• For months, Berkshire has been buzzing with the news that Sky is to film there a drama series about mankind’s final days, with a cast headed by Rob Lowe, titled Apocalypse Slough. Finally, a little Hollywood glamour to banish memories of the town’s dismal role in The Office? Now, however, Slough has been left in a slough after Sky unveiled the series and announced that the title has been changed to the rather less specific You, Me & The Apocalypse. Could it be that the name didn’t play well in territories where the series hopes for sales? Sky sources say the “early working title” was “changed to a title that better reflects the themes in the show”. Perhaps Slough evades the apocalypse after all.
• Monkey was a bit upset when the “Updated Royal Christening Souvenir Edition” of OK! magazine landed on the desk the other day. The front cover was festooned with glorious images of Princess Charlotte’s christening and so it was natural to excitedly flick through in expectation of a cornucopia of pictures and words about it inside. Alas, after much foraging Monkey could find nothing, beyond the front, which it must be added was not OK!. After contacting the magazine, it appears that Monkey received one of a handful of copies that were incorrectly bound, resulting in two phone calls to OK!. OK! assured us these readers were supplied with correctly printed copies as would any others that came forward with the same problem if they got in touch.
• To Bafta for the launch of Melvyn Bragg: From Wigton To Westminster, a forthcoming BBC2 profile in which the veteran broadcaster is on the other side of the camera, instead of posing the questions and providing his trademark “noddies”. Asked post-screening about the closed-doors deal between the government and the BBC, Bragg (who joined the Beeb in 1961) said he was “very disturbed”. Of the BBC Trust, he noted that “they say they weren’t consulted” and asked “why haven’t they resigned? It’s called the Trust because they’re trusted with looking after the interests of licence fee payers.”
• Although the documentary includes clips from Spitting Image (and Bragg doing an impression of his puppet’s impression of him) and his legendary wine binge with Francis Bacon, the moment that elicited most laughter at the preview was a telling hesitation in a tribute from Tony Blair, who praises both Bragg’s programmes and his politics. On the latter, it was the Cumbrian’s consistency that impressed him, compared to “some of us” in the Labour party who had had an early bout of leftism, before moving to “er, er, er, the er centre”.
• Roger Mosey, the former BBC executive whose long career included jobs running television news and masterminding Olympics coverage, wrote a cogent Guardian column last week arguing that the corporation’s News Channel should not be among the victims if whole networks have to be sacrificed in the next round of cost-cutting. Mosey - whose just-published book and other articles have provided ammunition for rightwing press Beeb-bashers - also listed other services he felt should be sacrosanct, and in doing so gave a fascinating glimpse of what the options look like when viewed with the mindset of the BBC news empire (from which DGs Tony Hall, George Entwistle and Mark Thompson all emerged). Also on Mosey’s suggested line-up of “essential services” were “BBC1, BBC2, Radio 4 and the World Service”, which all just happen to have significant news offerings. Inessential and so available for axing, by implication, were BBC4, Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and (particularly surprisingly, as Mosey once ran it) Radio 5 Live.
• At John Witherow’s Times, the recourse to flesh-baring photos, with flimsy pretexts or none, increasingly verges on self-parody. Thursday’s main paper alone was enlivened by a near-topless performer at the launch of “the Toronto Caribbean Carnival” (no accompanying report), a painting of nude classical figures in a Sotheby’s sale (ditto), a leggy model at Paris Fashion Week (ditto), Dutch National Ballet dancers duetting (ditto) and a business pages photo of Taylor Swift, ingeniously if obscurely justified as an illustration of a Swift-free story about Microsoft’s embarrassment over its Nokia deal (resulting in the phone brand disappearing so that “even the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles - which has hosted Taylor Swift - is under the Microsoft banner”). The T2 section was no less on heat, devoting to its cover and an inside spread to steamy photos of Rihanna, naturally provided with a Daily Mail-style pretext in the form of a why-oh-why column about her latest video. Good work all round.
• The Independent and the i are often accused of overlapping so much that the cheaper paper is anything but independent, but the two were at loggerheads last week on how to present the same arts pages interview with cerebral Mercury prize winners alt-J. “Don’t call us nerds” the band commanded in unusually forthright fashion at the top of the Indy’s piece, only for its parasitical sister paper to disobey with its own headline, “Nerdy trio have lift off”.
