Well now, at this time of looming economic recession, when the Great Leader himself is forced to admonish us proles to consumer rather less and reduce our wastage of food (Before tucking into his 8 course banquet at the G8 Meeting, natch!) how do those guardians of public broadcasting at the BBC respond to these tough times? Well, by awarding themselves 17% pay increases, that’s how! Mark Thompson, the Director-General, and nine other BBC bosses earned £4.96 million in 2007-08, up from £4.25 million the previous year. Most BBC employees took home 4% increases over the same period. Given the cutbacks in the private sector over the past year, I would like to know on what grounds the BBC fat cats get that much more bloated and even the workers ants get their inflation busting 4%? I mean, how can they afford it? Oh yes, I forgot, they just rip us off. Money for old rope – let’s hope it’s a rope to hang these parasites.
LET THEM EAT CAVIAR.
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There’s no “senior staff canteen”, either. We get pretty standard work canteen fare: fish and chips, jacket potatoes, sandwiches, curry, salads.
BJ | 08.07.08 – 10:31 pm | #
Poor dears – but you’ll find we’re not quite that gullible here BJ.
Here’s your own website’s description of your “works canteen” at BBC Club White City – one of seven BBC clubs in the London area alone.
I never ate in a works canteen with a chocolate fountain myself – and please don’t propagate the “no subsidy” bullshit.
None of the BBC club premises have ever paid commercial rents or rates – a major overhead for all catering establishments – although I believe there are discussions about changing this in the future.
The day starts early at TVC with breakfast from 7.30am. And it’s no mean spread – cereals, fruit salad, muesli, croissants, and cooked options ranging from poached eggs on toast to a full English plate, all cooked to order.
Busy times vary from day to day as production schedules in the building dictate the ebbs and flows of meal breaks, but informal meetings go on all the time in the comfortable lounge and, weather permitting, outside on the roof terrace.
Great food
The seasonal menu is available Monday to Friday from 12 to 2.30pm alongside a canteen style service with four main dishes to choose from – one vegetarian, one fish and two meat plus jacket potatoes, a salad bar and soup. An evening menu is available between 5 and 9pm.
Remember Club TVC is also now serving their signature dishes from 11.30am to 2.30pm every Saturday as well!
The bar gets busy between 6 and 7pm, and on Friday evenings there is a DJ, who carefully adjusts the music to fit the mood of the evening.
Parties and Events
If you want to hold a party at Club TVC the staff will be happy to set up a bar tab for you and can organise a small buffet, but you will need to come in early to bag your table.
The Club TVC team are very experienced at providing food for parties and special events in other parts of the building, such as the ‘Bridge Lounge’, studios or any of the conference rooms. They can organise drinks, entertainment, spectacular treats like chocolate fountains and the staff to serve it all. Call and speak to a member of Club staff for full details.
Do you know?
You can also hire TVC outside of normal opening hours for private events and functions. Which means you’ll won’t have to worry about securing a space as it will all be yours. Contact a member of the Club TVC team using the details below to find out just how competitive prices for venue hire are!
Gym
Club TVC has a gym complete with personal trainers, classes and therapists. For full details follow the Club Workout links below.
Joining the Club or Gym
To use either the Club or Gym you need to be a member and show a valid membership card at reception. Membership is open to all BBC and BBC service partner staff and contractors.
in any other industry in the private sector, she would have been fired. instead , in the bbc world – she gets a close to 100k increase.
archduke | 08.07.08 – 8:27 pm | #
That’s a very specific assertion, I wonder why? That rather handily lets ITV off the hook.
Now how much they did they defraud the public of? Lots of people fired from that landmark episode…I’m just struggling to remember who.
One of the main comparable private businesses. Completely irrelevant to your point I’m sure.
ITV can rip us off as much as they like Mr Lancaster – we as viewers can choose to NOT watch them, and therefore impact their revenue stream.
we can also choose to dump ITV stock and drive down their share price.
we have no such option with the BBC.
Of course. But you are the one making a comparison with the private sector. I’ve just pointed out that it has fallen at the first hurdle.
BJ is a troll.
No Gus, I’m just expressing my opinion, and pointing out a few facts. Sorry you don’t like it.
As for the BBC Club — that’s entirely different from the BBC Canteen. I pay about eleven pounds a month to be a member of the BBC club, and it is funded by subscriptions and the profit it makes on selling food and drink, running a gym (which costs extra), and various other exnterprises.
