Channel 4 has decided to stop paying Carol Vorderman as though she was the chief executive. It is a lesson in market economics for the BBC.

Vorderman was reputedly paid £1m for helping present the daily Countdown game show. The question for Channel 4 was not whether it could afford it but whether it needed to pay her so much.

She undoubtedly has skills, but it is a fair bet the TV station could find someone with the mathematical talent and some degree of personality (plus, perhaps, even her looks) for less money – probably even for less than the £100,000 it apparently offered her. C4 could even use a computer to solve the arithmetical riddles – as Countdown’s French version does.

Channel 4 was thus right to cut her pay and let her go, even if it disturbs the continuity of a programme that has been shown since the channel launched 26 years ago.

The question for Vorderman in rejecting the cut is whether she can earn more elsewhere. As a celebrity she undoubtedly will be in demand even if there is little alternative appetite for her mathematical skills. She can probably earn more than £100,000 elsewhere, but probably not the £1m that was no longer available anyway. She needs to expand on the many extramural activities she already undertakes.

So a £250,000 or £333,000 offer might have kept Carol at Countdown and given Channel 4 its continuity – but C4 seems to think even that too expensive for the low-budget afternoon show.

But between them, Vorderman and the TV station have proved there is a market in talent – a fact the BBC’s trustees failed to grasp in their report on stars’ pay in June 2008. They concluded that performers like Jonathan Ross are not paid more than the market rate – even though the BBC won the auction for him by outbidding rivals.

The trustees did not realise that with so few buyers of talent (and C4 now proving it cannot bid with the big boys) the BBC is the market. And it did not realise that an employer creates the value of its stars by giving them formats and exposure – just as Channel 4 created much of Miss Vorderman’s value.

The Countdown experience should teach the BBC that wages go down as well as up. It is a lesson for boardrooms too.

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