Jenny Abramsky: 'Record pension pot'

Two BBC bosses caught up in the corporation's fakery scandals have both received bumper rises.

Jenny Abramsky and Jana Bennett were among ten top executives who shared a combined pay increase of more than £700,000.

While the BBC top brass enjoyed a 16 per cent rise, the average staff member received only 4 per cent, while up to 1,800 of the corporation's workers are facing the axe as part of cost-cutting plans.

Last night critics condemned the big rises as a 'reward for failure' after the series of scandals that have tarnished the BBC's reputation in the past year.

Miss Bennett, who is Director of BBC Vision with overall responsibility for TV output, saw her pay go up by £103,000, the BBC annual report shows.

She came under pressure to quit last year after the 'Crowngate' scandal, when documentary footage of the Queen was misleadingly edited to suggest the monarch had stormed out of a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz.

An independent report criticised Miss Bennett for 'showing a lack of curiosity' over the incident, which cost BBC1 controller Peter Fincham his job.

The BBC also came in for criticism after faking competition winners on Children in Need and Comic Relief.

And it ignored an audience vote to choose a name for the Blue Peter cat and called it something else instead.

Despite these controversies, Miss Bennett's pay rose 24 per cent from £433,000 to £536,000 in the last financial year, including a bonus payment of £23,000.

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson (left) waived his right to a bonus but Vision director Janna Bennett (right) took a total rise of more than £100,000 including her bonus

Miss Abramsky, outgoing Director of Audio and Music, was paid £419,000, up from £329,000 the previous year. This included a £19,000 bonus, despite the fact that the fakery scandals hit radio as well as TV.

Competition winners were faked on The Liz Kershaw Show. Russell Brand's 6 Music
show was billed as live, but prerecorded and a member of staff posed as a competition winner. Jo Whiley's Radio 1 show was found to have been guilty of twice faking a competition entrant.

Miss Abramsky is leaving the BBC with what is believed to be the public sector's biggest pension pot, valued at almost £4million.

Yesterday Tory MP Nigel Evans told members of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee he was 'staggered' that she would draw a pension of some £190,000 a year  -  'more than the Prime Minister'.

Scandal: A still from documentary A Year with the Queen. The BBC had to apologise after wrongly implying the monarch had stormed out of a photoshoot

Deputy director-general Mark Byford was also given a £41,000 bonus, which helped take his total pay to £513,000 last year.

Despite waiving his bonus for the fourth consecutive year, director-general Mark Thompson still received a total of £816,000  -  up from £788,000 the previous year, according to annual report.

He defended the bonuses for others, saying they represented 'a tiny fraction' of what executives in the commercial sector received.

He also said some bosses involved in the scandals had been penalised by losing up to 40 per cent of their bonuses.

But Conservative MP David Davies said: 'These pay rises are absolutely horrendous.

'For a publicly funded organisation to be award six-figure pay rises shows an absolutely extraordinary lack of knowledge about what is going on in the rest of the workplace.

'It is an insult to all those that are struggling to pay their TV licences.

'Given the scandals which were overseen by these people then there appears to be a policy within the BBC of rewarding failure.'

Young deserters

Young viewers are deserting BBC1, corporation bosses were warned yesterday.

To reverse the trend, the flagship channel must do more to provide 'fresh' entertainment and drama rather than relying on established shows, the BBC Trust report says.

It adds that BBC2 is becoming ' increasingly mainstream' by showing a large number of entertainment, lifestyle and leisure programmes.

The report also reveals that the number of repeats on the BBC's two main TV channels increased last year.

Soap that shocks

Eastenders was the most controversial show on the BBC last year, attracting 5,500 complaints from viewers.

That was more than double the number provoked by any other programme. Scenes in the soap included character Max Branning being buried alive and a gruesome gang attack in the Queen Victoria pub.

Yesterday MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee expressed alarmed at the storylines and the number of 'disturbed people in one programme'.