✒We can all feel a collective swell of "the Brits are coming" pride over the UK acting talent cast as little folk in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. But spare a thought for Brit drama producers, who could be making a few long distance calls to New Zealand during the back-to-back filming of the two Hobbit movies over the next 18 months to sort out potential scheduling issues for Martin Freeman (Sherlock), Richard Armitage (Strike Back), James Nesbitt (Monroe) and Aidan Turner (Being Human). Freeman will be back in the summer for Sherlock, while Armitage is to join the series two shoot of Strike Back – a Sky/HBO co-pro. Nesbitt and Turner may be required for series two of ITV's yet to air Monroe and the fourth run of Being Human, respectively. Tricksy hobbits, indeed.
✒Could this be the underlying reason for Eddie Mair's self-acknowledged "feud" with Robert Peston? PR Week reports that Nils Blythe, formerly the business reporter on Mair's Radio 4 programme PM, is joining the long list of BBC hacks who've turned spinners by becoming interim head of communications at the Bank of England – Mervyn's minder, in other words. Mair and Blythe had a rapport that developed into variations on the old Upstairs Downstairs theme music being played before daily markets updates. But Eddie's playmate has recently been puzzlingly absent, and now we know why; grumpiness about having to put up with Pesto's weird whirrings instead would explain why the normally urbane Mair has tangled more than once with him when the business editor has graced the tea-time show. Last week's interview with Peston's rival Stephanie Flanders, in contrast, went tellingly smoothly.
✒Most attacks on Arianna Huffington after her AOL deal were predictable, but last week the US TV satirist Stephen Colbert found a fresher angle – after noting that the Huffington Post is famous for grabbing and reworking "things other people produce and put on the internet", including clips from his show ("where's my money, Arianna?") – by mimicking its methods. HuffPo can now be found "repurposed" at Colbert's mocking site, The Colbuffington Re-Post, which he revealed is "for sale – I will take $316m".
✒Aaron Sorkin must already have been alerted to the opportunity for a perfect screenplay follow-up to The Social Network, with a hero far closer to his usual talkative protagonists than Mark Zuckerberg. Monkey hears Peter Bazalgette is involved in a new social networking site, AskPeopleYouKnow.com, and – assuming the former Endemol boss's venture eventually overthrows Facebook and Twitter – the story of his rise from food programmes, via Big Brother, to a global empire cries out to be made. Everyone will have their own favourite casting for Baz: The Movie, but Hugh Bonneville looks like a front-runner for the title role, with Emma Thompson tipped to play Davina McCall and Jason Statham as Mark Thompson.
✒Like an England batsman recklessly throwing his wicket away when in sight of a century, Indy editor Simon Kelner announced on Friday he is "taking a break" from the daily Letter from the Editor in his 20p paper i with only 82 columns on the scoreboard. This brings to a temporary end one of the strangest ventures in journalism, in which Kelner has produced 25,000 words without missing a day while editing two papers and overseeing a third. In the previous day's effort, he explained that he didn't tweet because it didn't seem the best use of an editor's time – perhaps he suddenly noticed that this might also apply to columnising?
✒Swanky Condé Nast, the magazine empire behind Vogue, Vanity Fair and Tatler, is "launching a London newsagent" (Campaign reports) on the ground floor of its HQ which opens for business this morning, conjuring an image of UK viceroy Nicholas Coleridge presiding over an unlikely convergence of the worlds of The Devil Wears Prada and Radio 4's corner shop comedy Fags, Mags and Bags. The aim is to only sell British and international editions of the publisher's glossies. But it's not hard to imagine punters drifting there, past the sloaney fashion assistants in the lobby, and treating it like any other newsagent. And if the demand is there, can cries for trashier mags, and even sweets, phone cards, booze miniatures, lottery tickets etc, be resisted, if profit's the goal?
✒A hundred hopefuls will have the chance to meet ad agency giants such as Steve Henry and Stephen Woodford next Tuesday at a Nabs event (tickets from nabs.org) called Speed Mentoring, with a 10-minute limit to each encounter. Particular interest will centre on the tips on offer from Beta chief executive Garry Lace, a Yorkshire-born adland legend who confirmed last year that a long sabbatical had not destroyed his talent for controversy with his response to a seemingly dull brief to promote billboard advertising – Lace's ads reading "Career Women Make Bad Mothers" were stripped from the sides of buses after an outcry. There's no doubt, though, about his ability to reveal how to become Mumsnet's most hated man for a week.
✒Ofcom has unveiled the sign that will appear at the start of programmes to signal the presence of product placement, plumping imaginatively for a simple letter P. There may be concern among programme-makers, however, that some viewers will take this as a sensibly timed instruction, disappear, flush, return to the living room, and – already feeling lost, having missed the opening sequence designed to hook them – switch over to something else.
