• Thanks to a recent interview in Total Politics, those called before the culture select committee can now call up an image (if they so wish) of its chairman Jesse Norman, helping them to put into practice the traditional advice to imagine your interviewer naked if you’re facing a grilling. “Of course, in politics, you do from time to time sit in the bath and speculate on what it would be like to be running the shop,” says the Old Etonian, asked if he has prime ministerial ambitions. “But it’s not something I’ve given serious thought to.” From “time to time”, eh? Sounds pretty serious to Monkey, and the kind of agreeable pipe-dreaming that might also serve to relieve the tedium of committee sessions on, say, the technicalities of extending broadband to remote areas.
• Once director of television Danny Cohen leaves the BBC next month, his job will be done on an acting basis by entertainment controller Mark Linsey. That means that, besides Cohen’s overlord role, the top posts in both entertainment and factual will be occupied by stand-ins, since factual boss Emma Swain is already on a year’s secondment to ponder the Beeb’s commissioning system. Throw in the fact that drama controller Polly Hill – appointed in May after another proven hit-maker, Ben Stephenson, left the organisation – still has her L-plates on, and it adds up to a supreme team many of whom are inexperienced in the multi-million-spending jobs they’re doing. All of which might make Tony Hall wish he could hang on to Alan Yentob as long as possible, rather than (as some newspapers are predicting) being forced to bid farewell to his talent-schmoozing consigliere before Christmas.
• As for replacing Cohen, the BBC’s problem is that no one in-house can match his previous experience as a successful and identity-shaping controller of both BBC3 and BBC1: the channel bosses now working under him are first-time controllers who emerged from genre departments. And those outside the BBC, such as Jay Hunt, who would be credible replacements, wouldn’t welcome the high public profile (with the likelihood of press and social media personal attacks), are probably earning more than Cohen’s £320,000 salary in the commercial sector, and might well be further discouraged by the fact that the role of director of television will in future shrink because (with the emergence of BBC Studios) it will lose responsibility for production.
• Monkey has noted that in the past that, when sports stars take the adman’s shilling – Joe Hart flogging shampoo, Liverpool players promoting Nivea, Jenson Button, Jessica Ennis-Hill and Rory McIlroy enthusing about Santander – their fortunes are liable to take a sudden turn for the worse. And the latest curse-causers seem to be the bookies Ladbrokes, who picked five players to illustrate their ad this season for betting on the Premier League: Sergio Aguero (now out for a month, after previously being sidelined by another injury), Jordan Henderson (out for around 10 weeks), Diego Costa and Wayne Rooney (both in dreadful form, with only one PL goal apiece in 2015/16), with Alexis Sanchez so far the uncursed exception who proves the rule. And who, incidentally was the star of BT’s pre-season ad campaign promoting its coverage? Jose Mourinho, manager of the club that was No 1 in 2014/15 and as of last week was 16th.
• There’s little trace of tearfulness in Eddie Mair’s reaction to the imminence of “Pexit”, even though the PM presenter and Robert Peston (after years in which Radio 4 listeners deduced from their on-air exchanges that they were engaged in a feud) had only recently begun jointly presenting a late-night interview show. “Asked to say a few words” on the subject by Radio Times, where he has a weekly column, Mair offers some wry throat-clearing before recalling a moment from the pair’s session at the Radio Times festival. Peston says he is “the Marmite of broadcasters”, to which Mair replies: “But some people like Marmite.”
• In his BBC days, whether Jeremy Clarkson actually grasped telly’s regulatory set-up was something of a mystery, and the fogginess remains after a recent post-rehab column in the Sunday Times’s Driving section. Hymning the joys of the former Top Gear team’s new arrangement with Amazon Prime, Clarkson extolled the brave new world of “narrowcasting”, whose attractions include the fact that “you can say what you want, because out there, in the free world, there’s no Ofsted. No finger-wagging.” A simple mistake, or has his sense of humour got even stranger?
• By way of tribute to the TV reporter and campaigner Sue Lloyd-Roberts, here are some of the roles she played in order to smuggle herself into repressive countries or smuggle film out of them, culled from the obituaries and friends’ memories that appeared last week. A tourist, usually a “housewife from Muswell Hill”. A servant. A gems dealer. An ornithologist. A clothes manufacturer. A dotty academic specialising in Byzantine history. Her driver’s deaf-mute sister. Someone desperate to buy rhino horns in Vietnam. Someone desperate to buy a baby in Romania. Two other distinctive ruses stood out in recollections of the self-styled “Miss Marple” who pioneered foreign video reporting: keeping fake tapes in her knickers rather than real ones, so that those she was trying to evade thought they’d caught her out; and handing her camera to the soldiers or officials who were barring her way, so that they actually filmed her subversive dispatches that began with “Hello Mum, Hello Dad”, and so appeared to be messages a genteel traveller was sending home.
