Tim Davie and the death of BBC ‘talent’

Has anyone ever come up with a better put-down for Nick Robinson? It is even better that it came from his own boss. Interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning, BBC director-general Tim Davie said ‘we often refer to people like yourself as ‘talent’, but I’ve kind of banned that.’ From now on, he intimated, Robinson and his colleagues would be known as mere ‘presenters’.

Davie also went on to speak about ‘bad actors’, although it turned out he wasn’t talking about the cast of EastEnders – he meant propagandists in Russia, whose activities the BBC is out to challenge.

But that aside, does anyone care whether presenters are known as on-air ‘talent’? What many of us do care about rather more is being stung for a TV licence supposedly to fund public service broadcasting, only to find our money splashed on extravagant salaries to tempt presenters, or keep them away, from commercial broadcasters. If