Scott Mills earned £745,000 from the BBC in his final year as a Radio 2 breakfast host. He was then sacked. The institution that paid him three-quarters of a million pounds decided it no longer wanted what it was paying for.
This is the BBC’s business model in miniature: identify talent, compensate it lavishly, then panic that you’ve compensated it. Mills had been doing the same job for decades. He was good at it. The audience knew who he was. By every metric that justifies a £745K salary, he had earned it.
But somewhere between the salary approval and the sacking, the corporation remembered that it exists in a universe where mediocrity is cheaper and, crucially, more defensible. A mediocre presenter generates no controversy. A mediocre presenter does not require justification to angry licence fee payers who think anyone earning over £50K is stealing.
So the BBC did what it does: it paid a fortune to someone, then fired them to prove it wasn’t wasteful. Mills becomes the expensive lesson nobody needed. The corporation gets to tell the public it takes costs seriously. The public gets to feel vindicated that the BBC is run by idiots.
Everyone wins except Mills, who now has a severance package and the knowledge that his talent was expensive enough to kill him.