Round Two

There were some little "wins" for BBC management on the second of the one-day NUJ strikes over 100 compulsory redundancies at the World Service and BBC Monitoring.  On BBC1, Breakfast was presented by Charlie Stayt.  Any suggestion that he looked less poised on his own than the usual strike-buster, freelance Gavin Grey, would be resented.

At Radio Five Live, their Breakfast show was started by Ian Payne - then, at 0700 Nicky Campbell took over, which I think is a first strike appearance for him.  (The resourceful Payne then moved downstairs to provide his first sport bullletin for Today for over ten years.)   He was followed at the microphone by Victoria Derbyshire and Richard Bacon; Shelagh Fogarty did not appear. 

Round 2 was similar to Round 1 on Radio 4 - a shortened Today programme, 0700-0900 with Sarah Montague and, yes, occasional Mail columnist, John Humphrys.  No current affairs later in the day, and the schedulers have been a bit more louche than usual with their replacement offerings. Soul Music, on Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, runs instead of The World At One; Portillo on The Berlin Olympics and Lenny Henry on Jackson Pollock fill the PM slot, and Portillo reappears instead of The World Tonight, in the retro feature Meeting Myself Coming Back.

Both Today and Five Live Breakfast had their August moments, despite a stonking news agenda. Humphrys got tangled up in some guff about gooseberries, and Campbell seemed to nod off in a phone discussion of Yorkshire Day with Geoffrey Boycott and Brian Turner. 

• According to an update in the BBC staff organ, Ariel, there are 98 compulsory redundancies on the cards in World Service (down from 102 last week) with 43 of them out this week - but there are now two more at risk of an unwilling departure at BBC Monitoring.