• With Sir Martin Sorrell able to calmly repel insolent questions about his £70m pay package by pointing to healthy sales growth at WPP, Monkey is concerned that he’s not being interrogated about the marked lack of innovation and improvement in one area – the ever-changing metaphors for his company or the economy for which he was once renowned. The Napoleon of hype first invoked swans when weighing up an acquisition in 2004 (“at this stage it is not a beautiful swan or an ugly duckling”), before channelling Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Donald Rumsfeld as he contrasted unforeseeable black swans with the “four grey swans” of known threats to global growth in 2012. And ever since then they’ve reappeared as he answers press posers – last week the terracotta-tanned titan deployed the metaphor yet again, noting that “the grey swans or known unknowns haven’t got any whiter and the black swans or unknown unknowns are still there”. But how does Mystic Martin know that unknown unknowns are there?
• Another Sunday Times Rich List, and once again a certain plutocrat has unaccountably gone missing (although he is allowed into the World, as opposed to British, Rich List, where family wealth estimated at £8.3bn earns him a lowly ranking of 92nd). According to the “Rules of Engagement” small print at the back, “we exclude Rupert Murdoch”, the chairman of the paper’s parent company, “as he is a US citizen and based in America”, although these rules also state that even foreigners who merely possess “strong links to Britain” are included. Turn to the top of the chart and you oddly find at No 3 music-to-metals magnate Len Blavatnik, likewise a “US citizen”, likewise an owner of luxury residences in New York and London, and someone – like other non-Brits on the list – with less strong links to Britain than the ultimate owner of three of its national newspapers and Sky. Among those also deemed eligible, with real or theoretical residence abroad evidently not disqualifying them, are the Monaco-based Barclay brothers at No 12 and Viscount Rothermere (who reportedly has non-dom status) at a surely disappointing No 117. Richard Desmond, a rare instance of a British and British-based press baron, comes between them in 48th spot, his £2.25bn estimated fortune more than twice Rothermere’s £1bn.
• Was the choice of estate agencies to flog TV Centre flats (top price: £7m) to fatcats entirely wise, Monkey wonders. No problem with Knight Frank, but given what once went on at the former BBC home of shows such as Top of the Pops (as exposed in the Dame Janet Smith Review earlier this year), there is said to be disbelief in some quarters that another agency wasn’t picked instead of Savills.
• Prone to drop off with the help of the nightly tedium that earned Newsnight its “Snoozenight” nickname? You’re not alone. “I watch Newsnight in bed,” Kirsty Wark tells the Radio Times. “Sometimes I fall asleep and watch it on iPlayer the next morning.” No clue, sadly, as to which of her fellow-presenters, Evan Davis or Emily Maitlis, is more likely to act as televisual Nytol.
• As he limbers up for next weekend’s launch of ITV’s Peston on Sunday – at 10am, up against newly promoted John Pienaar on Radio 5 Live rather than Andrew Marr on BBC1, and wooing politicians with an Evan Davis-mimicking pledge of non-aggressive interviewing – Robert Peston has retweeted a first unveiling of its logo with the question “whatcha think?” Faced with an image that combines the host’s initials, what Monkey thinks is that Pesto might be wise to reconsider the way one leg of the “R” juts out (possibly meant to be a tongue or jaw) so that it resembles, er, something male, dangling and limp in a blue condom. And the lack of Arsenal colours is disappointing too.
• The centrepiece of the first tranche in 2012 of the BBC’s Shakespeare adaptations, The Hollow Crown, was Henry IV parts 1 and 2 – a perfect match, with Jeremy Irons as the weary, ageing Henry, for the end of the BBC reign of Mark Thompson, then a few months away from moving on. And as the second tranche beginning next weekend opens with Henry VI, it’s pretty clear that we’re meant to see Thommo’s hapless short-lived successor George Entwistle in the feeble, disastrous titular king. Where, though, will the corporation find a Shakespearean counterpart for Lord Hall, who was anointed after Entwistle’s abdication? Monkey hears that the Roman plays may be next for the telly treatment, but which of them contains a ruler whose friends keep on either deserting him or behaving so embarrassingly they are obliged to quit the court? Perhaps a batch of comedies should be considered instead.
