**Channel 4's director of programmes Kevin Lygo is the biggest individual burden on the public purse it appears, having trousered some £1m plus last year. Quite why C4, which doesn't actually make any programmes, needs to pay its chief programmer such a generous sum is something the Government and Ofcom might think about as they weigh the channel's future. The worst thing C4 ever did was move out of its modest Charlotte Street HQ to its modernistic pile in Victoria. You build a big office and you fill it with lots of people paid far too much. C4 actually needs a non-executive chairman, a CEO, a finance department, a sales department and about half a dozen commissioning editors. None of them earning £1m plus. **Speaking of adland's depredations on the public purse, the second best-paid public employee last year was Adam Crozier, formerly of the Telegraph and Saatchi & Saatchi, at the Royal Mail. Adam picked up a mere £995,000. You may have noticed that the Royal Mail is in a bit of disarray at the moment. **The Government will announce tomorrow (Tuesday) its plans for Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland. They'll be told to flog off a few branches and pay various penalties for the Government insurance they have enjoyed since the banking crash. But Lloyds will get the money it wants through a rights issue and RBS will be fattened up for the same treatment about a year hence. The easiest way for the Government to ease its borrowing deficit problems - about £175bn at the last knocking - is to flog these banks back to the private sector for £60-70bn. It bought its share in them for £43bn and, if it were sensible, would hang on to see its stakes worth £100bn or so. Which is eminently realisable. For once the Treasury seems to have got its sums right. **Recession sage Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP (will it be L-shaped, V-shaped or maybe figure of eight shaped?) is striking a more optimistic note today as he announced that WPP's profits had declined a bit less in the third quarter than they did in the second. All the Jeremiahs are saying that advertising won't bounce back next year. But that's because they've factored the disastrous last quarter of 2008, when the Lehman Brothers crisis hit, and the falling off a cliff first quarter of 2009 into their computer models. But they were freaks, although nastily real at the time. It'll be business as usual, or rather as it was until the cheap money boom times of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Steady growth but at three per cent rather than five or six.

C4’s programme director Kevin Lygo is most expensive public employee

Posted on November 2, 2009 in Advertising, Business, Media, Politics

**Channel 4’s director of programmes Kevin Lygo is the biggest individual burden on the public purse it appears, having trousered some £1m plus last year.

Quite why C4, which doesn’t actually make any programmes, needs to pay its chief programmer such a generous sum is something the Government and Ofcom might think about as they weigh the channel’s future.

The worst thing C4 ever did was move out of its modest Charlotte Street HQ to its modernistic pile in Victoria. You build a big office and you fill it with lots of people paid far too much.

C4 actually needs a non-executive chairman, a CEO, a finance department, a sales department and about half a dozen commissioning editors.

None of them earning £1m plus.

**Speaking of adland’s depredations on the public purse, the second best-paid public employee last year was Adam Crozier, formerly of the Telegraph and Saatchi & Saatchi, at the Royal Mail. Adam picked up a mere £995,000.

You may have noticed that the Royal Mail is in a bit of disarray at the moment.

**The Government will announce tomorrow (Tuesday) its plans for Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland. They’ll be told to flog off a few branches and pay various penalties for the Government insurance they have enjoyed since the banking crash.

But Lloyds will get the money it wants through a rights issue and RBS will be fattened up for the same treatment about a year hence.

The easiest way for the Government to ease its borrowing deficit problems - about £175bn at the last knocking - is to flog these banks back to the private sector for £60-70bn.

It bought its share in them for £43bn and, if it were sensible, would hang on to see its stakes worth £100bn or so.

Which is eminently realisable. For once the Treasury seems to have got its sums right.

**Recession sage Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP (will it be L-shaped, V-shaped or maybe figure of eight shaped?) is striking a more optimistic note today as he announced that WPP’s profits had declined a bit less in the third quarter than they did in the second.

All the Jeremiahs are saying that advertising won’t bounce back next year. But that’s because they’ve factored the disastrous last quarter of 2008, when the Lehman Brothers crisis hit, and the falling off a cliff first quarter of 2009 into their computer models.

But they were freaks, although nastily real at the time.

It’ll be business as usual, or rather as it was until the cheap money boom times of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Steady growth but at three per cent rather than five or six.

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