Women

A frenetic International Women's Day for the BBC.  Helen Boaden, Caroline Thomson, Jana Bennett and Janice Hadlow will all have been relieved to be included in a "power list" of the top 50 women in UK film and tv. Bob Shennan, Controller Radio 2, announced that Alan Carr's weekend slot will be filled by Liza Tarbuck, 47.

And then that steady pair of hands, CFO Zarin Patel, gets the tone wrong in an interview with a specialist economics website, discovered by those cheeky media boys at the Guardian. "To be honest, we have stopped worrying about gender issues at the BBC".  What I think she meant was across the workforce in general, not on screen.  Zarin says half the BBC workforce is female - the most recent figures I can find put it at women 48.5%, men 51.5% (though taking Scotland on its own, there it's 52% women against 48% male. Scotland, however, is not helping with ethnic diversity targets. Black and Minority Ethnic staff are 3% of the workforce, against 12% for the rest of the BBC). Most recent figures from the Civil Service as whole say women there make up 53% of the workforce.

The issue is, therefore, with a healthy gender balance supporting the output, why isn't there better representation on screen ?

Anniversary time

How will the BBC - which loves anniversaries - mark the 65th birthday of its Creative Director, Alan Yentob, this Saturday ?

There is a belief that he's already made some preparation for this older age, and may be drawing a BBC pension as well as his salary, based on a pot which has been growing for nearly 44 years. He has 2619 shares in United Business Media, currently recovering nicely at 599p each; he owns 10% of the family fabric firm Dewhurst Dent, which, in turn, owns Dents Gloves and Corgi knitwear. 

And now daughter Bella, 16, looks to be embarking on a modelling career, which may keep the old man in designer bicycle clips. She's started at the top with a feature in British Vogue.

Last month, she was on Alan's arm for a Mulberry party at the Savile Club.

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Measured copy this morning in the iMail - sorry, the Mail Online.

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Former player

Steve Hewlett, on the R4 Media Show, has been asking previous BBC DGs for their thoughts on the job, and the succession. Today it was Lord Birt, DG from 1992-2000.  He said he was proud to have joined the BBC as its highest-placed outsider since the Second World War - he came in as Deputy DG, a post now abolished - and said he found "a shabby bureaucratic organisation obsessed with itself". This made Steve chuckle, pointing out that Private Eye still has a BirtSpeak feature to capture the best of the BBC's bloated management utterings - "Do they ?" said the Lord, laconically.

Lord Birt said the currently-floating idea of splitting the job into a Chief Executive and an Editor-in-Chief was daft, like arguing the job of Prime Minister was "too big".  There should be one job, but successful occupants of the office needed editorial qualifications. History, he said, shows that often DGs have been brought down by a failure to resolve an editorial policy question. This may or may not have been a dig at Greg Dyke.

He wouldn't be drawn on who should be next. Asked "should it be a women ?", he said one day it would be a woman, and when that happens there would be three cheers.

Thursday 1300 update: A letter to the March edition of Prospero, the magazine for retired BBC staff, reads thus:

'Distressing images in the last Prospero'.

Could Prospero adopt the same policy as TV news programmes, and warn readers when there are images which they may find distressing? I refer to the picture of John Birt on the letters pages in the February issue. 

Andrew Maywood  

Go west

One of my old BBC bosses, Richard Sambrook, is on the move again. He was Director of News at the time of the Kelly/Gilligan/Hutton palaver, and moved to become Director of World Service and Global News in 2004. In February 2010, he joined the Edelman PR group, as Global Vice Chairman and Chief Content Officer. One Edelman's more recent clients is News International - though Richard has been at pains to make it clear he's not working on that account.

As well as all the journalism stuff, he was the BBC executive who said it was OK for staff to be on Facebook. Which reduced some people's productivity during their normal hours of work quite considerably.

Now he's joining the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, at Cardiff University, as Director of its Journalism Centre, starting in June. He succeeds Richard Tait, of Newsnight, Channel 4, ITN and a former BBC Governor and Trustee.

There'll be a few familiar faces for Richard drifting around. Ian Hargreaves, Professor of the Digital Economy, used to run news at the BBC for John Birt; and Huw Edwards is an honorary professor, although he hasn't yet used his title on screen. Nor am I implying he uses it in the newsroom.  I just don't know.

Staying ?

Some elements of the media have focussed on travel between London and Salford in the latest disclosures of BBC management expenses.

At the end of last year, the BBC revealed, that for all Auntie's apparent success in persuading staff from London to move north, only 14 had bought a new home in the area with the assistance of BBC funds (and why wouldn't you use the scheme ?).

So far, £6.45m has been paid to 549 staff in terms of accommodation support, and it would seem that the vast majority of that is being used to subsidise rents.

Looking after the pounds

We've remarked before on the lovely round numbers that are a feature of the expenses claims by the BBC's CFO, Zarin Patel. Here I've collated the internal and external hospitality lines of her submissions for the most recently published quarter. The pence column tends to come into play for the higher amounts...

Staying put

The most recent lists of BBC management expenses claims and central bookings have been published, and the licence fee payers will probably like the impact of a contest for the next DG.  Caroline Thomson's taxi bill has gone down from £2,025 in the previously reported quarter, to a mere £550.

Helen Boaden's taxi bill for the most recent three months stands at £32, compared with a previous figure of £74.  Dangerous George Entwistle is up from £28 to £271.55.

Alan Yentob's taxi bill for that last reported quarter stands at £1,491. That includes £27 to transport him to Mark Byford's leaving do. Alan is just back from the Marrakech Biennale, where he has been curating the film programme.

Full ?

BBC Breakfast held its London "wrap" party last night. Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams were the hosts; guests included Ron Neil, launch editor of Breakfast Time when it stole a march on TV-AM in January 1983; Debbie Greenwood, one of the second wave presenters, and Sophie Raworth, who was paired with Jeremy Bowen when "Breakfast News" morphed into "BBC Breakfast", combining with News 24.  Fearless Director of News, Helen Boaden, who volunteered Breakfast to make up the Salford numbers, was also on hand.

John Kay and Susannah Reid were on the sofas this morning. The programme had one of the world's worst vox pops, on satnavs, and brought us the shock news that Alex James makes cheese.

Shake that moneymaker

Dapper John Smith, CEO of BBC Worldwide, must feel he just can't win. First the Trust shackle his burgeoning empire by banning any further acquisitions, and ordering him to shed, over time, stakes in non-BBC branded-channels. Now MPs say the targets for BBC Worldwide profits are "unambitious".

Meanwhile, he's just lost his non-executive chairman, Robert Webb, QC. When he was a head of chambers, Robert said his favourite recording artiste was Gracie Fields, and his biggest problem was trying to look smart. He's sharpened up over recent years, working at BA, and becoming Chairman of Autonomy, now sold to Hewlett Packard.

He's also a non-executive director of property developers, Argent, and has had to step down from meetings  about the sale of Television Centre.  Mmmm.