BBC stars deserve high pay as they can never tell public to eff off
IT’S that time of year when the BBC is forced to publish the salaries of all its big-name stars so we can all run around being cross.
Not me, though.
Orla Guerin is on £164,000 a year. That’s more than the Prime Minister would get if we had one.
And naturally, people are wondering how she can possibly be paid so much when she’s only on screen for a few seconds a month.
I’ll tell you why.
Orla is a war correspondent. She spends her life sleeping in sewage pipes and underground car parks, dodging bullets and bombs on a daily basis, so she can bring us news from all of the world’s pock-marked hellholes.
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That’s why she’s paid more than a Sunday school teacher.
She doesn’t have to go to work through a hail of machine gun fire. She doesn’t have to do her toilet on a battlefield.
So why, when all she does is sit on a sofa and read an autocue, will she trouser £369,000?
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Well, that’s the thing. Yes, Naga has a cushy job and is doubtless ferried to the studios every day in a Mercedes E-Class with an air freshener. But when she is finished for the day her work is not done. She will be pestered for selfies constantly.
When she’s at the supermarket, in the loos at a motorway service station, at a funeral. She will never be allowed to pop to the shops in odd socks and no bra. She will have to be careful what she says to everyone.
And even if she’s tired and stressed out, she will never be able to tell anyone to bugger off. Because they will say they pay her wages so she’s their property.
This is what people forget about fame. They think it’s a life of red carpets and the best tables in restaurants. But, in reality, it’s an open prison.
And, to make it worse, the BBC is forced to publish your salary so that people in the street can sneer at you and point out that old people are starving to death so they can afford to pay the licence fee.
Perhaps that’s why there’s no mention of Sir David Attenborough in the published salary list.
There’s no way in hell he’s paid less than Gary Lineker. But to make sure we don’t know what he’s on, which may expose the national treasure to ridicule, he’ll get his cash from the secretive BBC Studios — an organisation that doesn’t have to publish salary information.
How do I know this? Ha.
Because that’s what I used to do.
l EXPLAINED recently that I’m no longer able to download programmes from Sky.
A technician said that, for some reason, when I try, the central computer sees my request as a threat and shuts me out.
And now I’ve had a missive from Apple saying that I’m no longer in the cloud.
The trouble with all this kind of stuff is that I simply don’t understand the language they use.
I don’t know the difference between downloading and streaming. I don’t know what the cloud is. I can’t attach links to tweets.
I can’t speak tech, so even when they tell me how to remedy the situation, I don’t know what they’re on about.
Take pictures of space? Let’s boldly go there instead
ALL week, we’ve been dazzled by that amazing photograph from the other side of space.
I do wonder, though, why we spend so much time and effort building space-based telescopes when the simple fact of the matter is that, with current rocket technology, it would take us 40,000 YEARS to reach even the nearest star.
Surely, then, instead of wasting money on cameras that photograph places we can never visit, we’d be better off trying to invent warp-drive engines that meant we could?
Name is no Hood
WELL, the Government’s plan to level up the North and the South is going well . . . apart from the fact it isn’t.
We learned this week that Doncaster Sheffield Airport has lost its main airline, Wizz Air, and is likely to close in the autumn.
It seems to me the problem is they called it Robin Hood Airport (Sheffield claims the outlaw as a local). Which means no one flying in from abroad really knew where it was.
And those who did would have assumed it was in Nottingham.
What they should have done is called it London Doncaster. That’s what everyone else does.
Which is why we have London Luton, London Heathrow, London Stansted and even, hilariously, London Oxford.
EXAMS A-RATE IDIOCY
ONE in six students has admitted they cheated in their online exams last year.
Which means five out of six are liars.
Who cares, though? All students get A*s in every exam they take anyway, even if they’ve spelled their name wrong.
Which means they all go to university, where they all get a ton of debt before emerging with a worthless 2:1 in culinary arts.
Far better, in my mind, to not bother with exams at all and become a plumber.
Tale of brave Mr Biro
TRUE story from the countryside this week.
A civil servant type was given a list of properties in his area that did not have licence fees.
So he put on his short-sleeved shirt, popped a Biro into his top pocket and climbed into his rented Vauxhall so he could knock on some doors.
Unfortunately for him, one of the properties on his list was a caravan on a travellers’ site.
Displaying a Herculean disregard for his own wellbeing, he drove on to the site, picked up his important-looking clipboard, knocked on the door of the caravan and was greeting by a large gentleman, who said: “What do you want?”
The civil servant explained he was from the TV licence department and wanted to make sure there was no television on the property.
And when he’d finished, the large gentleman said: “So why were you looking through the window at my naked kid?”
The civil servant said he wasn’t, but by then a large crowd had arrived, asking what he wanted.
“He was looking at my naked kid,” said the man.
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I don’t know what happened next.
But I can’t imagine it was good.