Roaming

When mortals get stung for mobile phone roaming charges, they usually learn fast and find ways round the costs - a local phone, a local Sim, pre-paying to roam, texts not calls, Skype-ing through wi-fi, etc, etc.

Here's the top three in an FOI league table of BBC executives roaming charges over the last 23 months.

Alan Yentob          £2,870.05
Mark Thompson    £2,854.69
Peter Horrocks      £2,339.40

Alan and Mark's totals work out at over £120 a month. But Alan's bill was actually higher...

Please also be aware that in respect of the total provided for Alan Yentob, we have excluded the cost of any calls made in relation to his role as a programme maker. This is because such call cost information is held by the BBC for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature’ and the BBC is therefore not obliged to include this information and has chosen not to do so on this occasion.


We note that the BBC's Director of Future Media Ralph Rivera returned no roaming charges whatsoever. Either he's cracked it, and should share his tricks with Yentob and the others - or he just doesn't speak to anyone.

• 0700 Saturday update: An informed insider says many bosses have BlackBerries, which are locked down so they will not work with a local SIM. The contract with O2 is great for the UK, but punitive overseas. And, in a nervous nelly approach to the new, Skype is banned from most BBC computers - though widely used on radio output.