(I should point out that in five years of employment at the BBC, I have never once seen a chocolate fountain, either)
Jim T | 08.07.08 – 10:35 pm |
I wasn’t very excited by Gergiev’s performance. The main thrust of the first movement was too sluggish (Mahler writes “Don’t drag”, in one spot, and “Somewhat held back” in others, but Gergiev did drag, and held back too much for too long). As for the rest, I’m afraid I can’t add much more than say the same things the usual pundits have been saying about Gergiev’s Mahler cycle: sometimes he’s there, sometimes he isn’t, all very muscular when called for, but other times it’s as if he doesn’t know the inner details of the score and goes for his usual balance tricks and pressing on accents and swells. I’ve heard the whole cycle so far except for #8, and other than the 4th, it’s the same way for the rest. I even heard that he has his head buried in the score too much, but I can’t imagine the LSO would put up with that for very long. Although come to think of it, that would explain some of the rather independent solo moments I heard today. I’m sure it had more power and presence live, but I was kind of put off by a lot of details I know would have bugged me in person.
Sorry, can’t help myself; it’s a piece I know well, and I’ve been fascinated by the Gergiev phenomenon for some time.
Back to BBC bias. Unless they have reported on it, there’s no other explanation for ignoring an otherwise juicy little own goal by the fatcats. Mr. Brown just did a whole spiel on wasting food, and showing him attending such a spectacle the day before the summit discusses a food crisis in Africa. And they didn’t invite the @%#$#ing African leaders. In short, the BBC missed a good opportunity to do some valid criticism of these slobs, yet refrained in order to protect Dear Leader.
I really hope they’ve covered this somewhere, because this is just too pathetic otherwise.
BBC: It’s what we fake and make, a summary –
“BBC executives caught up in a fakery scandal are rewarded with bumper pay rises”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1033291/BBC-executives-caught-fakery-scandal-rewarded-bumper-pay-rises.html
Janet Daley (‘Telegraph’):
“BBC commits suicide, Part 76” –
“Another day, another public relations own-goal for the BBC. What are these people thinking? Wailing on the one hand that you must make savage cuts in your most fundmanetal broadcasting responsibilities (news and currrent affairs, for example) and simultaneously announcing pay increases of up to £107,000 a year for your executive directors is what you might call bad judgement.
“Unless you happen to work in (or care about) news and current affairs programming, in which case you would call it something unprintable. The Director General Mark Thompson defends these increases on the basis that the BBC must compete for executive talent in a competitive market. The words he chooses to describe this problem are revealing: ‘When you actually get out into the external world, some potential candidates almost roll on the floor laughing when you talk about potential levels of pay.’
“When you actually get out into the external world? The BBC, as anyone who has worked for it will testify, is a closed, hermetically sealed universe whose inhabitants are, as often as not, recruited straight from university. They spend their entire professional lives within the sheltering walls of the BBC, never experiencing the hurly burly of what Mr Thompson calls ‘the external world’ at all. It is that inbred, incestuous, self-referring (and self-regarding) culture that undermines the quality of BBC management – not the failure to offer high salaries to job applicants.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/janet_daley/blog/2008/07/08/bbc_commits_suicide_part_76
BJ:
(I should point out that in five years of employment at the BBC, I have never once seen a chocolate fountain, either)
BJ | 08.07.08 – 11:38 pm | #
I should point out that in a lifetime of BBCment, I have had a chock full of patronizing leftist crap stuffed down my throat.
How many BJs could the BBC hire for £107,000 ?
Quentin Letts was good in the Mail today:-
John Whittingdale (Con, Maldon), who chairs the committee with jowly lugubriousness, noted that a BBC executive had recently sermonised about the importance of safeguarding public service broadcasting.
That very evening BBC3’s schedule had included Dog Borstal, a show about the most annoying pop songs of all time, and a hospital drama called Bizarre ER which featured ‘a circus dwarf who had superglued his penis to a Hoover’.
Mr Whittingdale’s face, as he uttered these words, was a marvellous melange of horror, distaste, disbelief, pain and good-natured puzzlement.
Did Mr Thompson truly believe such programmes were worth £125million a year of licence fee money?
Behind the BBC grandees sat an array of flunkeys who froze to the spot, frowns petrified on their brows.
In earlier years Mr Thompson would have been clean bowled by such a question.
Yesterday he cheerfully kept his nerve and said he had ‘missed’ the circus dwarf programme. Mr Whittingdale, with emphasis: ‘So did I.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1033594/His-face-melange-horror-pain.html
Mrs Rooneys Nose- Hillhunt,
I think the reference to the rope was for the BBC to hang themselves when they realise what they`ve done and how much they`ve snaffled from us all.
But you`re right, they have no sense of shame, and their animal instinct for survival off the backs of others would overide any sense of public duty.
(please dont ban HillHunt. I think he`s great )
David Preiser (USA)
You should have your own music blog. I’d read it.
I would willingly sell all I have, my house, my belongings, clean out my bank account and savings and cash in my policies and sell myself into slavery so I can give it all to the top executives at the BBC and the highest earning talent.
