• While the Daily Star still finds nothing more important or riveting than Celebrity Big Brother – every front page splash last week was about the show – Richard Desmond’s Daily Express has suddenly lost interest since he sold Channel 5: hardly any stories have appeared on the current run, and even Katie Price’s emergency call-up failed to rate a mention in a paper back to its stodgy, oldie-oriented traditional diet of health scares, weather scares and house prices or pensions scares. In contrast to its excited previews in May and August 2014 of runs of a “brilliant” show “back to its glory days”, one of the few recent pieces began: “If you haven’t peered into the cess pit that is 2015’s Celebrity Big Brother, prepare to sacrifice what remains of your innocence and take the plunge.” There are naturally fears for the sanity of low-profile editor Hugh Whittow, so rapturously obsessed with reality TV for much of his reign but now at a stroke apparently horrified by it.
• Desmond, meanwhile, has been enhancing his reputation for giving anyone in his care a hard row to hoe, since it has emerged (on his wife Joy’s Twitter feed, for example) that the 63-year-old proud father has decided to call his newborn son Valentine. An entire childhood of being mocked for having such a lah-di-dah name now awaits the poor lad, though at least also having the initials “VD” is not the curse it once was.
• Implementation of Channel 4’s 360 Diversity Charter, the ambitious scheme it announced last week to improve diversity on-screen and in the staffing of the broadcaster and its suppliers, will be monitored by its board (there will be “quarterly executive and board level focus to ensure that the charter is fully delivered, and is creating the desired outcomes”). But how well does the board itself do on diversity? Not brilliantly on gender balance – eight men and four women – and worse in other categories: Channel 4 is not “aware” of any of this bunch of the great ‘n’ good (led by Lord Burns, and including the likes of Waitrose boss Mark “Chubby Grocer” Price and TV news veteran Stewart Purvis) having “disclosed” that they are BAME, LGBT or disabled, ie as far as we know the body ultimately overseeing the charter is all-white, all-able and all-straight (at least Burns deserves a half diversity brownie-point for being originally from the north, it is rather plaintively suggested). But that’s because, apart from the Channel 4 executives like David Abraham and Jay Hunt who sit on it, “the board is appointed by Ofcom”. The buck passes to you, then, rookie Ofcom chief exec Sharon White.
• If you are crossbench peer Lord Best, an earnest serial do-gooder with decades of activity behind you in fields including housing, rural development, local government and parenting, you have just completed months of work heading the Lords communication committee that reported on news and current affairs broadcasting (possibly predictable verdict: not enough women) last week. But you awoke on Friday to find the Daily Telegraph’s front page naming the chairman responsible for all this labour as “Lord Bell”: as Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s former PR man, regularly voices paleo-Thatcherite views, has never denied claims (originally in the Observer) that he had a cocaine habit during her premiership, and attracts accusations of being insufficiently selective in the foreign regimes or statesmen he advises, it’s such an easy mistake to make.
• The A-List, Campaign magazine’s annual, questionnaire-based guide to advertising and marketing’s big cheeses, rarely fails to produce the goods and in the latest edition Monkey’s favourite contributor is outspoken CHI & Partners boss Johnny Hornby. Asked “if you could be anyone else in adland for a day, who would you be and why?”, Hornby replies: “Either Moray, just to get a taste of what it’s like to be so very old and past it, or Robert, to understand why it is that being ginger makes you so angry.” Glossary: Moray must be Moray McLennan, worldwide chief exec of M&C Saatchi, and Robert is presumably Robert Campbell, the creative whizz (and former MediaGuardian columnist) who now owns Outsider.
• Monkey’s worry of the week: who sent Huw Edwards, in the “anchors away” aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders, to stand on his own in front of the Arc de Triomphe, a tourist site of no obvious relevance and on the other side of Paris to the main news events? When everyone else, including the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, was sensibly based across town beneath the giant statue of Marianne in the Place de la Republique, which is near the magazine’s offices and where Charlie Hebdo supporters gathered and the big march with 40 world leaders began? Monkey’s natural concern is that it might be someone with a grudge determined to make the Welsh anchorman look silly; perhaps the same malign BBC News puppet-master who thought it would be fun to send soldierly Alastair Leithead – previously rarely seen without a helmet and flak jacket in his tours of duty in war zones such as Afghanistan – to the red-carpet front lines of Tinseltown.
