Saturday, March 31, 2012

Computer says...

Regular readers will know how helpful regular Freedom of Information requests are to blogs like these. Now the redoubtable BBC FOI team have had to release their internal handbook on data they believe they can keep to themselves, because it is held for the purposes of "journalism, art or literature", and case law or the ICO backs them up.

Altogether they've got 66 categories of information that will stay just with the BBC, from production costs, resource allocation, editorial guidelines, stories held in databases, audience figures and complaints, to how competition winners are chosen.  The good news for those lodging inquiries - questions about "insurance", "tv licensing" and "Parties: wrap, Xmas, programme and service launches" are all "IN SCOPE".
  • The BBC has made a commitment to publish "a selection of responses to previous Freedom of Information requests handled under the Act. The selection of what we publish is made by considering if we believe that there may be a wider public interest, when information is frequently requested, or when information is not already available elsewhere."  This pipeline seems to have dried up, with no new answers to FOI requests published by the BBC since 14 December 2011. 

Friday, March 30, 2012

Broader picture

Piers Morgan modestly notes that first quarter ratings in the US for his CNN chat show are up 11% on the previous quarter. In the "key" demographic of 25 to 54-year-olds, that means an average of 182k viewers, compared with 164k at the end of last year.

And compared with 308k for the first quarter of 2011, when he launched. Still, he now has more Twitter followers than viewers in the States.

Trophy women

This has been the year of the big push for more women presenters in British broadcasting - in front of the mike and the camera. And in radio, Sound Women has been lobbying for more women to enter for the Sony Radio Awards.  The Radio Academy responded with more female judges than ever before.

Let's peruse the women who've featured in the nominations revealed today.  I haven't considered all the categories, especially those that require obvious team work - but of 85 potential nomination slots where gender is perhaps a consideration, I've found women in 21 of them (compared with 13 in the same categories nominated in 2011).  Please correct me if I've missed the obvious....

Best Breakfast show: nominees include 5Live, where Rachel Burden is now paired with Nicky Campbell; Heart, where Harriet Scott shares the mike with Jamie Theakston, and Kiss, where Charlie Hedges works with Melvin and Ricky.  2011 - One female featured.

Best no-so-big Breakfast: Leanne Campbell partners Adam Weighell at Juice FM; Real Radio North East, where Lisa Shaw works with Gary Phillipson. 2011 - Two

Best Music Programme: Fearne Cotton for Radio 1 2011- None

Best Specialist Music Programme: Mary Anne Hobbs for Response XFM 2011- None

Best Entertainment Programme: Radio Humberside's Saturday feature, Beryl and Betty - The Ladies That Listen, featuring Betty Smith, 89, and her friend Beryl, 85; Gayle Lofthouse co-host of Real Radio Yorkshire's Breakfast show with (David) Dixie  2011 - None

Best Speech programme: No women I can spot... 2011 - One

Best Sports programme: Ditto    2011 - None

Best News and Current Affairs programme: 5Live Drive with Peter Allen and Aasmah Mir; Kate Gerbeau for BFBS's weekly news show, SITREP; Caroline Verdon for JackFM Oxfordshire's Sunday Roast; and Martha Kearney for Radio 4's World At One.   2011 - Two

Music Radio Personality of the Year: Gemma Cairney for Radio 1Xtra; and Lauren Laverne for 6Music. 2011 - None

Music Broadcaster of the Year: No women   2011 - None

Speech Radio Personality of the Year: No women   2011- None

Speech Broadcaster of the Year: Jenni Murray for Radio 4; Victoria Derbyshire for Radio 5Live  2011 - Three

News Journalist of the Year: Teams or men, as far as I can see...    2011 - One

Best Interview: Victoria Derbyshire versus Ken Clarke on Radio 5Live    2011 - None

Station Programmer of The Year: No women     2011 - None

Station of the Year under 300,000: No woman boss I can spot   2011 - None

Station of the Year up to 1m:  Gillian Hall, programme controller of 107.6 Juice FM   2011 - One

Station of the Year 1m+: Mary Kalemkerian, departing boss of Radio 4 Extra  2011 - One

UK Station of the Year: No woman boss I can spot  2011 - One



Questions, but no answers

Jonathan Dimbleby, host of Radio 4's Any Questions? and Any Answers?, is apparently looking to reclaim leisure time on Saturdays, and drop the second show - which he's presented since 1988.

