Alan Hansen’s pay cut shows the BBC is in need of radical surgery

By
Steve Doughty

Last updated at 3:39 PM on 2nd February 2012

Poor old Alan Hansen. Another victim of the BBC’s Saturday night slaughter. First Brucie has to take a pay cut, and now the gravel-voiced scourge of slack defending has to sacrifice a third of his income, in the name of austerity.

He’ll still have a million a year to scrape by on, which is probably rather more, even allowing for inflation, than he pulled down in the days when he used to get paid for actually playing football.

He has a good act, it has to be said. Alan looks serious, talks in a doomy way about the failures of players who feature in unflattering replays, and sits next to the clowny one – that’s Mark Lawrenson.

Then we have Alan Shearer, who seems a bit embarrassed to be there at all, and that Lineker bloke. They’re all taking pay cuts.

We're sure you can struggle on: Alan Hansen still will receive a £1 million salary

We’re sure you can struggle on: Alan Hansen still will receive a £1 million salary

It could be that Mr Hansen is partly paying for a little public relations error back in December, when he twice referred to black footballers as ‘coloured’. You can’t use that language. It might have been good enough for Martin Luther King but it’s not all right on Match of the Day.

Probably the Corporation has come to the conclusion that some people might think £1.5 million a year a bit much to pay for a sports pundit who can’t sing, can’t dance and can’t tell jokes. He can’t even do smut like Jonathan Ross. There is also the outside possibility that some viewers watch Match of the Day for the football rather than for Mr Hansen’s wisdom.

I’ve always wondered why the BBC, which is not short of sports journalists, doesn’t put some of them on Match of the Day in the hope they might occasionally be at least just a little bit more questioning about the football establishment and its stars. They would certainly be a lot cheaper.

On the other hand, listening to the output of most BBC sports journalists, perhaps not. Yes, I know Sir Alex Ferguson refused to speak to the BBC for seven years after it broadcast something disobliging about him, but that was Panorama, silly.

The BBC, which has a record of jealously guarding the secret of how much it pays its presenters, doesn’t appear to be unhappy that we know about the pay squeeze on the Match of the Day pundits. Perhaps it wants to give us an impression of good housekeeping.

The Corporation needs you to understand it has to be just as careful with its cash as everybody else in these hard times. It only spent £200 million on moving all those people and programmes, including Match of the Day, to Salford, a move necessary to demonstrate how much it cares for the north of England. At least it’s handy for Sir Alex.

Licence fee income went up, you will be sad to hear, by less than two per cent in the financial year to March 2011. It amounted to a paltry £3.5 billion.

Then there was the ‘other income’, which went up a bit more, by over 10 per cent, to around £1.5 billion. This includes the money the BBC gets from selling the programmes that you and I have paid for. It could be used to cut the licence fee, but it isn’t, because the BBC needs the money to maintain all its important services.

It also comes from flogging magazines based on publicly-subsidised television programmes. These magazines are very successful, sometimes more so than the offerings of commercial rivals which do not have prime time television programmes to push their product.

The beeb needs a gastric bypass: If the BBC cannot survive on an income of £5 billion a year, and needs to go begging for more in Brussels

The beeb needs a gastric bypass: If the BBC cannot survive on an income of £5 billion a year, and needs to go begging for more in Brussels

The BBC, however, needs still more. So, we learn, it has started to take money from Europe. It has confirmed that it has taken £3 million in grant money from the EU over the past four years.

There is also a loan, from the European Investment Bank, which is an EU institution. The BBC has borrowed £141 million from the EIB over the last nine years, and £30 million is still outstanding.

Many people might think that a public broadcaster with a duty to balanced reporting might be a bit cautious about pocketing EU money, given that the European Union has been in the news a bit lately.

The Corporation has said the grant money didn’t go to its news department, but just to ‘research and development’.

The Euro-bank money? That went to BBC Worldwide, the arm which flogs programmes abroad. Nothing to do with news or the licence fee, so that’s all right, OK?

It’s not all right at all, not by a long chalk. The BBC may not have noticed, but its coverage of European matters is regarded by a very large number of its paying customers, and by a large number of elected politicians, as a historic disgrace. Taking money from EU sources is an outrage and a betrayal of licence fee payers. Only a badly overblown organisation with spectacularly complacent management would have considered it.

If the BBC cannot survive on an income of £5 billion a year, and needs to go begging for more in Brussels, it is too big. It doesn’t need reform, it needs radical surgery.

The BBC wants you to be impressed by a cosmetic cut to a football pundit’s inflated pay. But what is required is a broadcasting version of the Beeching cuts that were once so enthusiastically deployed to halve the size of the railways.

Here’s what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts,
or debate this issue live on our message boards.

The comments below have not been moderated.

How much?!

I am always incensed when I see the news,and I wonder why in hell it takes TWO “presenters” to read from a tele-prompter.They “earn” at least £100,000 a year when they should really be on the average wage of £25,000 at most if that,it makes me puke.

What? Are you telling me that people STILL pay their license fee? Baaa Haaa, Haaa! – FOOLS!!!

Seriously, if they had said that Hansen was getting £100,000 a year I would still have been shocked. And we worry about the bankers….

What utter rubbish. The BBC’s take on Europe is a million times better than this paper’s biased and utterly partial coverage. It’s high time you were less in thrall to the loony tunes in UKIP and took a leaf out of the Beeb’s book.
– Barry Pollock, Derby, 2/2/2012 22:25…………………………….Barry, when are you going to start spelling your name correctly?

We do not need these puffed up “pundits” and commentators, if you go to a match there are NO commentators, bring back the brass band. Can we have a red button so we cut these twerps out and just have the sound of the stadium?

What makes him and his cronies think that they are worth being paid so much?
I was so shocked when I realised how much they have been getting.
They are just NOT worth it.

OK, listen up. I’ll say this just one more time. If the BBC wants to economise it should shut down all regional TV and radio. The duplication it engenders is nothing short of a national disgrace. Who wants to know Mrs Miggins’ cat was rescued? Oh, yes, Mrs Miggins does. What she doesn’t want is to be told by the BBC. The rescuers will already have done that. Job done!

By accepting money from the EU surely the BBC is in breach of its Charter which forbids it from receiving money from a foreign source as this is treasonable.
I am not in favour of aiding and abetting treason and am seriously concerned that paying the licence fee could be just that.

Alan Hansen, a man so puffed up with his own self importance, he would do the job for nothing.

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