• Hopefully BBC social affairs editor Alison Holt’s triumph at last week’s RTS TV journalism awards (best specialist reporter) will prompt IMDb to update its entry for her, which currently informs the curious that she is an “actress known for BBC One O’Clock News, BBC Six O’Clock News”, and singles out her remarkable performance as “Herself” in Panorama’s Baby P: The Whole Truth?. More intriguingly still, the screen world’s online bible claims she appeared in the 2011 movie Pageant vs Playmate, in which “two types of knockout women use their beauty, brains, and bodies to compete for the ultimate prize as they jet cross-country to America’s hottest cities”. At the very least, scholars consulting IMDb need to know which type of knockout women the character Holt played belonged to.
• As for another RTS winner, Look North’s Harry Gration - more Yorkshire than Geoffrey Boycott, Dickie Bird and the eponymous pudding - he’s been fronting the nightly show from Leeds almost since television was invented. Unfortunate, therefore, that the inscription on his trophy read: “Regional Presenter of the Year. Harry Gration MBE. BBC Look East.”
• Ill-feeling about the BBC’s coverage of the police raid on a property owned by Cliff Richard (after which other broadcasters blamed the Beeb for bagging a “pool” helicopter for its own use) resulted in an outbreak of booing when it was named as one of the nominees in the RTS Scoop of the Year category. Fortunately, Jonathan Munro - who as the BBC’s head of newsgathering was responsible for the coverage and subsequently defended it publicly - didn’t have to endure either the distressing experience of being heckled by his peers or the report’s defeat (it lost out to a BBC Northern Ireland scoop): he was away on holiday.
• Given the continuing drive towards greater representation and recognition of women in TV news, the RTS awards were a surprisingly blokeish affair in which many of the programme prizes went to all-male or male-dominated teams, and men took all but one of the gongs for individuals: camera operator (Reuters’ Andriy Perun), network presenter (ITV’s Mark Austin), regional presenter ( Gration), TV journalist (C4 News’ Matt Frei), young talent (APTN’s Mstyslav Chernov), lifetime achievement (ITV’s Lawrence McGinty) and judges’ award (Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed). Only BBC social affairs correspondent Alison Holt, chosen as best specialist journalist, broke up the march of the penguin suits.
• What news, as the dust clears after Peter Oborne’s Telegraph bombshell, of US import Jason Seiken, who still bears the title there of “editor in chief” although he has reportedly been kicked upstairs or sideways? Seiken has played no public part in either defending the paper’s record or acknowledging mistakes, but before Oborne’s attack he did tweet a tribute on 13 February to the New York Times media pundit David Carr (who “feared nobody, pulled no punches. He was a statue of honor, even heroism”) that with hindsight could be seen as ironic. Hard to tell if these are words the digital visionary would also apply to Oborne, as the only thing he’s felt impelled to share with his Twitter followers since then is a basketball clip.
• With her byline in giant letters, a contented-looking Janice Turner adorned the Times’s front page on 14 February, rejoicing in having found “at last, a man who knows what women want”. Reacting against “literary snoots” who have dismissed EL James’s novel Fifty Shades of Grey and the just-released film adaptation, Turner’s column inside the paper predicted instead that after seeing the movie women will “return moistened to the marital bed”; and that’s because its hero Christian Grey is focused on the heroine’s needs, whether in telling her “in practically every scene how she stiffens his ardour” or in being “attentive, tender, almost paternal” (“he butters her toast, mends her PC”). Sentimental Times readers could have been forgiven for seeing the piece as a touching Valentine’s day tribute (if an elegantly indirect one) to the sharer of Turner’s own marital bed - an apparent paragon who happens to be Monkey’s old friend Ben Preston, the man who cracks the whip at the Radio Times.
• Monkey’s tweet of the week: “The most British moment of my life”, tweeted @Lettybird, “Baking whilst listening to Woman’s Hour discuss spanking” - a reference to a Fifty Shades-related item in which stand-in presenter Emma Barnett, moonlighting from the Telegraph’s Wonder Women, interviewed the dominatrix Mistress Absolute.
