It looks increasingly likely that Richard Desmond will be officially revealed as the leading bidder for the TV channel Five on Friday.
On that day, as Mark Sweney reports on this site, the current owners, RTL, are holding a crucial board meeting.
Desmond's broadcasting experience has been confined to the Red Hot adult channels and he is also known for cutting costs to the bone at Express Newspapers in order to maintain bumper profits. Then again, he has made an undoubted success of OK! magazine.
So can he emulate his OK! performance by making money and winning new viewers at Five? That's the question I ask in my London Evening Standard column today.
