Big BBC salaries ‘are huge embarrassment’

Guardian News and Media/London

Sir David Attenborough, one of the BBC’s longest-standing presenters, has described the big salaries of senior management as a “huge embarrassment” and said it would be a “catastrophe” if the corporation’s funding was cut.

Attenborough spoke out in the wake of the latest controversy around executive pay at the BBC, where £60mn was paid to outgoing executives over an eight-year period, including more than £1mn to the former deputy director general Mark Byford.

BBC executives past and present were roundly condemned by MPs on the Commons public accounts committee on Monday, with its chair, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge, accusing them of “covering their backs” over the payoff scandal.

The naturalist and broadcaster, whose latest BBC2 series, Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates, begins later this month, said: “It doesn’t require me to say that it is a huge embarrassment that salaries of that size are being paid in a public service organisation.”

Asked if he was worried that the controversy could damage the BBC, Attenborough said: “Very much so. The BBC is in my view one of the most important strands in the cultural life of this country and it is going through a bad patch. I just hope that it will emerge from the bad patch with the standards that made it great still there.”

Attenborough, who celebrated 60 years in broadcasting last year, said there were “plenty of people with interests which conflict with those of the BBC and would be glad to see the BBC diminished. Ideally they would like the BBC to be exterminated but they realise that would never happen, or should not happen. But what could happen is it is diminished or it is so starved of money that it has to abandon many of its public service responsibilities.

“If it did that it would no longer be the BBC and that would be a catastrophe for the country.”