• Put your money on The Archers editor Sean O’Connor, who is currently well ahead of the competition in Monkey’s festive self-promotion stakes. In a Radio Times exercise eliciting Yule listening plans and highlights of the year across all radio from people associated with the medium (Kirsty Young, for example, singled out Liza Tarbuck on Radio 2), O’Connor stood out for his splendidly blinkered approach to the challenge. Best of 2015? Dead Girls Tell No Tales, the one-off Archers spin-off set in the 50s (director: Sean O’Connor). Best Christmas listen? “I’m looking forward to Lynda Snell’s production of Calendar Girls”, this year’s Archers am-dram. Anything else? Desert Island Discs on 27 December, when Patricia Greene talks about “her 58 years as Archers matriarch Jill”.
• Alarmingly for listeners to You and Yours, as well as presenter Winifred Robinson, last Monday’s edition was interrupted by part of another Radio 4 programme entirely – a gritty, baleful male voice, apparently presenting a disturbing report, crashed in while Robinson was calmly quizzing a firm’s spokesman, and then went away again leaving her to apologise. It sounded as if someone had pressed the wrong switch, but why would that happen outside an inter-programme junction? For Inspector Monkey, the conclusion has to be that the notorious soporific qualities of the lunchtime consumer show took their toll, and someone’s head slumped on the central network desk controlling output, hitting a button marked “next current affairs doomfest, only to be aired when everyone’s watching TV – do not press”.
• Consternation at Who’s Who, as in the just-out 2016 edition of the annual guide to the establishment dozens of entries are already out of date, while some of the new entries – a privilege normally awarded only to those expected to remain eminent for decades, as once in you’re there for life – were clearly voted in on the basis of mistaken confidence in their prospects. Thus US digital seer Jason Seiken joins the British elite, although he ended his calamitous stint as “chief content officer and editor in chief, Telegraph Media Group, 2013-15” as long ago as early April and he makes no mention of it in his Twitter bio. The billing for another new entry, Kamal Ahmed, is similarly misleading following his sideways shuffle last week, as are those for a number of his BBC colleagues or ex-colleagues who are already in Who’s Who – such as Danny Cohen, Robert Peston and Alan Yentob – but have recently left the Beeb or changed jobs there as turmoil continues.
• Still, some of the new entries in what purports to be a definitive survey of top bods in “2016” do offer entertainment, such as the revelation that the other names of Magnus Llewellin, editor of the Herald, are Clenyg Crush, which means he could moonlight musically as MC Crush without even having to make up a moniker. And there’s Sky Arts supremo Philip Edgar-Jones, whose spectacular, protesting-too-much list of recreations – “drums, guitar, piano, composition, reading, theatre, ballet, rock’n’roll, gardening, chuckling, eating, walking, writing, cooking” – may make workmates wonder if he’s spending enough time at his Isleworth office. Puzzlingly, too, this detailed inventory of his leisure activities makes no mention of “watching Andre Rieu concerts”.
•Monkey’s coveted award for “most far-fetched pretext for olde worlde sexism in livening up a City section with a pin-up” went this week unanimously to Thursday’s front page of Daily Telegraph Business, which was adorned, not by Janet Yellen (whose latest comments were the splash story’s subject) but by Kelly Brook. “Up to 450 jobs are at risk after Fairline Boats collapsed into administration,” the caption’s explanation for her smiling presence in the Torygraph bafflingly began. “The business,” it continued, “on one of whose boats TV presenter Kelly Brook is stood, above, was recently sold by Jon Moulton’s Better Capital to private equity group Wessex Bristol.” Excellent work.
•When the prime minister announces that henceforward all government communications will refer to his current arch-enemy as Daesh, you might expect news organisations (particularly Tory-aligned ones) to obediently follow suit. Instead, though, papers and broadcasters have stuck with a bewildering array of non-Daesh options. The Mirror and Sun use IS. The Mail, Express and Evening Standard prefer Islamic State first use, then IS. The Independent titles go for Isis, while the FT, Guardian and Times reserve it for subsequent references, after Islamic State initially. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 News favour “so-called Islamic State” in first use (though correspondents don’t always stick to that), with any short forms apparently OK afterwards; less fussy Sky News has a similar policy but avoids the “so-called”. Most surprising is the Telegraph, which (after its supine coverage of the election) might be expected to do whatever David Cameron tells it to; whereas in fact it politely reproduces in full what the organisation calls itself, without shortening or caveat. Dave’s Daesh is uniquely dubbed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant at the start of each relevant article, and the paper is therefore also alone in plumping for Isil as the shorter form.
