He resembled a Ski Sunday racer in the schuss position

TELEVISION viewers may have been entertained yesterday teatime if they caught footage of MPs on the public accounts committee throwing cabbages at BBC executives and a bloke from Capita, the private-sector company which bullies householders into coughing up for a Beeb licence. The cabbages, alas, were only verbal.

As the Daily Mail disclosed recently, Capita staff have been behaving more like dodgy double-glazing salesmen than representatives of an august public-service broadcaster. The Mail’s scoop shivered the BBC’s higher timbers. Director-general Lord Hall nearly sliced the top off his finger instead of his breakfast boiled egg when he read the story. His lordship gave Capita a steaming rocket; Capita has since announced the departure of its chief executive.

Yesterday four queasy-looking witnesses faced the public accounts committee. These were: BBC deputy director-general Anne Bulford; a BBC licence fee unit boss, Pipa Doubtfire; a mouse called Nicholas Prettejohn, ‘Chair, Value for Money Committee, BBC Trust’; a chunky bloke from Capita, Vic Gysin.

Mr Gysin and Miss Doubtfire signalled that they were procedural wonks by starting many sentences with the word ‘so’. Ms Bulford, a more sophisticated snoot, wore one of those expressions of weary-eyed superiority, lacing answers with pitying, antiseptic corporate-speak. Mr Prettejohn just sat in the corner and did his best to disappear.

He crouched lower and lower until he resembled a Ski Sunday racer in the schuss position.

I could not stay for the entire meeting but I heard him utter not one word. This from the man who runs the Beeb’s value for money committee. On a time-and-motion consultant’s chart, Agent Prettejohn would just be a horizontal line. In a hospital they would run to make sure he was all right.

Ms Bulford preferred to talk about BBC licence payers as ‘customers’. There. Makes you feel better already, doesn’t it? It’s the way she manages to coat the word with such simpering boredom. Superb. Years of accountancy go in to that sort of voice.

She spoke of the ‘steep decline in TV penetration’, which may not be as painful as it sounds, and burbled away about the increase in ‘sales from site visits’. This was a euphemism for ‘the number of would-be dodgers who are forced to cough up their licence fees when we biff on their doors’.

The ‘we’ in such a case is not a BBC staff member but is a Capita ‘operative’. Or as Mr Gysin put it, a member of ‘our visiting officer community’. These are the type of grunts who were caught by the Mail boasting about how they lean on the vulnerable to cough up their dues. Chris Evans (Lab, Islwyn) wondered how much these chaps get paid.

Mr Gysin, oddly soft-spoken for such a burly man, mewed some reply which the room struggled to hear. Committee chairman Meg Hillier (Lab, Hackney S & Shoreditch) sought to reduce a certain tension in the room by jesting that Mr Evans was plainly interested in a second job. Eventually Mr Gysin was prevailed on to say clearly that the pay for a Capita debt-collector was £20,000, with a possible bonus of up to £9,000 if they ‘effected’ enough ‘sales’ (ie collared enough licence fee dodgers).

MS Bulford went a bit quiet, as well she might, for her salary at the BBC is £435,000 – as much as 20 Capita bailiffs. Mr Gysin’s annual emoluments are, I believe, something nearer £2million. You want to know where your BBC licence fee money goes? There are two of its destinations.

We heard about ‘incentives flowing down to field-team levels’, ‘output-based performance contracts’, ‘products’ (the different ways of paying for your BBC licence), ‘believable trend analysis’, ‘recalibrating of our values’ and ‘validating correct behaviours’. Mr Gysin did some unconvincing, husky grovelling about how sorry Capita was about the misconduct reported by the Mail. ‘I actually think we’re pretty good at continuous improvement,’ he said at one point, bafflingly, to prim-lipped nodding from Miss Doubtfire.

Scottish viewers have their own programmes.