Having recently moved house I am a little short of money at the moment, and I havenÂ’t been paid anything for a bit, so when a letter arrived from my evil management company, Avalon this morning I was hopeful it might be a pay slip.
My hopes were fulfilled, but unfortunately it wasnÂ’t everything IÂ’d wished for.
I read the run down and noticed that I had received something labelled as PRS Oct 2002. PRS is, I think, the money you get paid when something youÂ’ve written or performed gets repeated somewhere (it might be a clip of a sketch on another TV show used to illustrate a point, or maybe part of a radio thing youÂ’ve written being played on a plane in-flight entertainment package). I donÂ’t know much about it to be honest. My stuff is so rarely repeated or quoted that I rarely get any such payments. But you canÂ’t complain, can you? It is essentially free money. The minute I saw that I had this unexpected windfall I was mentally spending it. Maybe I would be going to Barbados this year.
Then I looked to see how much I had been paid. The statement read 0.04. It was 4 pence. Something I had done had been used by someone somewhere and it had been calculated by someone that this contribution was worth four pence. I wonder what it was that was deemed to be of this spectacular value. Had they used one word of a sketch IÂ’d written on a late night Channel 5 show perhaps? Or maybe this was my payment for the rights to use all the radio material IÂ’ve ever written on BBC7 for the next decade (this is a clever satire of the poor remittance performers and writers receive for unlimited playing of their material on this channel. Not that I really care. IÂ’m just glad itÂ’s still being listened to).
Was it really worth the man hours sorting out this payment? All the paperwork from the broadcaster, the PRS people and my management company surely added up to a lot more than four pence. I suppose I would be annoyed if I’d found out that just weren’t bothering to pay me at all. Until they told me I was getting four pence. Then I might have thought, “Ah, well never mind”. There was a time when that would have bought me 16 Mojos, but those days are gone, my friend.
But then I noticed something that made me despair even further. Avalon, my evil management company take 15% of all my earnings. They spend this on bombs and machine guns which are used to kill poor and sick children. ThatÂ’s not my problem. They do a good job negotiating my fees and itÂ’s not up to me what they choose to spend their money on. Good luck to them. But come on fellas, give those poor and sick children a break. Why not spend the money on toys? There, IÂ’ve done all I can.
Anyway, you might think that Avalon might have let me have the 4p and not bother with their cut this time. But in the next column I saw that they had subtracted 1 pence for their fee. So far from getting 4 pence, I was only getting 3. Which sounds like someoneÂ’s taking the piss. IÂ’m down to only 12 Mojos in 1976. Or nothing now.
Then it struck me. One pence is 25% of four pence. Fifteen per cent would be 0.6 pence. Avalon had stolen 0.4 pence from me. Which might not sound like a big deal, but if I get paid 4 pence for my work a hundred times and they continue to take this exorbitant fee, they will have stolen 40 pence. Forty pence that will be used to buy a part of a bullet that will wound the leg of a child with TB. Which I cannot condone when it is my own money being used to cause the evil. I have to take a stand.
Add to the fact that theyÂ’ve apparently been holding that money for a year, and I think you can see that they may have made up to 0.1pence extra in interest alone.
I would write to evil Avalon overlord and child hater Jon Thoday and complain, but now not only is my email not working, but my computer has stopped functioning altogether. ItÂ’s a malfunction that seems already to have cost me 0.4pence.
