BBC Use Actors As Political Football, Say Equity

The performers' union, has attacked the BBC’s plans to cut actors' pay as "short-sighted" and "a disgrace".
Equity General Secretary Christine Payne commented: "Performers are the BBC's best asset. Viewers do not turn on their televisions to see the likes of BBC Director General Mark Thompson, they want to see Equity members performing in their favourite soaps, dramas and comedies. Yet while Mark Thompson’s salary is safe he is attacking performers who earn many times less than he does.
"Actors in EastEnders, Hustle, Casualty, Holby City, Dr Who and many other of the nation's favourite programmes are having their earnings slashed. The threat to cut the earnings of every actor paid more than £100,000 is short-sighted and will damage the BBC in the eyes of viewers and licence fee payers."
The BBC paid actors, musicians, presenters and others £229 million in the year to March 2009, but over the same period it scooped up more than £1 billion for overseas sales of programmes.
Equity has been in angry discussion with the BBC about its plans to cut all TV and radio salaries over £100,000 without the option to negotiate. The union has said that this is arbitrary, bears no relation to the success of programmes or the skills of performers and attacks the BBC best asset – its talent.
Payne continued: "This is a cheap shot. They are picking on actors just because they can solely to appease some rabid, anti-public service broadcasting MPs. My members are being used as a political football – it is a disgrace! What astonishes me is that as little as 6.56 per cent of the licence fee goes on talent. I think that the public deserves to know where the rest of it has gone."
BBC Senior Managers are some of the biggest earners in the Corporation. 13 BBC staff earned more than £250,000 a year, with a further 26 receiving between £190,000 and £250,000. The majority of senior managers were paid between £70,000 and £130,000.
The £229m paid to talent on TV and radio is spread over 300,000 contracts, making the average talent contract worth only £767.
Half of the £229m total paid to talent goes to actors and others earning no more than £50,000 – considerably less than the combined annual expenses claims of the BBC’s top executives.
In 2008 the BBC Trust commissioned an independent review from Oliver and Ohlbaum Associates Ltd to provide an in-depth examination of the BBC's use of on-air and on-screen talent. With this in mind Equity commented that the BBC Executive appears to be out-of-step with their own Trust.
The main evidence from the O&O review was that:

• Overall the BBC is not paying more for talent than the market and that it is not systematically inflating prices for talent.
• There is no evidence that the BBC is paying more than the "market price" for leading TV talent when it finds itself directly competing with rivals to secure their services. In some cases, it may well be paying less than the market price for that talent.
• There is no evidence that the BBC is systematically pushing up prices in the talent market. Where high rates of inflation do currently seem to exist in the BBC this is largely due to market forces at work in the rapidly changing UK TV and radio markets.

In responding to the O&O report, the BBC Trust commented: "The BBC has a number of systems in place to ensure that it achieves value for money in its negotiation of talent fees, and has strengthened these processes in recent years."
(BMcN/GK)