The loss of Chris Evans is the least of the BBC’S problems
What fun it was, back in the summer of 2017, to ogle the first-ever list of BBC salaries. Even those of us who were brought up never to gossip about money (let alone other people’s money) tossed aside our scruples and ran covetous fingers down the list of celebrity remittances. The social justice angle provided some cover – Cor, look at the size of that gender pay gap! – but mostly it was just prurience.
At the time, the BBC director general Tony Hall described the list as a “poacher’s charter”, warning that this forced transparency would lead to salary inflation and star defections. But the government pooh-poohed Hall’s prophecies. “I am not sure there are many people out there who will be paying Chris Evans more than he gets for doing what he currently does,” an unnamed minister assured this newspaper. “Who [else] is going to pay Eddie Mair £300,000 a year? Nobody.”
Eddie Mair started his new job, hosting LBC’S drive-time show, on Monday – coincidentally, the same day that Chris Evans announced his defection to Virgin radio. For a sum presumably greater than his £1.6million Radio 2 salary, Evans will soon be swapping the UK’S biggest radio show, with nine million listeners, for one of the smallest (Virgin’s equivalent breakfast slot attracts about 500,000 early risers). Hall, the Cassandra of New Broadcasting House, must be rending his robes in despair.
Of course, money isn’t everything. A friend who works at the BBC tells me that, while the publication of salaries has certainly stirred up trouble, the bigger issue is bad management. “Good presenters need their egos stroked,” he says, “and no one seems to bother with that any more.” Managers are in a state of constant low-level panic, struggling with budget cuts, lawsuits, the gender pay gap scandal, political hostility on both left and right, and the bigger question of how to survive in a world of podcasts.
Commercial radio, meanwhile, is surging ahead: it overtook BBC listener figures last year, and the gap is still widening. LBC has proved a particularly nimble rival to the BBC’S currentaffairs stations. It has a sharp eye for talent and, with no BBC impartiality rules to obey, gives its presenters much more freedom to express themselves. I can’t bear listening to James O’brien or Nigel Farage – they bring on palpitations – but their angry, self-righteous style is perfectly in tune with these fractious times.
How Mair will adapt to LBC’S shock-jock culture remains to be seen. His voice – despite betraying a touch of nerves on Monday – is always a treat worth tuning in for, as soft and ticklish as a cat’s ear. But it was his air of restrained mischief that made Mair so irresistible on Radio 4. Now that the restraints are off, this formidable broadcaster seems a bit aimless. Taking refuge in self-deprecating jokes (“I’m joining a growing station… Watch it go into reverse”) is endearing, but he will need a better target.
Luckily, even LBC has some orthodoxies to subvert. One is the platitude that ordinary people (especially those who phone in to the shows) are superior to politicians. “Boris Johnson: He makes me so, so angry,” fulminated one typically self-important caller on Monday. “I’m told he feels the same way about you,” purred Mair, causing her to wobble briefly on her high horse. Let’s have more of that old miscreant charm.
Given the BBC’S HR woes, it’s a miracle that the Corporation still makes terrific programmes. Morality in the 21st Century (Radio 4, every day this week) is exactly what I want from a public service broadcaster: a huge can of difficult questions, prised open by a determined mind.
The mood of the series – like that of its presenter, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks – is apocalyptic. His proposition, essentially, is that Western society is becoming dangerously tribal and bitter. Can we recover a sense of moral responsibility towards each other before it’s too late?
Having identified the forces of destruction (chiefly, the cult of the individual, social media, artificial intelligence and identity politics), Sacks consults a series of experts about just how doomed we are. He then invites groups of teenagers – the generation that will inherit this dysfunctional world – to discuss the evidence.
The series has its flaws. It seems odd, for example, to talk at length to the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson about why rights should be less important than responsibilities, without hearing the moral counterargument from one of his many critics. But if Sacks tends to go with the grain of his own beliefs, at least he is asking profound questions. That, surely, is where morality begins.