What Britain Earns, BBC2

9:11am Thursday 10th January 2008

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IT'S the question we all want to know the answer to but are all too polite to ask.

Yes, last night father and son team Peter and Dan Snow (together are they a blizzard?) returned for another idiosyncractic exploration of British Life.

What Britain Earns on BBC2 set out to discover the economy of the country as revealed through its pay packets.

I suspect that Snow senior agrees to do these programmes (in the past they looked at who owns what) providing the Beeb gives him some computer graphics to play with - never has a man been more at home among moving arrows and cascading piles of coins.

It probably keeps his hand in for any election programmes.

Quite what Snow junior gets out of it is less clear.

He seems to spend most of his time being ordered about and getting grotty jobs to do.

For all its father-and-son tomfoolery there was a serious point to the programme which was how do you actually measure someone's worth.

Certainly how can you justify giving someone a salary of £75,000 a year to be in charge of someone's wardrobe, three times the salary of a health worker?

Money is one of those subjects which will always divide opinion.

It is something which we can't live without no matter how altruistic our vision of the world is.

It's unlikely that messrs Snow and Snow will be getting a call from the governor of the Bank of England to help with monetary policy, but they entertained us nicely.