• In the dying days of the Independent titles in print, with only a few mostly veteran stars (Simon Calder, Patrick Cockburn, Grace Dent, Robert Fisk) so far officially confirmed as mighty brands who will be staying when they become online-only, less illustrious hacks talk of a worsening “civil war” atmosphere between printies and webbies – so that a mutinous cheer could be heard on Thursday from some of the former when the figures for average daily browsers in February showed the Indy 12% down.
• Isn’t the problem with Dan Walker, not that he sits on the left or is a hardline God-botherer, but that he’s just too gigantic to be a co-anchor at all? Being well over 6ft is fine for solo anchormen, as 6ft 5in Jon Snow showed over the 22 years when he ruled Channel 4 News alone; and if you’re tallish but no giant, there isn’t a big issue if you and your co-presenter are sitting down (as with 6ft 3in Jeremy Paxman and Kirsty Wark, in their improbable stint as BBC breakfast hosts, or 6ft 2in Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan), which reduces the difference. At 6ft 6in, though, he is only compatible with people as tall as the strikers and centrebacks who tend to be his guests on Football Focus; Walker and Louise Minchin will always look distractingly ill-matched together, whichever way round they sit.
• Inside Obama’s White House, a prestige BBC2 project by the serial award-winner Norma Percy, duly received full support from BBC radio, with an ample nug (plug posing as news) in the Today programme on the day of the first instalment. But from her telly colleagues? Not so much. Apparently convinced that there’s no overlap worth worrying about between people who like classy documentaries and people who like classy drama, BBC2 barmily chose to doom its debut by launching it head to head on Tuesday against the Happy Valley finale – and while the climax of Sally Wainwright’s cop show was watched by 7.4m, the political doc only pulled 1.6m (a 7.2% share, below the slot average). Perhaps Percy should quiz bungling, beleaguered decision makers at the Beeb next, for the 2018 series Inside Hall’s W1A?
• So offended was the Daily Telegraph by the mid- and-post budget comments on Theresa May’s cleavage that not one but two columnists were encouraged to take up their cudgels against her critics – but maybe, on seeing how their views were presented, these pundits will have wondered if their pieces were used by the paper as a pretext for more gawping. “The blokeish braying over Theresa May’s breasts does us all a disservice,” lamented Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman, in an online column adorned by three images of May in That Dress (two in screengrabs from the Mail) in case readers might have forgotten what the braying was about. Three more appeared in Friday’s paper trailing or illustrating Judith Woods’s view that “It’s time to stop staring at Theresa May’s boobs”, a headline that online appeared immediately above a photo inviting the reader to do so, and introduced musings also decorated by a giant image of Susan Sarandon wearing a low-cut outfit to the Oscars and one of a boob-baring racegoer at Cheltenham.
• There were no such verbal-visual tensions at the Mail, sneakily challenging the Sun’s status as the breast man’s paper - it ran the same photos of Cheltenham flesh-flashing two days running, for instance. There Jan Moir’s Friday column criticised May, not her critics, providing helpful support for a classic example of “having your Dacre and eating it” (simultaneously tut-tutting and gawping, as in Sideboob Alley): a whole double-page spread of female politicians displaying legs or cleavage, with Penny Mordaunt showing off both in a swimsuit at its centre and the requisite cynical accompanying words indicating that they “flaunt their, er, agendas” because such gambits are “always strategic”.
• “The Virgin Radio brand is to be relaunched on 30 March,” trills PRWeek, excited that Edith Bowman and Matt Richardson will be broadcasting the comeback show of the now-digital station that died in 2008 (when it became Absolute) from “a moving train” travelling from Manchester to London. And after “15 months of planning”, what a stonking tagline for the multi-platform promotion campaign the agency responsible have come up with! Though as a nerdy cultural historian Monkey would have welcomed some information on the type of envelope on whose back the instant-classic slogan “WE’RE BACK - it’s time to re-tune your digital radio” was scribbled, and whether, in keeping with adland tradition, it was only agreed by the brilliant creative team as they got out of their taxi before the pitch.
• Monkey’s dangler of the week: being part of the throng at Cheltenham is even more thrilling and perilous than Monkey imagined, or at least it is in this bewildering, grammatically challenged evocation of a key race last week in the Daily Telegraph: “Having finished a close runner-up to today’s RSA Chase favourite More Of That in the World Hurdle two years ago and fallen at the last when clear in the mares’ hurdle last year, a record first-day crowd of 67,470 held their breath as the 5-2 favourite [Annie Power] bore down on the final flight with Cheltenham glory once more at her mercy.”
