Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, may have been dealing with a double-whammy of announcements from the BBC Trust today – the trustees' rejection of the BBC's local online video plans and their assessment of the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand debacle. But Thommo was still doing a passable grace under pressure impression at today's Ofcom conference on the future of the web. "As you can hear it's getting to the end of another quiet week at the BBC," he deadpanned, after the introduction from the chair outlined the latest trifling developments for the corporation.
Thompson went on to share the fact that his wife called him out of the shower earlier this week and demanded that he call John Sergeant immediately. "It'll tell you something about my job that I can be standing there dripping with water talking to someone I worked with for many years debating whether for his final, final show on Strictly Come Dancing he should do the waltz or the pasa doble. These are the kinds of policy questions I've got to face every day." It's good to see Thompson is keeping his sense of humour in difficult times. But Monkey is still trying to erase the troubling mental image.
