• Is the strain starting to show at the Sun, following the recent shakeup of its political team that saw the signing of Harry Cole from Guido Fawkes as Westminster correspondent? Possibly feeling threatened by Cole’s record as a story-getter, political editor Tom Newton Dunn last week madly trumpeted as an “exclusive” (in print, online and on Twitter) his report that “the BBC blew £47,000 hiring meeting rooms near its new HQ last year” – a yarn uncannily similar to a Mail on Sunday report in April that “BBC forks out £50,000 on meeting rooms across the street from its brand new HQ”. The red-top may have been aware that the exclusive claim was risibly bogus, as it humiliatingly relegated its pol ed’s effort to a corner of page 28.
• Back at Cole’s journalistic alma mater, meanwhile, there was talk of replacing him with a left-of-centre hack, Monkey hears. In the end it was resolved that adding a counterweight to the usual Tory-with-a-dash-of-Ukip mix would damage the Guido “brand”. Perhaps time for a name change, as the real Guy Fawkes was non-partisan, a would-be even-handed destroyer.
• Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s former controller of drama, left in May amidst clouds of glory, just after the Bafta TV awards (where Happy Valley and Marvellous won the best series and one-off gongs) and the end of a first run that established Poldark as a hit likely to return year after year. Otherwise, though, his legacy is beginning to look less impressive, particularly for channel controllers stuck with it: new BBC TV dramas since he flew out to LA have been an almost unbroken run of critical and/or ratings flops – Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Stonemouth, Interceptor, Odyssey – the last two already strong contenders for Monkey’s coveted Stinker of the Year award. Only the cynical, of course, would absurdly conclude that, seeing what was coming down the slipway, Stephenson knew when it was time to be off.
• A glance at the subscription promotion on the Radio Times website, which mentions “the best guest writers from Michael Moseley to Sarah Millican” suggests someone is having difficulty keeping track of who’s actually contributing to the magazine. Leaving aside the snub to regular writers such as Eddie Mair, the problem with this is that Millican doesn’t seem to have written for Radio Times in the past six months, while the misnamed science presenter (Mosley, not Moseley) looks to have last appeared even longer ago than her. Let’s hope this doesn’t stop publisher Immediate Media picking up another digital marketing campaign innovation gong at Thursday’s PPA awards.
• As MediaGuardian produced one of the first power lists, subsequently much imitated, Monkey has become a connoisseur of the perils of such rankings; and there have been few examples of “the curse of the list” as impressively instantaneous as was the case with PR Week’s Power List 2015. Within a few hours of the unveiling on Wednesday of its global “Power 50” in public relations, with Toyota spinner Julie Hamp the second highest-placed woman at no. 10, the flaks’ favourite read was obliged to reportonline that “Toyota global comms leader Julie Hamp resigns after drug arrest” (admittedly for prescription painkillers tightly regulated in Japan, rather than anything more exciting).
• Wednesday also saw the announcement of the third Woman’s Hour Power List, with “influence” this time the criterion for assessing power for judges led by the Telegraph’s Emma Barnett and including Mail columnist Sarah Vine. Vine will not have been displeased, Monkey suspects, by the list’s most striking and ludicrous feature, the absence of home secretary Theresa May (which can’t have been a case of behind-the-scenes influencers being preferred to politicians and other high-profile types, since 2015’s No 1 was Nicola Sturgeon): May and Vine’s husband Michael Gove had a public bust-up over tackling extremism when Gove was education secretary. Also missing were Ofcom boss Sharon White and BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead, which makes you wonder how much more influence they will have to wield - overseeing all of sport or the music industry, perhaps, as well as all of telecoms and (between them) broadcasting? - before a Woman’s Hour panel deems them powerful enough to be admitted.
• Media correspondents’ eyebrows were raised last week when they were joined by Tom Cheshire, Sky News’s technology correspondent, at a Rona Fairhead briefing about the BBC Trust’s decision to axe BBC3 as a TV channel and move the service online. The tech man awaited his moment then pounced, making little attempt to disguise his Murdoch-driven agenda: “what discussions has the Trust had about moving the BBC News channel online?” he bizarrely demanded. A nonplussed Fairhead said no discussions had taken place and politely suggested returning to the subject of the fate of BBC3.
• Is someone at the Times less than happy with its veteran music critic (and general arts pundit) Richard Morrison? Monkey only asks because during last year’s row over male opera critics, including Morrison, slating the appearance of the young soprano playing the male role of Octavian in Glyndebourne’s Rosenkavalier, he was obliged to abase himself in a follow-up piece saying sorry for inflicting any psychological wounds (the Times also pointedly ran an interview in which the diva Joyce DiDonato made it clear what she felt about looks-focused reviewing). A year on, Morrison’s one-star review for Covent Garden’s controversial Guillaume Tell, based on its “inexcusable” rape scene, was swiftly followed by the commissioning of an arts feature by Anna Picard defending the production and by extension attacking its attackers: mainly the “bullies” who heckled it, but also critics looking for a “comfortable experience”. Who could she have been thinking of?
