Open your window and you’ll hear the sound of people tearing up their TV licences in disgust. Yep, news has broken that the BBC has spent £54m on presenters earning £150,000 or more in the 12 months to the end of March 2009. This equates to 1.55% of the total BBC licence fee and of course, we’ll need names to put in that pay-band (who I’ll now dub the one-percenters, mainly because it’s catchy as opposed to being accurate).

Essentially, that percentage of the licence fee pays/paid for Jonathan Ross, Jeremy Paxman, Fiona Bruce and Graham Norton. Possibly some others. They’re the main ones.

Basically, the BBC is declining to reveal how many individuals earned £150,000 or more in the 12-month period.

In total the BBC’s talent costs for the year were £229m. 6.56% of the licence fee was paid to artists, presenters, musicians and other contributors across its TV, radio and online services. The biggest sum was the £115m paid to individuals earning less than £50,000.

The BBC chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, said: “Artists, presenters, musicians and other contributors are central to the BBC’s ability to deliver high quality and distinctive programming and we know that audiences expect to see and hear them on BBC programmes.

“The BBC engages some of the greatest performers in the world across television and radio, and also nurtures and develops people that will be at the heart of our programmes in the future. They add to the credibility, expertise and creativity of the BBC.”

Now, this is all meant to get us angry and shouting into the sky about what a gargantuan waste of money this all is… however, it’s such a small amount of the total licence that there’s a lot there that’s unaccounted for in the press today that goes toward making brilliant TV and radio.

With iPlayer, a million radio stations and four channels catering for everyone, we’d be pretty brattish to complain about it. If anything, there’s a lot of middle management at the BBC that could do with getting kicked out into the street with P45s, but to be honest, I’d rather everyone kept their jobs.