Joe Offer adds a layer of proportion to this. It is a very small minority of top dogs getting these huge paypackets. The BBC can't advertise so it makes money by making excellent programmes, especially dramas, which it can sell. The licence fee makes up the rest. It is incredibly good value for money in my opinion. I'm a bit of a football fan and I pay five quid a month for Sky Sports mobile and another five quid a month for BT Sport mobile. Mrs Steve buys the subs for me as permanent birthday and Christmas presents. That's £120 per annum to watch maybe thirty or forty football matches. That isn't much less than the licence fee, which we both benefit from, unlike the sports subs. Like Dave above, I'm one of the tiny minority of licence fee payers who cherish Radio 3, which I have on for far more hours in the day than the telly, with which I have a very limited transaction. As I read yesterday, Chris Evans presented Top Gear, a huge money-spinner for the Beeb. Claudia Winkleman presents Strictly Come Dancing, a format exported around the world which earns the Beeb a fortune. Etcetera. I can't justify those huge salaries but the BBC is forced to operate in a capitalistic world. In every other big corporation the top people are paid big money, otherwise they won't work for you.   It happens in multinationals and it happens, egregiously, in banking. You pay big money to get the top talent. It doesn't matter whether you or I regard Chris Evans as having any talent. That's the way it works for the BBC as a whole. It happens in commercial television too. You can whinge all you like about Chris Evans (I had to ask who he was yesterday, by the way) being paid a ton from the licence fee. But we all pay lot more for all our stuff because it's advertised on commercial telly. We taxpayers/licence fee payers/consumers pay for everything. The licence fee is just a different way of paying for stuff, that's all. Long live the Beeb. They're putting on Fidelio tomorrow evening which must cost a bomb. I suppose that if you object to Chris Evans you should object to that as well as I expect the numbers listening to Fidelio will struggle to reach six figures.