• If it doesn’t fancy Media Guardian’s expert suggestions on refashioning Top Gear, the BBC has an easy alternative: devote an entire episode of James May’s Man Lab to the project. While May’s BBC2 series tends to be concerned with building things or learning manly skills, it has included challenges comparable to that now facing the channel’s controller Kim Shillinglaw, such as forming musicians into a team or turning someone into a TV presenter (albeit covering racehorses, not cars). There would be one drawback, however – on past form, Top Gear’s Captain Slow is highly likely to announce that his thirsty Big Wine Adventure buddy Oz Clarke is the obvious replacement for Jeremy Clarkson.
• After recently being humiliatingly marginalised by the Daily Mail – only six pieces published in 2015, and all but one of those were about the past – Simon Heffer is said to have quit, with the Sunday Telegraph talked of as his possible next berth. If he does end up there, it’ll be his third switch from the Mail group to the Telegraph titles following previous defections in 1994 and 2005, overtaking his two moves in 1995 and 2010 in the opposite direction – could even the most restless of itinerant football galacticos match that?
• Monkey learnt many things at a Broadcasting Press Guild breakfast last week with Martin Sorrell (or rather alongside him, as he didn’t stop talking long enough to eat his scrambled eggs) but chief among them was that you interrupt the adland Napoleon at your peril. As Sorrell swept through changes in society and advertising in past decades in a fluent opening monologue, BPG chairman Gideon Spanier (formerly of the Evening Standard, now at the Times) gutsily halted him mid-flow and asked him to accelerate towards 2015. Sorrell did so, but alluded to Spanier’s impertinence more than once – and with no hint of being willing to forgive it – when answering questions. Perhaps it was the same mistake the legendary film producer Harvey Weinstein made, explaining why his business partnership with Sorrell (ruefully described by the latter at the BPG event as “not well-thought-out”) proved short-lived?
• On the morning following Top Gear decision day, the Times easily won the battle of the front pages with a pink flannel panel at the top strikingly combining a photo of the sacked star looking stroppy (“Clarkson unleashed”) with a bigger puff for “the pensions revolution” (“Your 20-page guide to retirement savings”) and a photo of an early-retirer with a blonde on a sun-kissed beach. Smart work, and yet Monkey can’t help wondering whether what looked like the wittiest of sneers at Clarkson’s expense was in fact a ghastly, insensitive mistake: away from TV he is after all one of the biggest selling points (as car reviewer and columnist) of the Sunday Times, the sister-paper Times editor John Witherow edited for 19 years before moving across in 2013.
• Witherow, incidentally, deserves simian congratulations for a remarkable hat trick: his beloved photos of skimpily-clad performers (preferably ballerinas, but dancing men and suitably posed female swimmers and gymnasts also qualify) appeared in the Times last week on three consecutive days, including a pair of bare-chested male hoofers on page 25 on post-Clarkson-sacking day. Let’s hope it wasn’t picking inside pics that, if the seemingly snarky Thursday flannel panel was indeed a mistake, distracted the normally meticulous editor from how his front page was looking.
• When the Heff reinvents himself yet again in his new columnar slot, giving his official CV a spring clean might be advisable, with particular attention to the notion of “recreation” and his order of priorities. Heffer currently lists as his premier recreations in Debretts “cricket, music, ecclesiology, bibliophily”, with “wife and children” also oddly included but bringing up the rear.
• Interviewed in Broadcast, Channel 5’s colourful director of programmes Ben Frow looks forward eagerly to a much-needed autumn rebranding of the channel; but he seems badly in need of such a makeover himself, given that the otherwise respectful piece describes him as “part Bond baddie Blofeld in appearance and part turtleneck-wearing Warhol figure”. Happily, the back of Broadcast reveals that a look rethink is taking place, in the form of a revival of his penchant for wearing skirts (as witnessed by Monkey in his previous stint at 5): a photo of a Neighbours anniversary party shows the bald, white-bearded Frow grinning in a dark kilt or skirt and a sporran. The only problem is that this makes him look like a Hebridean character in the Ealing comedy Whisky Galore, which may not fit the revamped channel identity his Viacom bosses have in mind.
• Monkey enjoyed Janet Street-Porter’s op-ed rant in Friday’s Mail, identifying Alan Yentob (on the basis of his weary Newsnight interview about Top Gear) as epitomising all the malaises and flaws of “the metropolitan elite”, but was a little puzzled as to how this smug “luvvie clique” was being defined. Street-Porter, you see, grew up in London as her accent reflects, became a print and radio journalist in London in the 60s, joined London Weekend Television as a presenter in the 70s, and pioneered yoof TV in London (including on Yentob’s BBC2) as a producer and editor in the 80s; since then she has edited the capital-based Independent on Sunday, and now turns up at a London studio as one of ITV’s Loose Women. She has spent almost 50 years living and working in London, rising to the top of at least three professions; so it’s not very clear whether it’s the elite or the metropolis she somehow feels she isn’t part of.
• Campaign magazine reports that the proud name Walker Media is to vanish after 18 years, as the leading media agency (acquired by Publicis in 2013) is transformed into, er, Blue 449, a moniker the trade mag can’t helping sniffing at as “nebulous”. Yet Monkey is convinced that, while the name might sound like the kind of thing the idiot marketeers in Twenty Twelve and W1A come up with, clients across the world will eventually get the message: they’ll see through the nonsense about it being based on a wavelength number, recognise the reference to 449BC (when Pericles was reconstructing Athens as vigorously as Boris Johnson is remaking London’s skyline), and understand that Walker is being rebuilt as a porn-centred network. It’s almost as brilliant a choice as Ipso.
