• Morale has sunk even lower at the Daily Express, after the contortions necessary to ensure owner Richard Desmond got his heart’s desire at the glitzy charity bash he hosted last week at the Grosvenor House hotel – a copy of the following day’s paper presented to guests as they left, with a report on the event they had just attended featuring photos of the likes of David Cameron, Simon Cowell and of course Desmond himself (just one in print, surprisingly, but there were three in the online version). To achieve this, staff were told the Express would be “locked” early, so reporters, subs, the picture desk and the printers had to go into overdrive to get everything done by 6pm – all for the sake of 200 copies, one toiler points out, and gratifying the boss’s vanity.
• The Rochester and Strood byelection and recent growls by Rupert Murdoch put in question how the Sun will approach next year’s general election, given the testimony from former editors that he keeps a personal grip on the tabloid’s political line. “In UK only Salmond and Farage connecting with people,” ran one tweet from the obdurately anti-EU tycoon earlier this month. “Big Tory asset Marxist Miliband trusted even less than opportunist Cameron.” Which might suggest that, under his guidance, the paper could handle Cameron v Farage in May just as the Scottish Sun handled union v independence/Salmond in September: play hard to get in the run-up to the poll, then finally produce a front page both sides will see as a cop-out – no endorsement, but a lot of bluster about trusting in our wonderful readers’ decision-making.
• There’s still no sign of mercy towards Michael Buerk at Radio 4, despite official claims that he provided “plenty of notice” of his antipodean cash-in (notice seemingly not relayed to Radio Times, which still lists him as presenting this Wednesday’s edition of The Moral Maze, almost a fortnight after he decamped). PM host Eddie Mair is particularly unforgiving: on top of his programme’s daily “Michael Buerk I’m A Celebrity … Highlight of the Day” slot, his Twitter feed is now obsessively dominated by images of Buerk in jungle costume (ie clips of the daily highlight) and last Wednesday he provided a mocking fake trail for The Moral Maze – a lovingly crafted montage of Buerk’s harrumphings on the show about celebrities, implying hypocrisy – before the real one by stand-in David Aaronovitch. All very promising for trail-time when the former newsreader comes back.
• The BBC’s director general has skipped from one plonk-fuelled launch party to another in recent weeks, mysteriously modifying his monicker on the invitations depending on the nature of the bash – it was plain old Tony Hall for David Attenborough’s Life Story, but mighty, ermine-clad Lord Hall of Birkenhead who invited guests to last week’s drama launch (which highlighted Wolf Hall, so he may have seen it as fitting for an event with so many titled Tudors on screen). But is his presence really a boon for shows? Life Story, with a latest rating of 3.15 million (a 15% share) on BBC1, has hardly shone, not helped by BBC2 competition from Peaky Blinders and then The Fall. And it will not have been forgotten that the first offering whose launch he graced as DG, The White Queen, was axed after a single series.
• Searchers for Robert Peston’s weighty thoughts on Twitter (at @peston) may now find themselves looking at @robpestonhair (“keeping the brain of the BBC’s economics editor warm, changing styles like he changes his coat”) by mistake – a site that, confusingly, largely consists of retweets of genuine Pesto. Meanwhile, BBC Breakfast reporter Steph McGovern (@stephbreakfast) also has her own image-focused Twitter tribute feed, @StephMcEyebrows, setting up a Pirandello-esque postmodernist moment last week when the real Robert Peston retweeted a suggestion forwarded by the real Steph McGovern about their respective parody accounts: “Perhaps the eyebrows of Steph McGovern @StephMcEyebrows can interview Robert Peston’s hair @robpestonhair?”
• The spat between Alex Thomson and the Rory Peck Trust continues with the Channel 4 News reporter insisting that it was not his decision to stand down from this week’s awards. Indeed, so convinced was he that a period of enforced quarantine was not needed that he flew straight from filing harrowing reports from Freetown to a conference in Luxembourg. Where media types gathered to praise freelance journalists who often take huge risks to tell difficult stories around the world fear to tread, it seems organisers of a conference on global food supply do not. Thomson chaired the conference and flew home for a week’s annual leave. “I did not pull out of presenting the Rory Peck Awards – they dropped me,” he tweeted. Meanwhile, he was sarcastically impressed by one story on the awards ceremony pull-out, which mentioned his damning reports on Rangers FC in its second par, as if they were relevant: “Magnificent work guys: Scottish Sun finally nails the link between Rangers and Ebola.”
• Something has gone awry in Newsnight’s post-Paxo strategy of targeting young professionals of both sexes, if the YouGov profiles made available last week can be believed. YouGov’s sampling suggests the typical viewer (who mostly sounds distinctly like Paxman) is 60-plus, male, ABC1, works in government or civil service and lives in the south-east or Yorkshire. Shops at M&S, drives a Volvo, buys tweedy clothes from House of Fraser, Gieves & Hawkes and Austin Reed; favourite things include beef wellington, old films like Oh What a Lovely War! and a number of bands all from before 1990, while his favourite celebrities are a very senior bunch of broadcasters, with no sign of Evan, Emily, Laura or other recent recruits – Kirsty Wark, Peter Snow, Andrew Neil, John Simpson and the late Robin Day. Weirdest of all are this typical viewer’s preferred sports: Formula 1, with “acrobatic gymnastics” as second choice.
• Though Posh People, BBC2’s series about Tatler magazine, has been dismissed in advance by Rachel Johnson as “basically a three-hour promotional puff for Condé Nast”, it’s apparently encouraged the channel to commission an entire season devoted to the super-rich; Broadcast sets out a slate including commissions from Plum Pictures, Fremantle Media, Fresh One and True Vision TV. But there’s no mention, disappointingly, of the television industry’s own super-rich. Why isn’t Fresh One, primarily Jamie Oliver’s production company, looking at the wealth of its own main man (estimated at £240m, including Jools’s earnings, in the 2014 Sunday Times Rich List)? Or Fremantle Media investigating the fatcat “gnomes of Gutersloh” behind Bertelsmann, which owns Fremantle-owner RTL? Or Fremantle’s global chief executive Cecile Frot-Coutaz? Any of them would be better telly than the over-familiar stuff - documentaries about Necker Island, expat oligarchs and luxury cars - lined up so far.
