LAST WEEK the poor old BBC discovered the hard way that when you lay off or outsource large numbers of administrators with access to filing cabinets, you tend to find your grubby washing vindictively hung out in public. Not, of course, that there is anything actually unhygienic about paying half a million a year to DJs who are good at burping, sneering and making risqué remarks about 16-year-old virgins. These are, after all, marketable skills. But it was all a bit embarrassing. I was rung up four times last week by reporters trying to entice me to join a mythical Radio 4 “campaign” for parity. All I could bleat was: “Look, I always was a cheap date.”

Yet whenever revelations about showbiz money seep out, there is a vast grey elephant in the room that reports sedulously ignore. It is not high pay in media that is the biggest scandal: it is low pay. And no pay.

The “creative” world — journalism, TV, publishing, theatre, pop, fashion — is now so popular that it is the equivalent of the equestrian world that enslaves horse-mad young girls. Few professional stables could operate without a pack of grooms sleeping in ratty accommodation, forking manure for years at the minimum wage and never asking for overtime, all because they love their four-footed friends. Meanwhile, at the top of the heap, people turn very nice profits from horse sports and horse leisure.

In recent years it has become more and more noticeable that creative industries — especially TV — are heading the same way. There are mainstream programmes that would never get on the air without a cadre of unpaid runners, and even on the staff of the BBC you meet inventive and indispensable researchers who have served 20 years and not yet reached the £27,000 mark (national average male full-time earnings last year were £31,500). Last year the union Bectu was moved to pass a resolution “requesting of the BBC that no single employee will be paid a gross taxable annual salary more than 35 times that of any other BBC employee”.

Elsewhere in the glamorous world of media, pay can be extraordinarily low. Three years ago the National Union of Journalists had to harass the Scott Trust — publishers of the socially sanctimonious Guardian — for starting its graduate provincial journalists on £10,486, seven thousand less than a trainee manager at McDonald’s at the time. In the publishing industry the last measured average salary was £23,942, starting salary £16,300. Still less than a burger bar.

But at least on staff you have employment protection and perhaps a pension. Beyond the low-pay zone lies the no-pay zone. Some like the BBC are ethical in that they restrict unpaid “placements” to a few weeks and try to give the subjects proper experience and advice rather than using them as gophers. But in many creative trades, months and years of unpaid drudgery are common. The cult of the “intern” came from the US, where you may often find a magazine run by a staff 40 per cent of which is unpaid. As for broadcasting, one researcher studied US interns over 15 years. In 1976 most of the stations paid their long-term interns; by 1991 only a fifth were bothering. Now, hardly any.

Britain is catching on: there is a six-month internship currently advertised at a London theatre, offering £25 a week “meal allowance” and help with transport. Ah well, you may say — this person will be backstage in a theatrical process, making ideas flower . . . how thrilling! But read on and you find it is in the fundraising office, with duties listed as photocopying, mail, manning phones and word-processing (good IT and typing skills essential). In other words they want an office junior, free. Evening and weekend work may be “required”. Not requested, required. Hundreds will apply. As for the fashion world, you can spend three years earning nothing whatsoever and being routinely insulted without anyone thinking it odd.

That is how it is. It won’t readily change, and there is genuine value in work-experience apprenticeship if the deal is respect on both sides. But the embarrassing fact is that creative Britain — talked up by ministers as a vital part of the economy, fringed at its top edges with wealth, administered by senior management ever ready to suck up bonuses — this whole sector is balanced on the exploitation of youthful anxiety. Amusingly, the act of Googling “media, exploitation” always leads straight to the websites of TV companies piously exposing the plight of low-paid workers in other industries. One wonders whether the irony occurs to the threadbare graduates typing it into their database.

Well, showbiz is a risky biz, and adults are free to make choices. To opt for poverty and a buzzy job is a reasonable thing to do, and it is not unreasonable to proffer your services free, at least until disillusion or a real job intervenes. Heaven forbid any legal interference — employment law makes life difficult enough as it is. I also admit to being a beneficiary of this weasel market, and have found placements for numerous young, including my own, to general satisfaction.

It is just that I would like to point out the catch in all this: a widening gulf, a social and cultural imbalance in the media trades. The kids who get the flying start with contacts and experience are the ones whose parents can afford to keep them. They live in roomy London houses and hand out an allowance and perhaps a deposit on a flat. Their children know they will inherit in later life to compensate for not having money to save. This small financial elite will increasingly monopolise the communicative professions, because all the other kids, cumbered by student debt and perhaps living far from cities, will have to find non- media jobs, however creative their minds may be.

So don’t be surprised when public discourse gets ever shriller, smugger, more chicly urban and more detached from majority Britain. Media start-up jobs are the new Eton-Oxford-and-the-Guards. It’s enough to make Chris Moyles burp even louder.

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