• Click on the safety advice for staff section of the BBC website, specifically the “myRisks information” page, and who do you find but … Jeremy Clarkson! Mysteriously using an old-fashioned scarlet telephone box, Jezza is pictured apparently either asking the Beeb’s safety experts what his risks might be (if, for example, he has got involved in horseplay some might deem a fracas), or in the very act of shopping himself after his recent reaction to a hotel’s cold spread. As the other BBC idols shown supposedly making phone calls about safety on the same page are David Brent and Chrissie from Holby City – whose personal risk record included being taken hostage by a boyfriend, getting caught up in a triple crossbow attack, and promiscuous unprotected sex – you can’t help wondering if the person in charge of the site is a Richard Littlejohn-esque satirist determined to undermine the cause of health and safety.
• While the Goves and Lord Rothermere go back a long way, so too do the Mail’s owner and the Osbornes. When he testified at the Leveson inquiry in 2012, Rothermere declared a weekend he and Lady R spent with the Osbornes in 2009, and said that he had met the chancellor several times over the course of 2010. It must be assumed that the same chummy pattern has continued, though as Osborne is not required to identify weekend guests at Dorneywood it’s impossible to know if there have been further sleepover parties involving the biggest man in politics and the richest British press baron.
• The Times, meanwhile, was equally ardent post-budget - and without the bizarre, would-be humorous attempt made (with its “epic strut” image) by its stablemate, the Sun, to suggest all the sycophancy might be tongue-in-cheek – calling Osborne “The comeback king” in its splash headline with no question-mark or irony. But inside (despite a group photo depicting the paper’s election comment squad as one big happy family) a lone dissident voice was permitted. “We need more than this dull, simplistic budget”, argued Tim Montgomerie, suggesting one possible reason for his still-unexplained demotion from comment editor to rank-and-file ranter.
• Will Peter “Pinch ‘em” Fincham, the ITV television boss known for coveting BBC shows and talent, commission a mystery drama called Table No 9 in homage to BBC2’s black comedy Room No 9? Monkey only asks because the great puzzle of Tuesday’s Royal Television Society awards bash was what became of the said table – booked by an ITV group including Ant and Dec and entertainment and comedy tsarina Elaine Bedell, it was cancelled at the last minute, leaving banquet guests wondering as they took their places why the table plan skipped straight from 8 to 10. Simian inquiries to ITV failed to elicit an explanation, leaving the cynical to infer that Ant and Dec & co decamped because they heard an advance whisper of the broadcaster’s humiliating Tuesday Night Takeaway: after five RTS awards in 2014, Fincham’s fistful of channels picked up just one gong (two if you include Melvyn Bragg’s lifetime award) out of 27. Doomed, cash-strapped, evening-only BBC3 collected three.
• While argument continues to rage over whether the broadcasters or David Cameron and his hapless spinner Craig Oliver “blinked first” over election debates, it’s easier to say which journalists are left with reddest faces now that some debates look set to happen. It gives Monkey no pleasure to report that the winners are among Fleet Street’s most senior political commentators and share a reputation for reliability and shrewdness: the biggest buffoons were the Independent on Sunday’s John Rentoul (“I agree with Dave - there’ll be no TV debates”) and the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley (“Chances of an election debate? Choose between zilch and nada”), both on the weekend of 10-11 January when other pundits were sensibly being a little warier of making such definite forecasts.
• Monkey waits with trepidation to hear what Radio 1 will do in response to the demand in last week’s BBC Trust’s report on the Beeb’s radio services that it must find “more regular opportunities for enriching daytime speech”. Essayettes on current affairs by the likes of Robert Peston or Simon Schama could soon be popping up between pop tracks instead of DJ gush, as the station hurries to meet this retro-Birtist requirement for more differentiation from commercial radio; but a better solution is near at hand in the form of Friday’s appointment to the BBC Trust of former Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer. Look out for beefed-up speech Damazer-style such as a 26-part history of the Americas by a Cambridge prof, or the complete works of Dostoevsky across every week of 2016. Possibly in Russian (with subtitles on the website) to be even more enriching, unless Fearne Cotton is fiercely opposed.
At the launch of former TV producer and Channel 4 and Sky exec Jacquie Lawrence’s book Different for Girls - held at the offices of Yahoo executive Dawn Airey, whom Lawrence married last year - it emerged that the novel originally began life as a script for Channel 4. Lawrence revealed it was so long ago that Ben Stephenson, now BBC drama supremo, was a junior on it. However The L Word came along and “blew my drama out of the window”. She shelved it for a while, then decided to turn it into a novel centring on a mixture of heterosexual and same-sex couples in affluent west London. First Ladies author and Sky News presenter Kay Burley, who attended the launch, “gave feedback to her on it”. Apparently there has been interest from a well-known US actor and producer, “so you may see it on TV screens after all”.
• Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance has emerged as the catalyst for former Fleet Street journalist Mark Jagasia’s first play Clarion - a black comedy about “free speech, nationalism and the state of the British media in 2015” and starring Doctor Who star Clare Higgins. It is set in “the office of Britain’s worst newspaper, the Daily Clarion” but former Daily Express hack Jagasia says it came about after he met Rylance at an aftershow party at The Globe around 13 years ago. The actor told him to defect, leave tabloid journalism and do something sensible like work in theatre. He didn’t take the advice for a decade but when he did and wrote Clarion he was struggling to find an agent and a home for his play so he sent it to Rylance. Jagasia says: “I was pretty staggered to get a text from him a couple of months later - he’d actually read it, loved it and went out of his way to open some significant doors for the play. He is definitely a very nice bloke – not many actors of his calibre would bother to read unsolicited manuscript and then actually do something about it.” Reviewers are likely to be able to identify the model for “egomaniacal editor” Morris Honeyspoon when the play opens in London next month, but will it be so easy to see who inspired Higgins’s character, “washed-up” senior foreign correspondent Verity Stokes?
• In what it calls “a round-up of priceless insights”, Press Gazette shares some of the tips given by leading editors to the press marketing body Newsbrands. Some are indeed priceless, such as the Telegraph’s editor-in-chief Jason Seiken (flattered by being treated as if that was still more than a paper title) choosing “any headline from BuzzFeed” as his favourite 2014 headline - on the negative basis that “they remind us of what the world would be like without quality newspapers”, a choice clearly intended to counter the idea that people he recruited introduced BuzzFeedery to the Torygraph. And then there’s No 2 in Paul Dacre’s “qualities of a good journalist”: “an ability NEVER to forget that the rich and powerful only want to befriend you for two reasons: to get stuff into your paper or, far more likely, to keep stuff out.” This laudable standing up to famous fatcats and the business-political elite has its limits, of course: Lord Rothermere is clearly exempt, for instance, and so currently is George Osborne, while hostility to David Cameron is reportedly why Simon Heffer lost his Saturday column in the Mail. Plus there’s all the celebs at once teased and feted by Mail Online: aren’t most of them “rich and powerful”?
• Rarely does the BBC simply admit it’s bang to rights over an on-screen blunder, but that was the case - or at least a production company was obliged to cough up to its mistake - with BBC2’s Nelson In His Own Words. “I was shocked to see,” writes a Radio Times reader, “that Nelson’s missing arm had changed from the correct right side to the left!” Flipping the shot resulted in a “schoolboy error”, conceded an unnamed spokesman from Oxford Scientific Films.
