• Condé Nast UK managing director Nicholas Coleridge features in the forthcoming BBC series Posh People: Inside Tatler. As well as providing soundbites, he makes a decisive intervention that somewhat embarrassingly shows up Tatler editor Kate Reardon when she and her top team sashay in so he can pass his eye over an issue with the Duchess of Cambridge on the cover. That coverline “Are you a slut?”, he wonders; wouldn’t it be best to move it much lower, so that it’s not next to the duchess’s eyeline? Out they troop, humiliated but with their bacon saved.
• Insensitive timing from Johnston Press chief executive Ashley Highfield on the day that a merger of Johnston’s Scotsman titles and Edinburgh Evening News was announced with the loss of up to 45 jobs. Not the best moment, then, for Highfield (whose Twitter feed says home is “Kensington”, ie 400 miles from Edinburgh) to tweet a link to an amusing listicle of “13 films that perfectly portray what it’s like to work in a soul-destroying job”.
• No stranger to embarrassing interviews, the Today programme’s Garry Richardson sensed more potential peril as he interviewed John Kirwan, coach of rugby’s Barbarians, about how well how he communicates with his younger players. “There are funny handshakes,” Kirwan replied, and also by way of greeting “you get the odd ‘up G!’. Do you know what that means?” “I don’t, this is Radio 4,” murmured Richardson, clearly suspecting it could be sleazy or offensive and regretting raising the topic. In fact it’s short for “what’s up, gangster?”, Monkey is told, and any day now younger Today toilers will be hailing John Humphrys that way. They already greet Tony Hall with “up DG!”, of course.
• To the Specsavers Crime and Thriller awards, televised on ITV3, where the worlds of screen crime and book crime come somewhat awkwardly together. But at least they could agree on the awfulness of host Bradley Walsh (who derives his flimsy credentials for the job from appearing in Law and Order: UK, but has now left the ITV show). Link after link was fluffed, interview after interview went badly, but what got an otherwise docile audience jeering was his habit of greeting any women who joined him on stage – usually actors presenting awards or receiving them – as “girls”. When three joined him at once, including the feminist authors Val McDermid and Kate Mosse, hopes were high that Walsh would at last receive his comeuppance, perhaps by receiving a sock in the chops on “as live” TV. In the event they confined themselves to seething, but crime fans may find the grotesquely mutilated corpse of a sexist cockney actor turning up in the first chapters of a whodunit.
• In the first showdown between Line of Duty 2 and Happy Valley at the Crime and Thriller awards, due to be repeated at the Baftas, Sally Wainwright’s drama won best series and supporting actor (James Norton) but in the evening’s final award Keeley Hawes beat Sarah Lancashire to best actress. Few who were there will forget Hawes’s poignant speech, in which she made a few nods to Jed Mercurio and other colleagues but primarily gave thanks that “at last I can have a pee!”. Bafta organisers may like to ensure their best actress award is given early in proceedings to avoid any risk of repetition.
• While Bradley Walsh’s blushes were largely spared by retakes, there was no such luck on Wednesday for Radio 1’s Alice Levine in coverage of the Mercury prize bizarrely shared between Channel 4 (just five minutes for the announcement, including Nick Grimshaw saying the same things twice) and not E4 but More4 (which otherwise shows no interest in music). Sounding like her Lewis Carroll namesake as she quizzed laconic victorious rappers Young Fathers, Levine made little headway with such posers as “how does it feel?” (“it’s positive”), “did you think you’d win?” (inaudible mumbles) and “how will you spend it? (“we’ve not talked about that”). “I imagine it’s an out of body experience … ”, she eventually ventured desperately, perhaps thinking more of her own predicament than what they were going through. Some tweeters, noting that More4’s live feed cut off during the car crash encounter, cruelly speculated that it might not be an accident.
• Stardom beckons for Matthew Bell, the dapper Independent on Sunday columnist who decamped to Tatler just in time to appear in the forthcoming BBC series Posh People: Inside Tatler - in the publicity photo, he is the sole male surrounded by around 30 women. Yet while Bell is prominent and appears to be enjoying himself in the opening programme, the cunning film-makers (and possibly his colleagues) might be seen as setting him up for a fall. When he’s sent to Oxford to investigate the Bullingdon Club, we learn that “Matthew has not persuaded any members to talk”; and a second assignment to crash summer social occasions ends in double failure: crashing a royal garden party turns out to be a crime akin to treason, and he is swiftly spotted as a phoney when trying to gain entry to another event as a waiter. The obscurity of scribbling columns for the Sindy may come to seem preferable.
• Danny Cohen, the BBC’s director of television, has recently become more active on Twitter, but not all are convinced that @DannyCohen is authentic, not least because in his BBC3 days he was the victim of a cruel spoof blog, Secret Blog of a TV Controller. Gushy @DannyCohen tweets like “Excited to be Following the wonderful Nigella Lawson” have a suspiciously parodic ring, and a heartfelt thought on Tuesday (“People can be really odd on Twitter. They follow [people] but then just send them immensely rude or aggressive messages. Why bother?”) sounded more like an unworldly Twitter-virgin teenager than an on-the-ball top media executive. The clincher, though, is the declaration under his photo that he will tweet about “telly, books, football”. The real Cohen, as we know from his Who’s Who entry, is also obsessed with “meditation, contemporary art, pickle, giraffes”.