The licence fee is nothing, make everyone pay double, no triple.
They deserve it so much.
They are superb and clearly do the job of hundreds of ordinary BBC employees.
Their massive salaries are entirely validated by their abilities, and to suggest that the BBC is not commercial means they don’t need commercial salaries is of course wrong.
Yes they have job security that the commercial world can only dream of, but they are such nice chaps they are worth it.
I am not fit to lace their boots.
What’s more talented people like Ross, Norton and Wogan are clearly each worth hundreds of BBC employees, and if we were commercial the monies generated would prove it, of course we don’t sully our hands with profit though.
They are great public servants and the shows they put on are of a quality and nature that the commercial media just could not put on.
And the executives made a whole series of blunders, who doesn’t, they’re still fine people and well worthy of their massive increases in salary that are more than most employees earn in years. We are not rewarding them for their blunders, its their other talents, which I am not telling you what they are, its a secret, but they know and thats why they are so well paid.
The BBC knows best and I spend my life supporting everything they ever do, they can do no wrong.
Good old auntie.
You people claiming BBC bias, try to just assume the BBC are always right like a sheep as I do, then you will see less of it, trust me.
I would continue, but my dealer and therapist have just simultaneously arrived at my door…
Ernst: surely the point is that they are paid too much at ITV and Channel 4, rather than arguing that the BBCers should get the same inflated pay. (God forbid that Channel 4 should get any more public money than it does and even the thought of handing some of the licence tax money over to ITV makes me feel faint.)
Besides, what is Mark Thompson being paid FOR? Is there anything to him? He seems to me just like another civil servant and doesn’t have anything about him at all.
He presides over an organisation that for all its publicly funded wealth is increasingly illiterate and lacking in quality. So how can the senior managers responsible for this decline in standards be considered worthy of pay bonuses at all?
At the BBC, crime pays. Quite handsomely, too.
http://vodkapundit.com/?p=9991
Why is the BBC obsessed with Marks & Spencer? On 5 live they spent some 20 minutes talking aobut how much the chief exec is paid and how much profit they make.
Almost every week they spout on about M&S or Tesco. Funny the BBC almost totally ignored the pay and bonus awards to their own senior staff. Presumably the BBC thinks that is “sensitive commercial information”. But it’s OK for the BBC to spout on about what everyone else gets paid?
Victoria Derbyshire is obsessed with it. Almost every day she’s trying to find out what someone is paid, but never answers to the question “so what do you get paid Victoria?”
la marquise | 09.07.08 – 12:39 pm |
You should have your own music blog. I’d read it.
Thanks. Funny you should say that, because I’ve been slowly putting one together over the last few weeks, with the goal of having something up and running by the end of the summer. I used to get paid to write about music (mostly liner notes and CD reviews), and worked in the music biz, so it’s an idea I’ve toyed with for a while.
One of my very first posts will be:
Why does the BBC, with its massive budget and resources, broadcast online at only 64kps, with the defense that they need to keep costs down? Radio France Musique can do 128, Radio 4 from the Netherlands can do 384 (one of my favorites – I have it on right now), and even Klassika from tiny little Estonia can do 96k?
Why does the BBC give so little value for the license fee by comparison? I’m sure the claim is that they have infinitely more listeners than those stations. But they probably include in their official count those listening to licensed simulcasts on various European stations, which doesn’t apply here.
Hell, why don’t they just steal more from Children In Need?
Dr R
Shame on you they need all they can get from children in need to pay Wogan a great wodge of cash.
A video discussion on “BBC bosses’ bonuses” chaired by A.Neil and A.Anand, and featuring H.Harman, K.Clarke and M.Thompson; from BBC’s ‘Daily Politics’:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/7497612.stm
George R:
A video discussion on “BBC bosses’ bonuses” … from BBC’s ‘Daily Politics’:
THAT. IS. ASTOUNDING.
What Ms. Jowell came out with (or rather avoided for minutes of waffle) beggars belief.
Credit to the interviewers for trying, but at the end what were we, the viewer left with? Zippy, other than the distinct feeling this was being swiftly moved on with a giggle and wink.
What the heck was that term for ‘nothing do with me, guv’ (ace for the Minister in charge of the BBC on OUR behalves) she came out with?
Who or what the heck is this country being run by?… I ask, rhetorically. And is there no media capable of hold these numpties to account?… (as I am on a daft question roll).
Jowell commented that the BBC is loved and trusted. Yeah right love!
Not her job to justify wage increases. Strange that she has the power to set the level of licence increase without factoring in the level of top level wages involved.
The nurse will have her “VIEW” taken into account by the trust.
What the hell is she on. No ones “view” is taken into account, that’s why the do it BECAUSE THEY CAN.