Norton remains a director of the company. He recently admitted that he could not ‘justify’ his wages so he did not try to. He said: ‘Am I still cashing the cheques? Yes, because somehow the market forces have decreed this is my value.’
The BBC’s annual report in the summer put Mr Norton as its third most highly paid performer, behind Gary Lineker, on £1.75million, and Chris Evans – who has now left the corporation – on about £1.25million.
But Mr Norton questioned whether they really are ‘top of the tree’ in terms of BBC pay. He said: ‘We all know there are people who earn a lot more than me and Gary.’
However, many of the BBC stars are paid through production companies, including BBC Studios, which do not have to declare what they are paying.
Last week, Mr Norton said the outrage over his salary would be greatly diminished if the public knew how much his contemporaries at ITV made. He told Radio Times: ‘For some reason, MPs want to know what famous people at the BBC earn. If they could get ITV to tell them what [This Morning presenter] Phillip Schofield gets, they’d love to know. Also, what would really shock the public is to discover the disparity between ITV and BBC. People would go, “Wow!” ’