TV review - Because We're Worth It: Tonight

Half-an-hour given over to fat cats to tell us why they are worth extortionate bonuses was always going to be TV to tear your hair out to,

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As the price of . . . well just about everything rockets up, jobs hang in the balance and services are cut, there can be few who endorse the lottery winning sums of bonuses being paid out to those at the top of such well run businesses as the Royal Bank of Scotland.

And last night's Because We're Worth It: Tonight documentary (ITV) will have done nothing to promote any sympathy for such greedy men and women.

The cast included Britain's number one celebrity boss, the sneering Sir Alan Sugar – a champion of the ludicrous bonuses – and RBS chief executive, the remarkably well tanned Stephen Hester along with entrepreneurs like Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou from easyJet and Lord Martin Sorrell.

While some, it can be said, were more reasonable and more humble than others, a few will have left viewers wanting to put the TV out of the window.

Asked by reporter Laura Dobsworth what he thought about questions being asked in Parliament about the extent of bonuses, Sir Alan Sugar grimaced and said in his widest cockney accent: "They should just pack it in."

"I don't think it is that bad and I know that might be difficult to hear for someone up in Middlesborough that is out of work and all that stuff," he said as if not quite believing a place called Middlesborough exists or that all that 'stuff' like redundancies and lives crumbling really ever happens.

"You pay peanuts you get monkeys," Lord Sugar finished, probably itching to tell Miss Dobsworth she was fired at the end of the interview.

Well Lord Sugar, I hear some of you say, people pay big money for Stephen Hester and there are a few who may accuse him of being less than successful.

Cue the man himself to take the hot seat and convince us why he and his pals really are worth it.

"I do not think this country will be better off if we stigmatize success," Mr Hester said.

He must have been talking about the success of recording a loss of £2bn last year – the fourth consecutive year of losses since its October 2008 bailout. The success that was rewarded with £785 worth of bonuses for bosses.

His next point: you have to offer lots of money to attract the type of people who are going to be able to get us out of this mess. Err, the mess that you got us into in the first place . . . never mind.

Millionaire Stelios from easyJet also hit out at bankers bonuses saying those who create their own business take a risk and reap reward by putting their necks on the block, while bankers simply take the money for no risk whatsoever.

Even former fat cats like Jeroen Van De Veer, once a director of Shell, were amazed at the amounts they were paid for decisions whether successful or not while the High Pay Commission's chairman Deborah Hargreaves predicted we could be on the way back to Victorian levels of inequality.

It conjured an image of a well fed Hester, or the like, angrily chasing a skinny worker out of the building for daring to ask for more.

Scary stuff.