“For the life of me I’ve never understood why it spends so much on him”

Talking of BBC pay, the Telegraph's Michael Deacon hit the nail on the head this week when he wrote that getting rid of Gary Lineker - thereby saving £1.35 million - would “not lose the BBC a single viewer”:

Last year, the BBC paid Lineker around £1.35 million. For the life of me I’ve never understood why it spends so much on him. I’m not saying he’s a bad presenter. On the contrary, I think he’s a very good presenter. But the BBC doesn’t actually need a very good presenter to host Match of the Day – for an extremely simple reason.

Which is that it’s football. And, let’s face it, football fans would watch the highlights of Saturday’s big games no matter who was presenting them. They’d watch them even if they were presented by Jedward, Diane Abbott or Larry, the Downing Street cat. Because it’s the goals they’re tuning in for, not the reading of the autocue.

...which is very true. 

MD also mocks DG Tim Davie for insisting that the broadcaster has shown “incredible restraint” with its wage bill. He observes, “Whenever we read about all these stupendous sums of money, it becomes hard to sympathise with complaints about the BBC’s budget being frozen.”

It certainly does.