✒ Where The Archers is concerned, BBC spin doctors seem increasingly to be having a laugh. A Freedom of Information request for the cost of putting on Loxfest – the rural soap’s recent rock festival, headlined by the Pet Shop Boys – received the tongue in cheek reply: “Please be advised that there are no income and expenditure accounts associated with the holding of Loxfest since it is an entirely fictional event” (fair enough, although books for Archers addicts provide ample details of Ambridge’s entirely fictional farms). Perhaps the same wry spinner was the “Radio 4 spokesperson” who replied to a Radio Times reader’s inquiry about the Archers character Susan Carter’s expensive new hairdo: “having consulted on the matter, and with respect for Mrs Carter’s privacy, it is felt an image would be far too unsettling for publication”.
✒ Those who turned up on time for Tuesday’s home affairs select committee session were able to witness three BBC eminences failing to do so: like naughty schoolboys sneaking in late to assembly, director general Lord Hall, news boss James Harding and head of newsgathering Jonathan Munro had to excuse their way past the entire back row after South Yorkshire police’s chief constable had begun giving his account of discussions surrounding the search at a property owned by Cliff Richard. It was “as if they’d crashed the pips!” spluttered a devotee of Radio 4’s Today programme, still struggling to make sense of the alarming experience.
✒ For Munro, there were lessons to be learnt from the session (mustard-coloured ties are best avoided if the DG’s gone for a dark one) and from what followed on Wednesday’s interview on The Media Show, when he proclaimed the Beeb was “in the market” for breaking stories. The very next day his deputy political editor James Landale claimed on Twitter he was first to reveal that Tory whips were canvassing MPs about action against Isis; but instead of being tagged as an exclusive in bulletins, the story was introduced with the deadly formula “the BBC has learnt”, which is universally recognised as meaning the opposite of a scoop – “someone else has broken a story, and a BBC hack has read it or seen it”.
✒ October’s GQ offers a glorious collection of ghouls. There’s Tony Blair, interviewed ahead of receiving his much-mocked gong for “philanthropist of the year” at last week’s GQ Men of the Year ceremony. There’s Alastair Campbell, Piers Morgan’s replacement as the mag’s interviewer. There’s GQ agony uncle Rod Liddle (although he gained a few redeeming points by disobediently rubbishing the Blair award in the Sun). And there’s Andy Coulson, introduced with a poignant contender for byline of the year: “in his last feature before his conviction for phone hacking, the former No 10 director of communications … .”
✒ As for the curse of the GQ Men of the Year awards – last year’s recipients included Morgan (then still a CNN star), Lou Reed (then still alive) and Man Utd’s Bobby Charlton (then still a director of a Champions League club) – it’s still early days but 2014’s Leading Man of the Year Colin Firth showed promising signs of succumbing already by racking up two-star stinker reviews for his latest film Before I Go To Sleep in the same week as the ceremony.
✒ Monkey’s media love letter of the week: “Gavin Patterson walks in and you think, blimey, he’s so handsome and well groomed he should be heading Armani, not a vast, techy monolith like BT. Slim, tall, chisel-jawed, dark-eyed, luxuriant-haired, gentle and genial in manner, the 46-year-old seems altogether too glossy a package to be heading a crusty FTSE 100 giant” – introduction to an interview with the BT chief executive in Management Today, an organ clearly living up to its nickname, Management Toady.
✒ Radio Times appeared to forget its own name when it drew up up the Power List in its current issue allegedly identifying “the 30 most powerful women in TV and radio” (or “on” TV and radio as the cover trail tellingly preferred). Including the weekly’s TV editor but not her radio counterpart, the panel of judges came up with a well-balanced list consisting of 29 telly figures, with just BBC radio supremo Helen Boaden representing the senior medium. Among those who could be forgiven for wondering why they were deemed to have less “power” than, say, Anne Reid or Sarah Millican are several radio news presenters, Bauer Radio’s Dee Ford and Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams. Will Williams ever forgive Woman’s Hour anchor Jenni Murray, who was on the panel?
✒ The inaugural BBC Music Awards, to be held in December at Earls Court, are said to have unnerved the BPI, the music industry body whose similarly-themed Brit Awards takes place three months later on ITV. Bob Shennan, BBC Music director, sought to reassure the BPI by addressing its AGM. His Chris Evans-fronted show, live on BBC1, will “complement and not compete with the Brits”. It will “stand apart” from the ITV event and appeal “to more than one targeted demographic”. The idea that, behind the scenes, both shows are now competing for exclusive headline performers from music’s biggest names, is of course, fanciful.
✒ Farewell, then, Colin Robertson, who left the Sun’s TV Biz page on Friday after eight years with a ramble down memory lane that left unclear if he was handing over to Will Payne from Monday and moving to another role at the paper because nauseated or fed-up – the piece included a testy swipe at the rise of “nano-celebs”, which was odd given his last two TV Bizs led respectively with stories about Sinitta and Towie’s Mark Wright – or due to failing powers. “Reality TV was only just becoming the monster it is now” when he took command in 2006, Robertson hazily recalled, seemingly overlooking the fact that Big Brother made its debut in 2000 and I’m A Celebrity… in 2002.
✒ Facing extinction when the new press regulator Ipso launches on Monday, the old Press Complaints Commission seemed in denial on Friday. Nothing on its website’s home page indicated it was anything but business as usual, and there was no helpful link to Ipso; only a splendidly Yes Minister-style answer buried on the FAQ page (“the PCC is currently in a phase of transition”) showed any awareness of death being nigh. Ipso itself showed no greater signs of readiness, however: uninvitingly on offer on its drab, image-free site were a quote from the Leveson report, page 1758 (!) and a chance to download some tedious documents – no “about Ipso”, no “who we are”, no FAQ, no excited message about launch day, no reader-friendly guide to complaints procedure. You’d imagine the handover was at least a month away, rather than about to happen.
