Couple No 1

A new golden couple for a multimedia age ?   Danny Cohen, 36, yesterday moved forward to Controller BBC1, in what many see as a key step on an inexorable path to DG.  He has a double first in English from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

His partner, Noreena Hertz,41, is a professor in three places at the same time, and a facebook/twitter campaigner on global issues.   Great-grand-daughter of a British Chief Rabbi, she helped the World Bank with Russian privatisation, then thought the better of it.  She worked with Bono on the RED project to raise money for AIDS work in Africa.  In August, she appeared as "the token woman" on Men's Hour on Radio 5Live.


Danny's genuine interest in social media and new ways of communicating was cruelly parodied in The Secret Blog of a TV Controller aged 33 and 3/4 - which now looks to be defunct.  So it's not surprising he's not as visible on such services. One smart move he might consider is moving Liam Keelan quietly to BBC3, and closing the official Controller Daytime post - he's got enough brain to manage a whole channel, and there are plenty of "execs" around to do the mechanics.