Putting the free (as opposed to fee) into freelancing….

Even the Huffington Post - one of the most prestigious of online news and blogging addresses - doesn’t pay, I’m told, for contributions. Your reward is in having such a fine platform to put yourself forward on.

And just this week I have, on consecutive days, found myself being asked to come onto TV and radio programmes to offer a perspective on a story that I have become unwittingly a part of. Last Saturday, I attended the fiasco that was Julie Andrews’s return to the British stage for the first time in over 30 years - over half of her professional life away, since she made her debut on the London stage sixty years ago. I came straight back from the concert and filed my review to The Stage. I sensed there would be some kind of story here, and on Sunday morning, Alistair Smith, the paper’s news editor, realised the same thing, and posted a news story on the concert that was headlined: “Critical backlash at Julie Andrews’ ‘tragic’ stage return”.

Noting that Andrews had been greeted on her entrance by a prolonged standing ovation, the story proceeded to quote my review: “The audience regularly got up out of their seats throughout the show thereafter, though sadly not so often in gratitude as to make an early exit: I’ve seldom seen so many walkouts during the course of a show, and the pace only accelerated in the second act. Not since an arena stage production of Ben Hur last year staged a series of intentional chariot crashes here have I witnessed such an unintentional pile-up of car-crash musical theatre… She sang precisely two songs in their entirety in the whole evening.”

By the end of the day, publications as diverse as the Daily Telegraph and The Sun had re-quoted parts of this; and the Telegraph ran it again as a big news story, across the top of page three, in the Monday edition of the paper.

No wonder the radio and TV stations wanted to pick it up, too - and they needed a talking head to talk about it. The first call from BBC London’s Vanessa Feltz Show at 8am that morning - could I join Vanessa on the air at 10.10am? I know and like Vanessa, and was happy to oblige - I used to appear regularly on the station, and used to get paid modestly for my efforts, but was actually making a journey into the studio to do so. For a brief phoner, I accept that there wouldn’t necessarily be a fee. But at least I’d have the pleasure of talking to Vanessa who is always combative and fun, so I agreed.

But 10.10am came and went - and then the producer who had booked me called again around 10.15am to say that the programme’s running order had changed, and could they come to me at 11.10am instead. That, I’m afraid, was no longer possible for me - I had a meeting at 11.30am, and couldn’t hang around any longer. But I also told the producer how exceptionally rude the programme had been in mucking me around this way - especially since they only called me to change the time after the time I should have already be on air - and I wasn’t even being paid, after all, so the least it could do is treat me with professional courtesy. And I e-mailed the station’s managing editor David Robey to say as much, too.

He replied, ” I’m sorry you were inconvenienced but Vanessa’s show is reactive and I am afraid running orders often change, sometimes at short notice. I’ll tell her producer that you would prefer not to moved around in future, but I can’t guarantee an arranged interview will be honoured if editorial priorities change.”

Fair enough? No, not really. As I told him in turn, ” My own priorities as a freelancer are also liable to change at short notice. It can cut both ways. How would the programme feel if, at the designated time they called me up as they were about to go on air, I replied, ‘Sorry, not now… call me back in half an hour, please?’” (Robey’s response: “it happens that way too Mark and we have to accept it of course”)

No sooner had I dealt with this, than I got a call from ITV’s London Tonight: could they get a comment, to camera, for that evening’s telecast? Given that this meant I would need to actually meet them to do so, I asked for a fee, and was told, “We’re only a local station.” (Maybe their advertisers shouldn’t pay for their spots either, on the same basis). I said in that case, I’m not doing it. They came back with an offer for £50, so I did it. (As it happens, the entire programme that evening got axed, since Gordon Brown made his resignation statement at 5pm, so they paid me for nothing, as it turns out).

And then on Tuesday morning, I got a call from BBC1’s Watchdog. Could I come into the studio on Thursday evening, to comment live on air about what consumers actually got for their money at the concert - and whether they would be entitled to a refund for its failure to deliver on its primary promise, which was to hear Julie Andrews sing again. This would require me to re-jiggle my schedule, because of course as a theatre critic I am usually at the theatre every evening, and indeed on Thursday I already had a prior commitment to go to the opening of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Peter Pan at the Barbican. It was something I was prepared to do - but what was the fee, I asked?

“Oh no, we don’t pay - because that would compromise the BBC, since it would seem like we were paying you to promote a particular point of view,” she said. I duly replied, I am sorry I am unable to help you, but I feel very strongly that, far from the BBC’s supposed impartiality being compromised by paying for expert contributors, it is those very contributors who are being professionally compromised by being asked to appear for free. I would have to give up a work evening to be there. And no one else on the programme, after all, works for free (apart from work experience kids, as I subsequently discovered), from the cameraman to the researchers and of course presenter Anne Robinson. Perhaps it was time for Watchdog to do an investigation into the exploitation of journalists, I wondered aloud.

This conversation (part electronic, part verbal) was obviously relayed to one of the producers, because a few minutes after sending the e-mail, he rang to clarify. The BBC would pay after all for me to come in. And it turned out I was going to have to earn my keep: they needed me there by 6pm, for a dress rehearsal run of the show at 6.30pm, then the live show at 8pm. I duly did so last night - you can view the result here, roughly fifteen minutes in.

As Michael Coveney wrote in a blog on Whatsonstage.com last September, “One of the best arguments for not renewing, let alone increasing, the BBC licence fee should come from journalists themselves. The freelance fees offered by arts programmes on radio and television are now so pitiful, and often negligible, that if the NUJ had any more teeth, or members, I’d renew my lifelong affiliation and start a campaign. The Culture Show on BBC TV has just offered me no fee at all for explaining to Toby Young (who I imagine is working for some remuneration) why theatre criticism is under no threat from the internet and the blogosphere. Toby should know all about the decline in theatre criticism standards as he contributed to it himself, but the very fact that the question is posed proves the urgency of the need to refute it.”

Michael stood his ground, though, and rightly said that, “Of course when the ‘no fee — we’re on a very tight budget’ caveat came through, I told them where to stuff it. And I shall tell Mark Thompson, Alan Yentob, and any other BBC management executive I meet in future where to stuff it, too. If The Culture Show mattered more, or anyone watched it, I might have cravenly bitten the bullet in the general interest. But it’s truly obscene that the BBC should expect free contributions from expert journalists in exchange merely for the honour, and the invisible kudos, of working for the BBC. I’ve got news for you guys: it’s not an honour any more, and it’s not fun.”

More of us need to make this sort of stand. I did so, and they capitulated. But it’s outrageous that one should have to make the point at all.