• Good to see BBC director general Tony Hall is starting the new year in the manner in which he spent so much of 2014, earning him an unfair rep as being willing to turn up to the opening of a paper bag as long as there was BBC branding on it and some nice people (ideally reflecting the Beeb’s strategic aims, eg on diversity) around to be photographed with. His debut party this year is Wednesday’s launch of A Year of Song and Dance, an event that will give journalists a chance to see if the twinkle-toed peer’s winter training has paid off: though Hall is famously fast at escaping when tricky questions threaten to be asked, there was a feeling among journalists last season that Channel 4’s Jay Hunt was even quicker off the mark – so stopwatches will be out to see if he can reclaim his No 1 position. Improving his starts - his speed off the press conference podium, Hunt’s forte - will be key.
• The correction-collecting website Regret the Error has revealed its top correction of 2014, and it’s certainly a peach. “An earlier version of this column was published in error,” the New York Times conceded after adjusting it. “That version included what purported to be an interview that Kanye West gave to a Chicago radio station in which he compared his own derrière to that of his wife, Kim Kardashian. Mr West’s quotes were taken, without attribution, from the satirical website The Daily Currant. There is no radio station WGYN in Chicago; the interview was fictitious, and should not have been included in the column.” As Regret the Error says: “Kimye, butts and a writer treating a fake news website and a fake radio station as real” – faced with that competition the second-placed correction from the Sun (of nonsense it ran about London Bridge) didn’t stand a chance of taking the top spot.
• Planning and coordination have not been obvious in the BBC’s coverage of the approaching anniversary of the Magna Carta. First Radio 4’s teatime religious series, Beyond Belief, devoted an edition to the 1215 document on 29 December, before the anniversary year had even started – cheekily, because this put it ahead of Melvyn Bragg’s heavily trailed four-part daily series on the same network last week, which was presumably scheduled so early in the year purely to ensure it went first. Bringing up the rear, and probably fed up with being forced to do so, is serially stroppy Dr David Starkey, who at least gets his name in the questionable title of BBC2’s David Starkey’s Magna Carta (wasn’t it King John’s?), a now arguably redundant offering due in the last week of January. Ridiculously, all this overlapping output is going out five months before the 800th anniversary of the charter’s signing in June; though at least that’s an improvement on this time last year, when Jeremy Paxman’s BBC1 series “marked” the centenary of the first world war starting seven months before the actual anniversary.
• Sadly, only Sunday Times buyers and subscribers will have seen last weekend’s account in its News Review section of the transatlantic voyage of Atalanta of London, a sailing boat surreally skippered by the prolific TV producer Stephen Lambert (Wife Swap, Gogglebox, etc) with deckhands including Times editor John Witherow and some of his former staff at the Sunday Times. Worse, the paywall will prevent others seeing the accompanying photo of the grinning all-male, all-40-plus crew in nautical gear. They were taking part in November’s Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, and according to the piece made it to the finish in St Lucia (the rally’s “provisional results” list, though, oddly says Atalanta came 115th out of 117, with the rather worrying tag “DNS” – but no doubt that silly error will be corrected once the final results are produced). Anyway, however the good ship Gogglebox performed, we can be confident Lambert will be making use of the experience, either by developing a “Top Gear of sailing” or with a typical constructed reality role-play show in which a succession of middle-aged men have a go at being Swallows and Amazons.
• Last year Kim Shillinglaw, BBC2’s unusually frank newish controller, hurtfully said Danny Cohen, the TV supremo who appointed her, was “not very huggable”. And now her trademark unflinching candour has been directed at an even grander grandee, Sir David Attenborough, not only the revered king of nature programmes but a kind of Dumbledore of her channel, having run it himself in the 60s. Asked about Attenborough’s recent remark that “it isn’t overly plain to me” what guides “the editorial decisions on BBC2”, Shillinglaw first wearily asks “do we have to go there?” and then tells Broadcast that “David … spends a lot of time in delightfully inaccessible parts of the world. As a result, he doesn’t have as much time” (presumably to watch BBC2 fare) as the “average viewer”. Apparent translation: the old boy’s out of touch and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
• Though Simon Heffer has written for the New Statesman before, as part of editor Jason Cowley’s shift away from the red weekly’s lefties-only image, it’s still eyebrow-raising to see the Heff – whose day job is still at the Daily Mail, though rumour suggests his Ukip sympathies and loathing of David Cameron have meant he’s increasingly marginalised there – writing the current issue’s cover story: the marauding ginger whinger is somehow too far right for Lord Rothermere, it seems, yet left enough for the Staggers. The piece is an attack on the reputation of Winston Churchill, timed to puncture the reverence accompanying the forthcoming 50th anniversary of his death, and is surely partly designed to wind up his colleagues at the Mail, where it’s gospel that Churchill was the “greatest Englishman” – a belief reaffirmed every few years there by Heffer’s long-standing feuding partner Max Hastings, and overdue for another reiteration.
