Any fool can read the news, scoffs Paxman
Veteran broadcaster mocks bulletin presenters in rant against BBC ‘full of boring people doing dull jobs’
‘That’s the problem with television, it’s full of vainglorious fools who want to be on telly instead of just letting the story tell itself ’
JEREMY PAXMAN has claimed “any fool” can read the news because the work requires no “grandeur or skill”.
In a tirade against his BBC colleagues. the University Challenge presenter, who left Newsnight in 2014 after 25 years on the current affairs programme, has belittled some of the highest-paid figures at the corporation.
Newsreaders feature prominently on the BBC top-paid list, which in 2020 included Huw Edwards with a £465,000 salary and George Alagiah, who is paid at least £325,000 a year. But Paxman, who has presented the Six O’clock News, said he sees no point in their roles and compared working from a teleprompter to children learning to read.
“I think newsreading is an occupation for an articulated suit,” he said during an online discussion.
“I can’t see any point in reading the news at all. Reading aloud, do you remember reading aloud at school? That’s what it is. I don’t think it has any grandeur or skill or anything to it. Any fool can do it.”
Newsnight’s former lead interviewer, right, said the world is a better place for having the BBC, but added that it is “an immensely frustrating organisation”.
He said the corporation, which employs 22,000 staff, is “full of boring people doing dull jobs and pretending they’re important” which obstructs “its true mission” to make interesting programmes.
A BBC source said that the corporation was “too dull to comment” on Paxman’s remarks.
These included claims that the corporation’s problems are symptomatic of broader issues in his industry. He said: “That’s the besetting problem with television, it’s full of vainglorious fools who want to be on telly instead of just letting the story tell itself.”
In a streamed discussion with comedian Richard Herring, Paxman said that even in war reporting, egotism “switches the focus from whatever’s happening wherever you are to me, me, me”. His criticism also covered interviewers, who he accused of “moving on to the next question on their notepad” when not given an answer by politicians, and stated the interrogatory role he made his own on Newsnight is “not complicated”.
The presenter has been involved in broadcasting since the Seventies, first working at BBC Radio Brighton, before graduating to Tonight and Panorama.
He read the Six O’clock News and presented BBC One’s Breakfast Time, the first programme of its kind in the UK, before joining Newsnight in 1989.
Speaking via online video platform Twitch, the presenter conceded that the roles he has disparaged, yet filled early in his career, were necessary as “you’ve got to learn the job”.
Paxman, who is paid through his own private company for BBC work, has further criticised the corporation for its handling of royal events compared with other broadcasters.
The veteran broadcaster said that BBC protocols and alleged dress codes for coverage of the Royal family, particularly its family tragedies, were “absolutely absurd”.
He added on past coverage of royal deaths: “The organisation was caught in this trap between recognising a news story and acting as mourner-in-chief. It got into a real muddle about it.”
Paxman has voiced critical opinions on his employer in the past, and earned a rebuke from the BBC in 2014 prior to his departure from Newsnight for claiming that colleagues at the corporation were “smug”, and that playing the broadcaster’s youth-focused station Radio 1Xtra in the lifts at Broadcasting House was “hell”.