• In the battle between creative supremo Alan Yentob, the veteran incumbent, and television supremo Danny Cohen to be the BBC’s top celebrity schmoozer, Cohen pulled off a big coup last week with his tweet to will.iam: “@iamwill Hey Will please look after @noreenahertz at Davos. X” (Hertz is Mrs Cohen and an academic celebrity in her own right, the musician is of course a judge on Cohen-commissioned The Voice). A dual selfie duly came back showing chum and spouse at a party together, confirming that Yentob urgently needs to get his act together – party chats and phone calls are all very well, but if Al’s Pals are going to see off Dan’s Clan their leader will have to start using Twitter so those famous names are out there for everyone to read.
• After recent setbacks for marketing’s Napoleon, Sir Martin Sorrell - Media Week points out that he has suffered the “seismic” loss of two “multimillion-pound-spending clients in quick succession”, the government’s media-buying operation and newly combined Dixons Carphone – the world-bestriding WPP chairman could be forgiven for acting a little strangely. And so it proved at Davos, judging by a spiky report on the party he threw there in the normally boss-friendly FT. Tony Blair and George Osborne attended, but an unnamed fellow-guest sniffily characterised it as “Outdoors, ice sculptures and a lot of dodgy women. Not quite Russian oligarch but getting there. Sir Martin was trying to get people into a fake igloo to drink shots.”
• Monkey’s number of the week: minus 14, the temperature announced by Chris Packham in the first moments of BBC2’s Winterwatch; making the Mar Lodge Estate in the Cairngorms, the four-day nature series’ base, the coldest place in Britain (and western Europe) that day. Whether Packham and co are happy about BBC2 controller Kim Shillinglaw sadistically sending them to Aberdeenshire in January - there are, after all, alternative places with milder climates - was left unclear.
• In an overhaul of the BBC’s factual division, Broadcast reports, four senior commissioners “will have their roles closed” – Aaqil Ahmed (religion), Martin Davidson (history and business), Clive Edwards (current affairs) and Sam Bickley (BBC3 factual) – but may apply for three new, umbrella-like jobs such as head of science, business, history and religion. Disappointingly, however, there are no signs of the process being televised, naturally using BBC factual formats, in a modish spirit of transparency; though the opportunity is clearly there for, say, a quickie version of The Apprentice(each episode ends with factual empress Emma Swain saying “you’re fired!”), or for Gareth Malone to form those booted out into a choir to rebuild their morale. But another option would be to send in Alex Polizzi, aka BBC2’s The Fixer, to try to sort out a dysfunctional department that has been regularly beaten recently by rival outfits (Channel 4 in particular) when prizes have been handed out.
• Monkey’s journalism job of the week: “Charly Lester has joined Time Out as Global Head of Dating” (announcement by the London listings weekly)
• It is with puzzlement mixed with sorrow that Monkey notes that Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s head of drama commissioning for the past six and a half years (and with 10 years’ experience before that in telly fiction), still hasn’t grasped the distinction between an original screenplay and an adaptation. Trailers last week for Wolf Hall and Call The Midwife began with Stephenson’s long-running “Original British Drama” slogan, as usual intoned by an actor as well as shown in giant letters on screen, in blithe disregard for the fact that they are adapted from Hilary Mantel’s novels and Jennifer Worth’s memoirs respectively. What’s next for deluded Ben? Lots more “original” fare like The Casual Vacancy, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Cider with Rosie.
• Rugby union correspondents are traditionally red of face, due to the sport’s winter-centred season and the amount of obligatory drinking, but some will begin the Six Nations championship more ruddy than usual: headlines of stories by Steve James (Sunday Telegraph), Stephen Jones (Sunday Times) and Sam Peters (Mail on Sunday) all announced with complete confidence that fly-half Danny Cipriani would be “snubbed” by England coach Stuart Lancaster, only for the Sunday pundits to find out a few days later last week that Cipriani was in the squad - “I know, I know”, acknowledged James on Twitter, the only one to be publicly contrite. Potentially next in line for the humble pie option in the Fleet Street canteen are political columnists such as the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley (the chances are “between zilch and nada”) and the Independent’s John Rentoul (they “aren’t going to happen”) who declared equally adamantly that there will be no TV election debates.
• Was Emma Duncan, deputy editor of the Economist, too publicity-hungry by the neoliberal bible’s standards to be allowed to edit a weekly that bans its journalists from using bylines? A Times columnist and regular broadcaster, Duncan was most outside observers’ favourite by virtue of her position at the magazine and high profile; but the latter might help to explain why she was leapfrogged and beaten to the top job by business affairs editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, who is barely known at all outside the financial world but does very well on its talking-shop circuit: even in her previous post her agency charged a stonking speaking fee of £10,000-25,000 a pop, cruelly offering the Sunday Times’s amiable economics editor David Smith (C grade to her A grade) as a cheap alternative.
• During the ITV-screened National Television awards, Danny Cohen showed no sign of being alarmed or aggrieved as he tweeted congratulations to EastEnders for its three awards, but perhaps he should have done as the overall score was ITV nine, BBC five and Channel 4 two; a much weaker performance by the Beeb than last year, when ITV, on seven, was only one ahead of a less soap-reliant rival that also picked up prizes for Sherlock, Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing. This time even the dance show incomprehensibly lost, making Claudia Winkleman mouth “what!?” when The X Factor was announced as the winner. Perhaps the great British public didn’t want to humiliate Dermot O’Leary, who also hosts the karaoke contest, yet again after back-to-back NTA victories in 2013 and 2014 for Strictly?
