• Ker-ching! It’s pay increase time at the BBC again. Not that you’d know it as the Beeb only publishes what the top executives now get, not what their salary was before. Fortunately, Monkey has the previous year’s list. So it seems that 13 of the top executives shared pay increases of almost £200,000 last year. Big winners were head of sport Barbara Slater (up £19,700 although that is partly because she no longer gets BBC pension contributions), the director of the finance centre of excellence Leighton Davies (up £18,860 to £170,000) and director of communications John Shield (up £14,400 to £158,400). And the new HR director for news, Dale Haddon, is being paid £32,000 more than the person he replaced, Karl Burnett. Although, the BBC says his role does include extra responsibilities. All joyful reading, no doubt, for staff awaiting the results of their current pay claim. The BBC says: “We’ve cut the number of senior managers but of course some people’s pay has increased as they’ve either had the same 2.5% increase every employee had last year or they’ve taken on a bigger role or responsibilities.”
• Move over Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall: there’s another media power marriage coming down the aisle of news. Yes, former Daily Mirror editor Richard Wallace and ex-Sunday Mirror editor Tina Weaver are tying the knot in June. Wallace is now an executive producer on America’s Got Talent where Simon Cowell has returned as a judge, but the wedding is here in the UK at a country house in Oxford. The discreet event will include a smattering of the usual media suspects, including Piers Morgan. But with two editors getting hitched, Monkey wants to know who was editor-in-chief of the invitations.
• Eighteen months since BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore announced that the Generation Game was returning with Miranda Hart and a year since the pilot was made, Monkey hears the return of the show is still “on hold”. In March the newly promoted Moore (she is now controller of TV channels and iPlayer) is giving a speech which the Beeb says will be “the first opportunity to hear about Charlotte’s vision in the new role”. Will she use the opportunity to roll out a Generation Game update on the conveyor belt of news? If she opens her speech to Roachford’s Cuddly Toy then it’s a dead cert.
• Talking of Moore, when she was given her new job last month, director general Tony Hall said the move would “make the identities of BBC1 and BBC2 clearer”. Monkey hopes so. Currently BBC1 is airing insurance fraud series Claimed and Shamed every day at 11.45am on BBC1 and repeating it the following day at 7.45am on BBC2. That means that it is being broadcast on both channels every day. Monkey knows that more repeats are inevitable due to cost-cutting, but it’s going to end up being Named and Shamed in the Daily Mail if it carries on like this.
• Monkey almost choked on a banana earlier in the week when a trail appeared on BBC1 telling viewers that the repeat of EastEnders is now on entertainment channel W, along with a picture of the channel’s logo. The repeat of the BBC1 soap used to be on BBC3, but now that’s gone online-only the show has been snapped up by W’s owner UKTV, the commercial network owned by the BBC and US company Scripps. OK, W’s parent is partly-owned by the Beeb, but Monkey cannot remember a time when there has been an on-air programme promotional trail on BBC1 for a commercial channel. Answers as to how much the equivalent advertising airtime would cost to Monkey Towers please.
• This article was amended on 28 February 2016 to correct Dale Haddon’s job title
