• What can explain last week’s deluge of media appearances by the UK’s youngest press baron, Independent and Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev? In the space of a few days he scored TV slots on Wednesday’s The One Show and (wearing the same outfit, all-black with a shiny tie, as if he’d slept in it) Thursday’s Question Time, and also popped up on the Today programme, Chris Evans’s Radio 2 show and Radio 4’s arts plugfest Loose Ends. He hasn’t got a Christmas album out yet in appearances is even outscoring Adele – what could have got telly and radio bookers so excited?
• Easily the strangest gig of the lot, The One Show saw Lebedev (behind a podium under huge letters asking “would Evgeny lie to you?”) saying three things about himself of which only two were true – that Elton John once shaved off his eyebrows, that he owns a wolf called Boris, that he will be pressing the button to launch a space flight. Regular Monkey readers will spot the two truths, but the tycoon’s fellow guests (including Rob Brydon and Jeremy Vine) got it wrong because they were fooled by his evasive answers on where he kept the wolf, a coyness presumably attributable to his reluctance to admit on air that the peculiar pet is housed on the estate of his eight-bedroom medieval castle in Italy.
• When making a rare appearance (perhaps even his debut) at ITV’s glitzy showcase for next year’s programming at London’s Palladium on Thursday, Simon Cowell ended an on-stage chat by asking if he might say a word to the 2,000-plus ad execs in attendance, and effusively thanked them for their support and stuffing The X Factor full of commercials. Cynics in the audience were quick to point out after this unusual display of humility and gratitude that, once transferred from the BBC, The Voice will suddenly be transformed into a hot property in direct competition for ads with his own comparatively ageing music show. But which one will advertisers choose to vote out of their media schedule?
• When did Murdoch journalists feel it was OK to stop acknowledging their Murdoch connection? Monkey only asks after seeing such a reference to the parent company (usually run in brackets in reports containing references to the Times, Sunday Times, Sun or Sky) omitted from two Sky-related articles on consecutive days in the Times business pages, both by technology and communications editor Nic Fildes: and as the first was virtually a press release about the company’s unveiling of Q technology (“Sky turns to Q for new box of tricks”), while the second positively crowed about Sky’s success in an Ofcom ruling on sports channel rates (“Sky hits back of the net with victory over rivals’ pricing”), you could be forgiven for seeing the traditional declaration of interest as the minimum gesture needed to maintain a vestige of journalistic respectability. As if to eliminate any last hint of non-partisan reporting, the second piece was illustrated with an image of a football with the logo of BT Sport, to which Sky and Ofcom had administered a kicking. But was reportorial credibility meanwhile getting the boot too?
• Though a parliamentary committee’s forthcoming report on Kids Company is unlikely to be flattering to him, Alan Yentob doesn’t seem to be exactly going out of his way to woo widespread support, whether within the BBC or amongst viewers. Almost defiantly, his current series of Imagine on Charlotte Moore’s BBC1 has so far consisted entirely of tributes to white men in their 60s and 70s (apart from one documentary, on staging Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, about a middle-aged white man’s book): Howard Jacobson, Antony Gormley, Michael White, Wilko Johnson and David Chipperfield, plus David Gilmour (recently profiled on BBC2 by Yentob) have made up Al’s Company in autumn 2015. Whether anyone on the production team timidly proposed other options - a female novelist or playwright? A black or Asian artist? Someone under 50, or even 40 if we’re being radical? - to the BBC’s creative director has yet to be revealed.
