Media Monkey’s Diary: Newsnight balls-ups, BBC whiffs, Express rubbish
|
Version 0 of 1. • It’s becoming a pattern at Newsnight since Ian Katz took over as editor in September 2013: weary front-bencher gives a live interview, makes a gaffe and gets a pummelling from tweeters, commenters and political bloggers. Last week’s Ed Balls amnesia disaster (interviewed by Emily Maitlis) follows calamitous performances by Andy Burnham (Kirsty Wark), Harriet Harman (Laura Kuenssberg) and Tristram Hunt (Jeremy Paxman), plus the inadvertent apres-interview humiliation of Rachel Reeves when the editor himself tweeted that she had been “boring, snoring”. Despite mutterings in the rightwing press when Katz was recruited from the Guardian, all the meltdowns in the late-Paxman and post-Paxman eras have involved Labour shadow cabinet members; a pattern that seems to reflect not bias, but the fact that top Tories don’t feel any need to turn up brain-dead in Newsnight’s studio at 11pm after spinning continually since lunchtime (Evan Davis has had chummy chats with George Osborne and Boris Johnson, but on location and/or recorded). The last Tory to disintegrate on Newsnight was Chloe Smith, taken apart by Paxman in pre-Katz 2012, and she was only a junior minister. • If either ministers or presenters look as if they’ve just got a whiff of something nasty in Newsnight’s studio, meanwhile, that may be because they have, rather than anything to do with other participants’ personal hygiene or the rotting remains of politicians’ careers: as shiny, state-of-the-art studio B3 is in the bowels of New Broadcasting House, below the newsroom seen behind news anchors, Evan Davis, Emily Maitlis & co are even more exposed to the noxious smells caused by a crack in the basement than Huw Edwards – smells that obliged Beeb managers to turn up the air conditioning last week in the hope of dispelling them. While the crack’s existence only emerged last week, B3 (also home to BBC World News and The Andrew Marr Show) was accused nine months ago of being “a toxic waste pit” by World News presenter Peter Dobbie, who blamed his hospitalisation with a norovirus infection (and others’ illnesses treated as food poisoning) on “filth, human waste products and a badly built building”. Awkwardly, this new crisis in W1A has blown up just as the cast of the BBC2 satire of the same name have returned there to film the next series. • In this context, a strategy for BBC charter renewal and getting a decent licence fee deal based on the idea of “spillovers” might seem ill-advised; but that’s the key new piece of jargon introduced by James Heath, head of policy, in a blog on Thursday devoted to the corporation’s role in the creative economy. Central to the argument is the wonkish treat of a graphic intended to demonstrate that the BBC’s “investments” have first- and second-round positive impacts on the creative industries, but also various spillovers (skills, technology, etc) of which Monkey’s favourite is “cluster spillovers”. A rather terse explanation below reveals that this means forming the centre of creative hubs in Salford and, er ... lots of other places. • Monkey was pleased to see that the infant press regulator Ipso can afford to pay the director of external affairs it’s recruiting £75,000 (the possibly tougher post of Home Office chief press officer, also currently advertised, pulls in £61,745 max), but a little disconcerted by the job spec. Defined as “essential” requirements in Ipso’s ad are general PR experience and capacities like facility in using social media, public speaking, “resilience” and willingness to “work under close scrutiny”. But having “a good knowledge of new press regulatory framework” is merely one of the things listed as “desirable”: evidently quite nice but not a deal-breaker if an ace utility spinner applies who finds all that stuff completely boring. • Bin wars have broken out at the Daily Express, where arts and entertainment editor Clair Woodward (who on this evidence seems to double up as office manager) emailed staff last week to inform them that desk-side grey bins had been removed overnight “so that our ongoing battle against mice and fleas in the office can succeed”. Some were puzzled, some grumpy, and a surprising leader of the mini-mutiny emerged .... the paper’s beleaguered editor Hugh “Who?” Whittow, who joined the same email chain to issue a lapidary decree: “Daily Express staff want their bins back.” Perhaps the poor chap thought, amidst rumours that he could soon be shown the door, that it was a bad time to add to the risk with the Fleet Street equivalent of “losing the dressing room”? • The Today programme turned blue on Friday when (after much pre-emptive huffing and puffing about being obliged to be potty-mouthed) the normally prim John Humphrys intervened in a final item about grammar and pedantry to tell a tale that culminated in a punchline unfit for the ears of children or the sensitive. A hick freshman at Harvard asks a tweedy fellow-student “where’s the library at?”, only to be told “we don’t end sentences in prepositions here”. “OK, where’s the library at, asshole?” says the redneck. A good yarn, but Monkey can’t help wondering if Humphrys always intended to recite it once the item was put on the Friday agenda, rather than conquering his qualms and telling it spontaneously and semi-reluctantly: the anecdote does after all appear in his 2004 book Lost for Words, and has been part of his schtick on the discussion circuit ever since when language is the theme. • Regular Monkey readers may be wondering how Evgeny Lebedev’s ailing TV station London Live reacted to the disclosure here that listings in his own papers pointed to a record run one day of 20 consecutive repeats. Simple: Lebedev’s London Evening Standard (where the little-watched channel ludicrously appears first, ie before BBC1 and ITV, on the listings spread) immediately stopped putting an (R) after its rerun programmes, so you can no longer see how many there are. |