Are there are any BBC executives out there who are still coming down from their Glastonbury high? Well, I’ve got something that should speed up the job better than a face full of temazepam.

I suggest that they check out the comment forums on the Glastonbury websites, where they will see that, although they sent more than 400 people to cover a music festival populated largely by Notting Hillites in designer wellies — a team that included 27 presenters, 130 technicians, 30 producers, 18 “interactive” workers, 68 editorial staff, seven senior executives, the chairman of the BBC Trust and 130 contractors — quite a lot of viewers seem to think that the BBC’s coverage was a bit, well, rubbish.

The BBC misled viewers by promising too much and delivering too little, is a brief summation of the complaints, because it couldn’t broadcast fully the much-hyped headline acts Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen (but didn’t mention this beforehand) and because too much airtime was devoted to moronic presenters shrieking “amazing!” and “awesome!” as if they were High School Musical talking dolls. “Absolutely pathetic,” said one respondent. “We are paying for 400 BBC staff to attend Glastonbury in return for countless hours of gurning and preening ‘presenters’ and a few minutes of acts,” said another.

At this point, let us be clear that a) some people will whinge about anything; b) a lot of viewers thought that the Glastonbury coverage was good; and c) I am a big fan of the BBC. Of all my household bills, the licence fee is the one I pay with the gladdest heart because I believe it to be an “awesome!” force for excellence and I don’t want to be like that bearded refusenik Noel Edmonds. I don’t even think that the old joke “How many people work at the BBC? Answer: about half” is very funny any more, because I know people who slave their cojones off there on short-term contracts.

But come on. If you had sent enough staff to run a small hospital — nearly as many as were sent to the Beijing Olympics — to a weekend event, spending an estimated £1.5 million of public money along the way, wouldn’t you expect your performance to be superlative, sublime — to kick ass, as one of the more hysterical presenters might say? At the very least you would want viewers to conga down to Broadcasting House and hoist the Director-General on their shoulders in thanks for the best Glastonbury broadcast ever, not to have hippies writing that they will never renew their licence again. This doesn’t seem a great return on £1.5 million.

I would never argue that the BBC should be run like a private company because it isn’t and it shouldn’t. But the self-indulgent Glasto behemoth is the latest indication that the BBC suits have lost touch and still treat our money like trust fund kids do the bank of Mum and Dad. You may remember that ITV News sent 20 staff to cover the US election last year, and Sky sent 40. The BBC sent 175.

I won’t rake over the BBC executives’ expenses story, or the trauma of Jana Bennett’s stolen handbag (since reimbursed by us to the tune of £500). But it is worth noting that, in a week when reader Cheryl Armitage wrote to the Times letters page revealing that, as a Radio 4 reporter, she submitted a £10 taxi claim and her editor’s response was to make an assistant phone the companies operating the four buses that she would have needed to take for the journey, then repay her precisely the cost of those fares, we learn that deputy D-G Mark Byford, another of those execs rockin’ on down at Glastonbury, routinely charged the licence fee payer £240 for a chauffeur to collect him from Waterloo each morning.

Do management pay Jonathan Ross £6 million a year cunningly to deflect attention from such casual excesses? Maybe they think that we won’t notice all the middle-ranking managers with their vague job descriptions, vast salaries, cast-iron pensions and jobs for life who are doing — well, what exactly? Forming sub-committees and steering groups, drawing up five-year strategy plans on A4 pads and attending meetings, meetings, meetings. Recent documents reveal that 47 BBC executives are paid more than the Prime Minister’s salary of £195,000. Why? All we want from the BBC is decent programmes.

Rod Liddle, former Editor of the Today programme, says that the programmes we all value, and for which we happily stump up the licence fee, are nothing to do with these overpaid suits. They are largely made by employees on low wages, “sometimes scrabbling around on three-month contracts” with no job security. He contrasts such workers with the managers who take home £200,000-plus “for being head of diversity, or compliance, or vision, or strategy, or any other of those abstract nouns which pervade the BBC”.

When I was media correspondent for this newspaper, I was taken aback by the lavish launches that the BBC would often stage, with nibbles and glossy press packs for hacks who would be writing about it anyway. I recall being reprimanded by stroppy BBC press officers because we wouldn’t run suicidally dull interviews with managers who just banged on about what great jobs they were doing.

When you consider the self-puffery in which the BBC indulges, its trailers and self-congratulatory ads “selling” us something that we have bought already, you wonder if BBC management has, like Narcissus, gazed in a pool and fallen in love with its own reflection.

Well, OK. Ignore the furore over Glastonbury and decide to send 400 people again next year. Flaunt your Access All Areas pass, claim everything on expenses and strum an air guitar if you must. But when you’re kicking back, drinking wine on the grass, remember that there are plenty of critics out there who want the licence fee abolished. And you are giving them a field day.

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