A nutty idea

Given all the problems besetting live television at the moment, it's probably no surprise that certain TV folk appear to be a little nervous about tonight's National Television Awards on ITV1. The fact that it's also Halloween has also clearly got them really worked up. Monkey gathers that an internal memo had gone out from the George Mitchell, the exec producer at Indigo, the indie that makes the show, instructing all staff members to carry horse chestnuts in their pockets for luck. Apparently Mitchell was inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 1959 book, A Moveable Feast, in which he talked about his superstition of always having two things - a rabbit's foot and a horse chestnut - in his pocket. Apparently there's no mention of a rabbit's foot in the Mitchell memo, though. Could this spell disaster?