Biting the hand that feeds you

He may be battling with the culture secretary, but BBC director general Mark Thompson has revealed he is engaged in a cold war on the home front. "My relationship with the cat has begun to deteriorate," he writes in Television magazine. "He's gone off Top Gear and the first thing he did when I got back form holiday was to bite me on the hand." Thompson knows a thing or two about biting, having once bitten a colleague when he was working on the Nine O'Clock News. The BBC chief has his own theory as to what's gone wrong at home. "My wife says that it is the trauma of being separated from the family. I think he has been talking to Ben Bradshaw." The Times, P13