Say what you like about TV celebrities, there aren't many people who have the brain to do Carol Vorderman's job. Ten years ago I was sent by a magazine to audition for Countdown. Looking around the room, in a Manchester hotel, I surveyed my competitors: a bevy of grannies, bored-looking students and unemployed bricklayers. As a Cambridge graduate, like Carol herself, I thought: it isn't going to be hard to outwit this lot. Half an hour later I was shown off the premises, humiliated.

It won't have taken long for Carol to have calculated the implications of the 90 per cent pay cut that her manager says was hoisted upon her last week: a drop from a reported £1.2million a year to a mere £120,000. As for today's conundrum: why would Channel 4 risk driving away the face of its most successful show, the answer is two six-letter words, each beginning with “c”: credit crunch. With advertising revenue slumping, commercial television can no longer afford boom salaries.

It isn't hard to work out what this should - but probably won't - mean for the rest of us: a cut in our TV licence fee. The BBC Trust, as it admitted in a report last month, has been awarding its presenters above-inflation pay increases in recent years, which it justifies by saying represents the market rate in the commercial sector. Last year it paid presenters a total of £242million, a sum that has risen by six per cent per annum for the past three years.

With Carol Vorderman's departure from Countdown a sign that the bubble has burst, the BBC will presumably be telling its own presenters to take a 90 per cent pay cut or go searching for another job. That will mean Jonathan Ross's yearly earnings falling to £600,000 a year, Graham Norton's to £250,000 and Jeremy Paxman's to £100,000. By reducing its wage bill for presenters to £24.2 million, that will allow the BBC to save £218 million and so cut the cost of a TV licence by about £10.

You don't believe this will happen? Nor do I, somehow: at least not without a revolt by licence-payers. The public sector loves to talk the language of the private sector, which is why the BBC has performance bonuses and the town clerk at your local council now calls himself a “chief executive”. But when it comes to controlling costs like private companies, the BBC, in common with other public sector organisations, just doesn't get it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, as I write, a dim-witted executive has picked up the phone to Carol Vorderman's manager to offer her a deal of £1.5 million a year, which the BBC will later try to claim is the market rate.

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