The hunt is one for someone to present the public responses bit, which follows the Saturday lunchtime repeat of Any Questions? - and the smart money is on a woman.  (As with a range of BBC vacancies...)

Exactly how much leisure time this will free up for 67-year-old JD is unclear. Currently he hosts a good number of Any Answers? down the line from his Devon farmhouse. Last year the connection failed, and Jonathan was on the phone like most of his contributors.

  • Any Questions? started as a regional programme in the West of England in 1948, with Freddy Grisewood. As far as I can tell, Any Answers? first appeared in 1967, when Malcolm Muggeridge was the host for the launch of Radio 2. There are people who will correct me...


Be in the audience

Do I detect straitened times at Radio 5 Live ?  A tweet from Controller Adrian Van Klaveren exhorts us to buy tickets for "our biggest outside broadcast" (presumably excluding the Olympics or FA Cup Final) - an edition of Fighting Talk at 10.00am on 26 May at the Britannia Stadium, Stoke. Tickets are £10 each from SeeTickets - and there's also a charge of £1.50 "per transaction" - as per the BBC's terms and conditions. They ask you not to bring barbecues or flaming torches.

Last year's "big" Fighting Talk show was at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool, and tickets were free. The vast majority of shows on other BBC stations offer free tickets.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

End 'em all

The BBC has belatedly decided to call an end to the talent-free humiliation show that has been Total Wipeout, an excruciating legacy of the Jay Hunt regime at BBC1; even now, when I fail to avoid the trails showing people in designer life-jackets bouncing off inflated balls into chlorinated pools, I'm reminded that it would not have looked out of place on The Fast Show's Chanel 9.

But the spirit of creative competition between BBC Vision Productions and the vibrant UK indie market is on the case, vying to deliver a new Saturday tea-time offering to set the nation talking.  Or does Endemol have some hold over the BBC ?

"A TV source said today that Endemol already have an idea for a replacement for the Wipeout series" Mail.

"Endemol is understood to be working on a new format for the BBC to replace it"  Guardian.

 "It is understood show producers Endemol are in talks for a new replacement show to fill the Saturday night slot" BBC News.


Power cut

On the day that PR Week launches its 2012 Power List of the UK's most influential spinners, comes the news that Dick Fedorcio has resigned from his job running PR for the Metropolitan Police - we predicted he might not make it to the 2012 list back here. In 2011, Dick was at number six in the list of public sector comms leaders.

Here's the overall 2012 top ten, with last year's positions in brackets.

1 (3) Roland Rudd, co-founder, RLM Finsbury
2 (1) Matthew Freud, CEO, Freud Communications
3 (2) Alan Parker, founder, Brunswick Group
4 (4) Craig Oliver, Director of Comms, 10 Downing Street
5 (new) Jackie Brock-Doyle, Director of Comms and Public Affairs, LOCOG/London 2012
6 (new) Jenny Grey, Executive Director of Government Comms, Cabinet Office
7 (6) Lord Bell, chairman, Chime Communications
8 (8)  D-J Collins, vice-president, Public Policy and Comms, EMEA, Google
9 (7) Lord Chadlington, CEO, Huntsworth Group
10 (9) Max Clifford, founder, Max Clifford Associates

Ron rides again

TV journalists will welcome the news that there is to be a sequel to Anchorman, the 2004 film starring Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy, host of Action News ("They bring you the news so you don't have to get it yourself") on KVWN-TV, set in 1975 San Diego.

Ron, jazz flautist-san-pareil, and five-time (local) Emmy award-winner, announced the news after this discussion with late-night chat show host Conan O-Brien and his sidekick Andy Richter.



Will Ron be catapulted into a world of social media, crowd-sourced journalism, Twitter-feeds, Facebook and Pinterest ?  Surely too good an opportunity to miss...

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Best practice

The BBC Trust has held five meetings so far this year, and the minutes and summaries so far published make no mention of the fact that a process is underway to recruit a new Director General.

