Law in a nutshell

A reader with real world employment law experience at a high level has written to ask what (on earth) can be the BBC's defence in the equal pay tribunal brought by Samira Ahmed.

It does have a position - based on 'entertainment' v 'news-based output', and the different market for talent. But's difficult to express honestly and frankly, in a public-service organisation beleaguered by transparency and best practice. Even harder to make into a concise and credible written argument to hand over with a confident smile to the chair of an employment tribunal.

It goes back to showbiz, and the BBC of the last century. Key figures in the development of BBC tv were not director generals, but Bill Cotton and Michael Grade. Cotton worked in light entertainment from 1956 through to running all BBC tv til he retired in 1988. Michael Grade was a showbiz agent from 1963 to 1973. when he joined LWT. He was controller of BBC1 from 1984 to 1986.

Their time at the top of the BBC benefited from an ever-rising licence-fee, boosted by colour and a growing population, which rose in real value from around £140 in the early 70s to close to £190 in 2010 (at 2015 prices). Grade, agent for Morecambe and Wise and Larry Grayson, brought the heritage of his uncles, the theatre impresarios Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont.

They ran their channels hands-on. Peak-time programmes need their direct sign-off; they expressed very clear views about writers, performers, producers - and lower ranks leapt to do their bidding. In  1978, Grade 'poached' Bruce Forsyth from the BBC (though his tv breakthrough had been with Sunday Night at the London Palladium - a theatre owned by Lew Grade, and a show produced by Lew's tv company ATV).  Grade also snatched some of Match of the Day, and signed playwright Dennis Potter. 

The BBC realised it could lose ratings wars if it didn't hang on to talent and formats, and started looking to 'hand-cuff' performers with packages - clusters of programmes that they believed would keep big stars fully engaged, happy and content. Current beneficiaries include Graham Norton, Danny Dyer and Claudia Winkleman. Norton's busy enough with his tv chat show and Radio 2 Saturday show now, but there were a couple of years when the BBC was frantically searching for formats to justify his big deal. 

Emails disclosed in the Samira Ahmed hearing from Jeremy Vine's agent Alex Armitage make it clear he wanted a an improved package deal in 2007. “The BBC must now stop bullying this artist and pushing him around on this deal and listen to him…Stop treating him like a chattel and pay him properly in year three and lets have some mutual respect that is not meaningless words not backed up by money. Stop saying there is no more money as there is money for what ever you want it for, just find it and stop treating jeremy Vine like a child as he is sick of it now.”

The problem for the BBC with inflated deals like Vine's is that they came late to a realisation that the market had changed. ITV was no longer poaching. BBC budgets, year after year, lump the same money at big shows, without a new bottom-up look at the costings and the competition. It's a mind-set that applies across the board - Eastenders, Olympics, Strictly.

Meanwhile, over at News in the 1990s, Jenny Abramsky launched Radio 5Live and News 24. She secured more funding from the centre than anyone expected for the new channels, but then made that money work hard (in BBC terms). Newswatch came to the News Channel in 2004 in the wake of the Gilligan/Kelly/Hutton crisis, when funding was getting tighter.  It was meant to make News more accountable, but nobody saw the need for a huge budget. It was 'knocked off' on Friday afternoons, and provided a useful back-half-hour filler for the weekend news machine, nearly always short on material.   Giving it a repeat on Saturday Breakfast on BBC1 should have, by rights, attracted more budget, but the move was probably seen within News as a saving - less work for the producers of BBC Breakfast in Salford struggling to fill a weekend running order.

The supply-side of potential presenters to front Newswatch is huge (remember BBC News alone has 7,000 employees). Samira fell out of favour at C4; she's had a go at Sunday Morning Live, and was replaced by Sian Williams.
 
Losing this case could have serious consequences for the BBC.  What if Samira had chosen Match of the Day as a comparator ?  After all, it's just another show with a presenter introducing clips and interviewing a few tame guests.  Or if presenters of breakfast shows on BBC Local Radio claim parity with Nick Robinson and Martha Kearney ?  Or if Lucy Hockings, fronting her own-titled show on BBC World from Monday, demands parity with Huw Edwards ? 

Exciting times.