David Lister: The BBC does not have to pay the going rate

The BBC is at it again. At the Edinburgh Television Festival the corporation, in the form of Jana Bennett, its director of television (sorry, I don't understand what her official title, director of vision, means), defended the enormous salaries paid to some of its talent by saying it was a matter of the market. Worse, she thinks that this market is too complex for the public to understand.

She said in Edinburgh: "The BBC is in a market; in the broader sense, it's part of the creative industries. It performs a fundamentally different role than that performed by, for example, policemen or teachers. It is a category error to suggest that the public would actually be able to contribute to working out what we do about it."

It's the argument that the BBC has been offering for years to defend the salaries and perks not only of the on-screen stars but also of the off-screen executives. They must be paid an extraordinarily high amount, otherwise in the marketplace they would be snapped up by someone else.

This argument tends to go unchallenged, which is curious, because it is highly challengeable. It is in Jana-speak a "category error". Where is the evidence that other broadcasters are clamouring to sign up BBC stars and BBC executives at equally high salaries? Wouldn't it be interesting if, just for once, the BBC let one of its stars try their luck in the marketplace?

I'm not convinced that they would come rushing in for, say, Jonathan Ross. But let's imagine they did. Suppose that Sky One made him an offer that they thought he couldn't refuse. My hunch is that he might not take it, and countless other stars and executives might not take it, because they actually value working for the BBC. They see that it has a prestige and a history and a lot of viewers, and they are proud of that, even though such a pride seems to be beyond the comprehension of Jana Bennett and her ilk.

And that brings me on to another argument that I would like Ms Bennett to consider. Why is it that this marketplace does not affect the salary structure in another art form, theatre? I know that it is hard for television executives to accept that there is a world outside television, but Ms Bennett should take a look at what is happening in theatre and has been happening for some years.

Our nationally subsidised theatres, unlike our nationally subsidised broadcaster, have no qualms at all about ignoring the market rate and paying some of the world's biggest stars the theatre's normal (rather low) rate when they appear there. From Nicole Kidman at the Donmar to Gillian Anderson at the Almeida to Judi Dench at the National, these stars get paid a fraction of what they would earn elsewhere. When Michael Gambon appears in Alan Bennett's new play at the National next month, you won't hear the head of the National, Nicholas Hytner, saying: "Gambon is a star of the Harry Potter films, we have to pay him the market rate."

He knows that these stars are proud to appear at these world-renowned theatres, and that they accept that these institutions are funded by the taxpayer. It would be nice to think that TV presenters and executives were proud to work for the BBC, and would not expect a broadcaster subsidised by the public to be governed by market rates. It would be even nicer if Jana Bennett and her fellow senior executives believed that too. And it would be nicer still, fascinating indeed, if just as a scientific experiment they let a couple of these stars and executives go, and see precisely what the market offered them.

Madonna's 'Like a Persian' and other misheard hits

I've always been fascinated by misheard song lyrics, having spent a few decades believing that Jimi Hendrix was an early campaigner for gay rights, when he sang "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy". It was disappointing when eventually I learned that it was merely another psychedelic flight of fancy: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky".

Misheard lyrics are often better than the real thing. Andrew Lloyd Webber confessed in an interview that the lyric that had the most effect on him as a teenager was "I can't get no girly action" in "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones. Touching, but they never actually sang that. They sang "I can't get no girl reaction". One music fan told a website that he thought Freddie Mercury's line in "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me", was "Beelzebub, cos the devil has a scythe for me" – rather poetic I think.

Now there is a deserving new entrant to the list of misheard lyrics. The American film actress Zooey Deschanel, who is in the new movie 500 Days of Summer, said in an interview in this paper yesterday that the first record she bought as a child was Madonna's "Like a Virgin". She bought it at a time when American conflict with Iran was in the news, and political young Zooey thought Madonna was singing "Like a Persian". How disillusioning for a child activist to discover that Madonna was more interested in sex than the Middle East.

Caught out by all the cricket-film buffs

There are various rules that every new journalist learns on starting in newspapers. The most important person in the office is the editor's secretary, and that sort of thing.

Rule 17b on the list is not to offer a hostage to fortune by saying that there has never been any of something, or even that there have been very few of the said something. You will always be proved wrong. I ventured on this page last week that there had been few films about cricket. Students of leather-on-willow movies were quick to react. Anthony Asquith's 1953 film The Final Test had cameos from Len Hutton and Denis Compton; there has been an Indian epic, Laagan. Wondrous Oblivion was a British film about a cricket friendship between two boys, which was fortunate to have West Indian Test player Phil Simmons as technical adviser – fortunate because, until he politely intervened, the actor cast as Gary Sobers played him as a right-hander.

A little-known film called Leg Before Wicket also gets the occasional outing. And cricket featured in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and Joseph Losey's Accident. There are, no doubt, others. Indeed, I suspect that before Anthony Perkins entered the shower in Psycho, he had a quick practice of his spin bowling.

At least I'm always polite to the editor's secretary.