The BBC’s salary row shows how out of touch the Corporation is with its audience

I want my licence fee to filter down to the workforce at the coalface, not to someone checking ‘delivery’ or a nerd whose role is defined as an ‘identity architect’

Chris Evans is the BBC's highest paid star (Getty)

On Thursday evening, ITV held a swanky party in the grounds of Kensington Palace for their onscreen talent – a well-paid mixture of black and white faces from Eamonn Holmes, Kate Garraway, Piers Morgan and Andi Peters to Lorraine Kelly and Linda Robson, as well as reality stars like Joe Swash and Gemma Collins.

For the executives present, the mood could be summed up in one word: smug. Unlike the BBC, ITV has not been forced by the Government to name all employees earning over £150,000 a year, and (with brilliant timing) the broadcaster named a woman – Dame Carolyn McCall, the current boss of EasyJet – as their new chief executive, the day before the BBC’s gender gap revelations. Formerly at the Guardian, Dame Carolyn has been a huge success in her current job, with EasyJet announcing better than expected profits this week.

Having spent many years as a BBC executive dealing with contracts in front of and behind the camera, I know that pay is largely governed by how loud the talent or their agent screams and complains. It’s an executive’s job to whittle away at expectations, because there’s only one pot of cash in a programme budget, and any overspend will have to come from elsewhere. Truthfully, it’s no different to employing people anywhere, no matter what old bilge you hear about “connecting with the public” and “value for money”.

The BBC women who are now complaining they are underpaid have my sympathies, but maybe their agents were ineffectual or they didn’t have the guts to threaten to leave. The reason why some BBC radio and television presenters are paid so much is often because their contracts go back decades, and will have included built-in rises every year as well as pension perks. Shedding these long-running deals can be gruesomely expensive.

I can’t see why a former executive and part-time presenter like Alan Yentob should get extra cash every time one of his programmes is shown in another country. He’s working for a public broadcaster, not Sky.

For decades now, most performers’ contracts include a buyout which stops them being paid for every repeated show. Even so, in order to maximise earnings, clever agents manipulate favoured nations contracts (in which everybody agrees to an equal fee) by demanding extra payments paid through the back door via their service companies, with extra money for clothes, “research” and so on.

Of course this goes on everywhere, not just the BBC. But I don’t accept the argument that some presenters are worth a fortune because they are “special” – everyone is replaceable, and we all get old and die sometime.

I am not at all sure the nation would grind to a halt if Gary Lineker, Chris Evans and Evan Davis were no longer employed by the BBC.

ITV also pays some presenters – like Ant and Dec, and Lorraine Kelly – exceedingly high fees, but there’s a key difference. The broadcaster is funded by advertising and programmes sales, rather than the public’s hard-earned cash. If viewers stop watching, ad revenue falls, and then contracts are terminated abruptly.

In the commercial world, everyone is highly disposable, and audiences are constantly researched. You can see this most clearly in the presentation of the Ten O’Clock News: the BBC adopts the classroom approach, handing down information on tablets from Mount Sinai, whereas ITV is friendlier, building a connection with its older audience, and focusing on domestic stories rather than far-off wars in unpronounceable places.

The real scandal at the BBC is not the pay of the stars, or the fact that women have come out of this exercise badly. It’s the same old story every year: the scandal of a supine BBC board, which in any other industry would have been called to account for failing to confront management waste. There’s still an unacceptable number of highly paid executives holding meetings, writing emails, producing nonsense in the name of “progress”, attempting to justify their existence.

In many respects, the BBC is exactly like the NHS: speaking in its own rarefied language to internal disciples, but totally incomprehensible to the outside world. The staff at the BBC who work below senior executive level are not well paid, and many are on short-term contracts with little or no job security, exactly like their counterparts at ITV.

On arrival, I was asked if I would sit on the BBC “equality” committee, which sought to ensure women and minorities were properly represented. I declined – to me, equality is a backward step. Women and minorities should be continually fighting for more pay, more jobs, more visibility, not accepting the status quo or parity. You only get to the top by treading over someone else, not by becoming their best friend and sharing.

Working for a major broadcaster isn’t a hippie collective; these organisations operate as pyramids of power. Of course, the BBC delivers great value, but I want my licence fee to filter down to the workforce at the coalface, not to someone checking “delivery” or a nerd whose role is defined as an “identity architect”.

The BBC might be a big and complex organisation, but their core task is to reflect their users and communicate – and they have failed at the first hurdle. At least users now have a choice: turn off any programme when they don’t agree with what the host is paid. That should show them who’s boss.