For me, the cat is now out of the bag. I know it’s a silly phrase, but I have never really had time for celebrity worship, and have spent all my life totally unaware of their lifestyle until the silly business of Jonathan Ross’s indiscretion, minor in my view, which has been aired on the front pages of our press, and the headlines of the Internet news, for almost a week, when much more serious things were taking place in the world. The cat, as I call it, is the obscene salaries, not even just one off payments, the celebrities are clearly getting.
The average tradesman, who is an expert in his field, probably earns about £20,000 a year, based on 200 working days, at 100 hundred pounds a day. professionals, with university degrees, start somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 thousand, and for most of them, their top limit will be about 150, 000, if they are very good and very lucky. So when I hear that an alleged comedian, whose humour is relatively basic, at times, by my standards, almost gutter, is going to be given somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand pounds for one appearance, I know the world has gone mad. As to his alleged ‘salary’ of 6 million a year, an average doctor or surgeon would only earn half of that in his lifetime.
For some time I have been yammering on, on the blog, about the drop in the quality of what is offered on television, and the incredible number of repeats. The poor imports from America, the poor level and repetitious nature of the new, home-grown, material, which is often just a rehash of classical stories that we have heard and seen before, a prime example is the number of versions of Pride And Prejudice. Jonathan Ross can not be the only person receiving crazy pay, there must be hundreds of them, and we, the bemused public, are actually paying these salaries ourselves, in the advertising revenues extracted from the cost of products, our taxes helping to boost the BBC, and our licence fees. It had to come from somewhere. The question that always comes to my mind when I hear about people with their millions, is how the devil you can actually spend what’s left of 6 million after tax, on a yearly basis, and I bet, if you’re a millionaire, you can afford the best accountancy brains to keep as much as possible of the sick millions. On the basis of 6 million a year, some of the offshore banks must be groaning under the weight of celebrities’ savings, because surely they couldn’t spend it all. I just wonder if Mr Ross is 5,980,000 times as happy as I am?
I rest my case