What is Gary Lineker worth to licence-fee payers? One obvious way to think about that question is to measure what else you could get with his £1.35m pay packet, a large chunk of which has just been offloaded by the BBC: 8,000 television licences, 40 NHS nurses, 26 BBC employees on the corporation’s median salary, eight Keir Starmers, seven Chris Suttons, six Alex Scotts, five Mark Chapmans, or a house somewhere outside Elstree. And that’s mad, obviously. He says the names of the football teams and asks Alan Shearer whether something was a red card or not – and it can’t take more than a couple of days a week. There is absolutely no way to justify it.
The other way of thinking about it is a lot less concrete, and a lot harder to turn into an overheated demand to scrap the BBC. You could begin with the observation that, as well as being massive and unjustifiable, Lineker’s pay deal cost less than four hundredths of a percent of licence fee income this year. You might note how lucky the likes of Amanda Holden and Stephen Mulhern, not obviously more talented, are that their ITV deals are treated as commercially sensitive, and therefore secret. And you might also say that in the end, since the BBC has a comfortably larger audience share than any of its commercial rivals, it isn’t that surprising if it has to pay somewhere in the same universe as the going rate.
Even so, the decision to part ways with Captain Underpants (or the Match of the Day portion of his service, at least; he will still present live football) is probably the right one. After years of below-inflation increases to the licence fee, the corporation is seeking to save £500m a year. It’s less than a month since 130 jobs were axed across news and current affairs, with HARDtalk and the BBC Asian Network’s news service among the victims of a cost-cutting drive that has already reduced Newsnight to a shadow of its former self. Commercial rivals to Mark Urban, who left as Newsnight’s diplomatic editor in May and earned less than £178,000, are very much harder to find than plausible football presenters.
Meanwhile, the BBC’s legion of critics, who continue to be granted a mysterious number of column inches by direct competitors, remain enthusiastic in their search for ways to claim it is a bloated drain on the public purse. Even if Lineker doesn’t make a huge difference to the bottom line, there is some use to binning one of the most visible trinkets on Auntie’s mantlepiece.
There are very reasonable questions to be asked about the perverse outcomes of a system that hails Lineker as the top earner every year when it is quite likely that as much or more money is going to the likes of Michael McIntyre and Claudia Winkleman, who are paid through production companies and the corporation’s own commercial arm, BBC Studios. It’s a distinction that makes no real difference – and means that we only have a partial picture, and likely distorts the way the BBC operates, because so many A-listers would naturally prefer you to be hazy about the precise degree of their mintedness, picking up only scraps from weird planning fights over their desire for, say, a massive new roof terrace.
Even so, this is probably more than a symbolic shift. The BBC is a long way from where it stood in 2006, when it signed up Jonathan Ross for the frankly hilarious figure of £18m over three years, and heralded the deal on the basis that he was “uniquely talented”. Outrage over that contract, and then a bleak wider economic picture, had lasting consequences, and presenters were told to expect significant pay cuts three years later; by 2015, pay to on-air stars earning more than £100,000 was down by 29% against 2010, and the wage bill has continued to trend downwards since.
Even if the highest earners’ salaries continue to raise eyebrows when they are published – Zoe Ball will not be grateful to Lineker for leaving her to lead the headlines next year – the overall picture looks at least a little more cognisant of the times. And if that means fewer uncomfortable questions about pay clawback for the director general, Tim Davie, the next time something like the Huw Edwards scandal emerges, nobody at the BBC will mind.
Lineker has a natural attachment to the most prominent football job on TV, and was reported to have been willing to stay on at Match of the Day – but he will probably live with the outcome as well. His burgeoning podcast business is absolutely coining it, and his own show will now appear on BBC Sounds. He can accept whatever deals he can get elsewhere unburdened of the irritation of seeing the numbers included in an annual report. And everyone will be a lot less exercised about his tweets.
All of that is indicative of a shift that has been going on for years, in which big BBC names – Chris Evans, Eddie Mair, Emily Maitlis – dive, Scrooge McDuck style, into the great lake of cash that the commercial sector represents, and get to say exactly what they like into the bargain. They may even own a piece of the equity themselves.
Those losses are often painted as a brain drain for the BBC, but that analysis misses the many other middle-ranking presenters who are quietly moved on by the corporation, making way for cheaper talent to come through without any discernible loss to the viewer or listener once the initial shock has worn off. At least in those circumstances, the BBC looks like it is working towards a healthy model of public service broadcasting – as an incubator for talent that knows when it’s time to let other channels, which probably wouldn’t have taken a risk on the same people earlier in their careers, reap the profits.
As for Lineker: 25 years is an awfully long time to incubate a BT Sport presenter, and it is possible to recognise that his exit is a natural conclusion to his BBC career without accepting the calculated rationale that many of the corporation’s critics adopt. It is true, certainly, that most people will watch Match of the Day whether it’s presented by Gary Lineker, Gary Barlow or five Mark Chapmans; it is also true that in a straitened era, the recently installed BBC Sport director, Alex Kay-Jelski, can probably find better ways to spend the money.
But when the argument follows that there is no point in the BBC paying for things or people that can be found a home on ITV or Sky, and that a public service broadcaster should limit its scope to the truly unique, we should understand where it leads: to an offering that is confined to classical music and religious programming, and has little to offer the great majority of the country that pays for it. In any single case, the numbers may not add up. But if you subtract all of them, the average viewer will be left with a very reasonable question: is this really worth me paying for?
Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter
