Guido’s number crunchers have calculated that the total amount of money spent on each of the BBC’s top ten stars is equivalent to every single resident of some of the UK’s most significant towns paying a licence fee directly to the loaded luvvies.

Gary Lineker, for example is paid £1,750,000 a year. Including employer’s National Insurance the BBC is paying £1,991,500 for him, divided by the licence fee that would cover every man woman and child in Buckingham. And that’s not even taking into account that licence fees are per household rather than per person!

• Gary Lineker – Buckingham, Bucks
• Chris Evans – Abergele, Conwy County
• Graham Norton – Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
• Huw Edwards – Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire
• Steve Wright – Gilberdyke, East Yorkshire
• Alan Shearer – Busby, East Renfrewshire
• Andrew Marr – Kirton in Lindsey, Lincolnshire
• Claudia Winkleman – Thorpe Willoughby, North Yorkshire
• Jason Mohammad – Stocksfield, Northumberland
• Vanessa Feltz – Brewood, Staffordshire

The BBC hands out this sort of cash to its top tier luvvies yet can’t bring itself to find the savings to not tax the over 75s. All of this would cease to be a problem if they just scrapped the licence fee and moved to a sensible subscription model like Netflix, Sky, HBO, Amazon Prime, BT Sports, Apple Music, Spotify…