Will the credit crunch close the wage gap?

Fantastic. Give her the money gladly.

£100,000 is also apparently the salary of 22-year-old Rachel Riley, the new maths wizard who will be presenting Countdown alongside Jeff Stelling. You don’t have to be good at sums to work out that she is much better value for money than Carol Vorderman, who was paid £1.2m and refused to take a 90 per cent pay cut.

There is little rhyme or reason about pay. Why were bankers getting millions of pounds in bonuses when they clearly didn’t have a clue about what they were doing? If a plumber had made such a mess of his work, he’d have been sacked and sued before you’d even got the carpet dried.

Maybe we could sack any of the remaining bankers and get keen youngsters in on a tenth of their salary.

And surely half the fuss about Jonathan Ross’s unpleasantness was not just that he was rude and cruel to a national treasure, but that he was getting paid £6m of our money to do so.

He’s been replaced on Saturday mornings by Terry Wogan. Fair enough. But why not give the job to a 22-year-old, an unknown who would do it for a fraction of the money?

And Stephen Fry. There must be someone who could do most of what Stephen Fry does for not much more than the national average wage. Give another youngster a chance.

Footballers get paid ridiculous money, of course. But at least we can judge them on results and their playing days are limited.

And even the footballing greats are eventually replaced by younger, faster players.

Natural selection.

Who will ever replace Ant and Dec? Or will they never grow up and move on? Or take a pay cut on their £15m?

The gap between the lowest and the highest wages gets ever wider. It does nothing to make for a contented society. The one benefit of a recession is that it might narrow that gap slightly.

The Prime Mminister gets paid £187,000.

Not much, really, in comparison with entertainers.

Though, to be fair, he doesn’t give us that many laughs.

Meanwhile, there will still be some who will be shocked at a nurse – a nurse! – getting £100,000 a year.

But if at least one nurse gets paid the same as at least one television presenter, then maybe we’re beginning to get our sense of values straight again.

BRITNEY Spears mimed her way through her guest spot on X Factor and didn’t even bother to watch the acts she was meant to be encouraging.

Compared to the singing and dancing contestants, she looked a total amateur.

Just as well it was only a brief guest appearance.

If she’d been doing it for real, she would have been the one voted off.

OF course, Tana Ramsay isn’t going to throw Gordon out because of his affair with the “professional mistress” Sarah Symonds.

Because that would make it seem as if Symonds actually mattered. Far better to maintain an united front in public and deprive Sarah Symonds of the importance she craves.

What Tana says to Gordon in private, might be a different matter altogether...

LULLABIES are so old-fashioned.

Modern mums are more likely to sing pop songs than nursery rhymes to their babies at bedtime, says research by a parenting website.

Robbie Williams rather than Rock a Bye Baby, Sugababes rather than Lavender Blue. So?

Unless you’re a sentimental traditionalist, there is nothing inherently superior in the old songs. All that matters is that mothers – and fathers – sing to their babies, cuddle them, talk to them, smile at them and make them feel loved and safe.

My babies were lulled to sleep with a mixture of home-made nonsense rhymes and You Are My Sunshine and usually dropped off to sleep in seconds – probably just to get away from my singing.

Backchat

Dear Sharon,

YOUR article on survival reminded me of the time, a few years ago, when visiting my sisters in San Diego, and there was a real panic about water shortage, even getting the amount used vetted by the water company. So we all remembered our lessons from the Second World War on saving precious water and put them into practice.

Their friends were so impressed that it became the thing to do and they were all congratulated by the authorities. So nothing learned is ever wasted, including water.

Shelagh Harnby, Stockton Dear Sharon, IN his early career as an environmental scientist, before the internet, when communication was by radio, my brother lived briefly on Fair Isle, then on an isolated croft near Cape Wrath and also on the northern Norwegian coast.

He always maintained that if the world ended, in those places it would be years before they even noticed and that they were quite the safest places to be.

He also said that the best training he had for such postings was the time we spent with our grandparents who had a smallholding on the North York Moors, near Rosedale.

They lived a very hard life, with no electricity or proper plumbing until well into the 1960s and were almost entirely self-sufficient and never wasted anything.

I wouldn’t like to go back to those days, but we could certainly learn something from them.

Carol Atkinson

A success very much deserved

MANY congratulations to Mandy Reed of The Swaledale Cheese Company in Richmond. It’s still only a few years since her husband, David, died, leaving her to cope alone with the company they set up together. Then last year, just as she was getting on top of it all again, the factory was flooded, hundreds of kilos of cheese were ruined and the factory was out of action for months. Nobody would have blamed Mandy and her family for chucking the whole thing in and giving up. Not a bit of it. Amazingly, triumphantly, not only is Swaledale Cheese very much back in business, but it has been awarded protected origin status – so Swaledale cheese can be made only in Swaledale – and this year their hand-made cheeses have won a string of top awards. It is a triumph for hard work and determination – probably otherwise known as cheerful bloodymindedness – and after all they’ve been through, Mandy and her team really deserve their success. Oh yes. And the cheeses taste good, too.