Libby Purves

There is still surprise that women earn large salaries – but how did ‘star’ wages get so insanely high?

As the dust fails to settle on the BBC pay storm, step with me back to 1983: Mrs Thatcher on a second term, Rik Mayall on telly, a Rubik’s Cube on every desk. Threeand-a-half years earlier, I had left my role as a Today presenter to have babies – four 4am starts a week seemed inimical to fertility – and was writing and doing odd bits of radio, including working as a guest interviewer on

Midweek with Russell Harty.

The producer asked if I would take over presenting, but the controller of Radio 4, Monica Sims, was against it and said just do documentaries. I explained that our docs were so lovingly crafted that they paid less per hour than cleaning windows. I never forgot her response: “Oh, is money an issue then? But you’re married…”

Yes, I said – to another precarious freelancer. In fairness, Ms Sims was the controller who two years later produced the important Women in BBC

Management report that paved the way for flexible work. And she lost our argument: I did Midweek for 34 years, until it was axed this spring.

But the point is that only 35 years ago, under a woman PM, it was still comfortable for bosses to assume that women don’t really need money the way men do. Mrs Thatcher herself, of course, had been supported through her long struggle for a constituency by the affluent Denis. It gives perspective to the present furore about the gender discrepancy in “star” pay.

For there is still an undercurrent of surprise in this country when women – outside the pop or movie world – earn immense salaries. And there may be a faint reluctance in women to demand to be propelled into that stratosphere. Indeed my first reaction to the BBC figures was that they demonstrated how much greedier and vainer men are than women. Men easily confuse financial “worth” with the deeper, necessary sense of worthiness. You see it in bankers, emotionally distraught if their bonus goes down by a million, even though they don’t need any more stuff and barely have time for holidays.

Women like good, fair pay, but maybe fewer of us have the weird instinct which appears to make chaps like Chris Evans or Sir Philip Green feel more personally secure, more snug in their underpants, if they have more money than any sane person needs.

But some discrepancies are mad: how is any vapid non-specialist TV studio face worth more than Laura Kuenssberg? Emily Maitlis? Clare Balding? Perhaps the women simply thought: “It’s a great job, good salary, the BBC is a public service, if I nagged for more money the ghost of Lord Reith wouldn’t like it.” Perhaps they didn’t realise that the smug expression on their male colleagues’ faces was backed by half a million quid more…

And why did broadcast star salaries get so ridiculously high in the first place? Executives and agents prattle about “the market”, but it isn’t that sort of market: these aren’t barrels of oil or beef cattle. In speech radio there is, in fact, hardly a market at all. In TV, “talent” doesn’t come ready-cooked off the shelf. What happens is that an organisation – let’s say the BBC – develops stars with airtime, familiarity, top camerawork and excellent (often quite low paid) producers.

If stars then defect for mere money, they often fade: think of the “Famous Five” on TVam (Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and Robert Kee); Morecambe and Wise, less loved on ITV; Des Lynam, never quite the same; even Harry Enfield was less sharp after the Beeb.

I bet Bake Off won’t be the same on Channel 4: clearly the (female!) presenters who refused to go knew that. Production talent, tradition and the status of the world’s greatest broadcaster is not nothing. I am always amazed that the BBC seems unable to reply to threats of defection with: “OK, no sweat, we made you, we’ll make another. Have fun.”

Maybe another element is in play here. BBC executive pay has rocketed – absurdly so when you consider what the upper-middle management layers actually do for their £200,000-plus, and how protected they are by the structure from hard answerability.

Perhaps, just perhaps, those on inflated wages, when hiring on-air talent, simply feel more comfortable ramping the offer up really high. Doing so returns the manager to a sense of being just an honest toiler on the lower slopes while “managing a huge budget”. If you earn £150,000 you are, of course, rich. But seeing someone else (especially a bit of a dimbo) on £500,000, no doubt assuages your guilt-of-affluence.

That guilt would be turned to a better purpose if it made managers think hard about getting value for every licence fee they spend.