Latest BBC news: equality and the Drivetime car crash

However, the BBC is a high-profile, publicly-funded institution.

It also has to publish annual salaries of its top earners, which are of interest to both employment lawyers like me and others who are just naturally curious. Accordingly, I don’t think they can be either over-sensitive about, nor surprised by, the level of scrutiny these figures attract.

This year’s salary figures showed — again — that most of the high earners are white, middle-aged men.

To illustrate, Gary Lineker gets around £1.75 million to introduce football. You may have thought that football fans switch on to watch the actual game, but the BBC knows better.

Another example is Graham Norton.

Graham gets a mere £600,000. If that seems a pittance don’t worry, that’s only for his Saturday Radio 2 show (a whole three hours long, albeit he gets decent holidays). Graham’s BBC1 chat show is not shown in the figures as it’s sold to the BBC by a production company.

So in fairness, Graham’s probably doing all right.

Legal duty to provide equal opportunities

The salaries and the apparent lack of diversity have drawn a lot of comment which, you may not be too surprised to learn, has not been universally positive.

And so this latest kicking for the BBC comes in a report from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which tells us the broadcaster has “failed to lived up to” its legal duty to provide equal opportunities for women. There is even a suggestion that BBC managers “deliberately misled” the committee.

BBC managers attempting to deliberately mislead? Surely not – particularly after being accused of exactly this by the judge in the Cliff Richard privacy case?

Either way, the committee called on the BBC to take “urgent action” to address the “shocking” gender imbalance ahead of next year’s report on top earners.

Solving the diversity problem

An obvious solution here is to give more jobs to folk who are not middle-aged men.

Another is to increase pay – as long as you’re not a middle-aged man.

Unfortunately, the Equality Act does not allow for this type of positive discrimination, and the committee’s recommendations, however well intentioned, may lead to attempts to massage the figures without truly getting to the root of a problem that goes back many generations.

Which brings us to Drivetime.

The daytime Radio 2 line up is a classic example of the BBC’s middle-aged man problem – 12 hours of white blokes aged 50 or over.

The BBC could not resist going into quick fix mode and decided to have Jo Whiley co-host Simon Mayo’s Drivetime show.

The fact that many thought Whiley lacked Mayo’s charm and humour was not initially seen as a problem. Despite the pairing not being popular with listeners, she fitted the job description: specifically, she wasn’t a middle-aged man.

Unfortunately though, the show was a disaster and has now been scrapped with Mayo leaving Radio 2.

So, it turns out that solving the problem the BBC has created over many decades is not that easy. It takes hard work and cultural change – not headline-grabbing reshuffles.

Sadly, this appears to have come as news to the BBC.