This strikes me as odd. Maybe, as is sometimes the case in the BBC, there's already bumper book of procedural guidelines and case-law, presented in deferential, un-minuted silence to Lord Patten on a velvet cushion by The Director of The Trust, with the Deputy Director of The Trust in attendance, flanked by the Head of Governance, whose coat-tails are held up by two Senior Advisers, Governance, as the Head of Public Services Strategy and two Senior Strategy Advisers nod on approvingly from the cheap seats, and numberless Advisers Strategy in mufti listen at the door.

Or maybe the process has been dragged into the 21st Century by Lord Patten himself, non-executive director of international recruitment consultants, Russell Reynolds Associates ?  Will there be an old-fashioned formal interview panel ? Psychometric and personality tests ? An assessment centre, with team tasks ? Candidate profiling, with measurements of unconscious bias ? You can perhaps tell how excited I am by all this. I have visions of the three final candidates standing by in Nando's next to the Trust offices, after a day of interrogation, waiting for their mobiles to ring.

Sadly, we'll probably have to wait for memoirs to find out what really went on...


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Form book 18

Lord Grade: “I think the BBC has become too bureaucratic. I commissioned The Singing Detective in the loo.

“I bumped into Jonathan Powell, the head of drama. He said ‘I’ve just had a meeting with Dennis Potter. He’s got a thing called The Singing Detective.’

“I said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’ That was it. What’s missing today, to a certain extent, are people’s instincts. You’re not allowed to trust your instincts."

Lord Grade, 69, is 66/1 for next DG with Ladbrokes.

In other market moves, Caroline Thomson's publicity push has not paid off yet at the bookies. Three now give George Entwistle the shortest odds. Paddy Power stick with Caroline, with George and Ed Richards as joint second favourites. No board price yet for Lionel Barber of the FT, despite apparent overtures from Lord Patten via the press. Meanwhile, the Evening Standard, which started the Barber story, is now worried that their tip is a Europhile - which could be seen as a bad political pairing for Lord Patten.  Caroline Thomson's friendship with Lord Mandelson apparently is evidence of a similar problem.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Toe to toe

There's something now slightly unseemly about the campaigning for position of BBC Director General. A little peer behind the Times paywall on Friday found a discussion of two contenders - "women, but ..significantly older than their male rivals".

 "Insiders" and "supporters" were either asked for or proffered opinions as to why Caroline Thomson, at 57 and Helen Boaden, 56, were not already at the top of the tree at such an immense age.

For Caroline: “She was conservative in her career choices at a time when her male counterparts were pushing ahead. It should be more widely understood that women have different career patterns because of the pressures of motherhood. Now she’s in her fifties, she can operate like all the men could in their forties.”

For Helen: Ms Boaden’s supporters say that her gender also contributed to the slower progression of her career, but for a different reason. She and her husband were unable to have children, which a friend described as a great sadness to them. The friend said: “She thinks men have more of a game plan, whereas she felt she’d reached the summit of her ambition when she became a Radio 4 reporter. She thinks a lot of ambitious men decide they have mastered a job after a couple of years and then move on. She has tended to stay in posts well after mastering them because she was enjoying herself.”

A similar agenda flows through a long career profile of Caroline Thomson by Dan Sabbagh - so detailed that it looks like the answers came from Caroline herself, rather than "supporters".  Whatever next ?  Live public hustings ?  DG debates ?

  • The photograph of Caroline accompanying Dan's paean of praise is by Louise Edwards of Cater, set at a jaunty angle and cropped by Guardian News and Media Imaging, who've sorted eyebrows and added eye twinkle. Let's see them try that on a male candidate....

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Driving us to...

There'll be plenty of analysis telling you who was the biggest winner in last night's clash between Danny Cohen's baby, The Voice on BBC1, and Simon Cowell's toddler, Britain's Got Talent on ITV. The biggest losers were Harry Hill, with what may or may not be the last ever episode of TV Burp (scheduled against The Voice) and Dale Winton, with In It To Win It up against BGT.

The Voice's average was 8.4m, remarkable for a first show, whilst BGT's 9.9m average represented a 41% share. Here's a prediction - with nicer weather, the BST clock shift, the end of the month in sight, and both programmes sampled, next Saturday evening people will be mostly drinking outside....

Form Book 17

Here's a bombshell (if correct) for those considering a punt on the BBC 2012 DG Stakes - and for the insiders who have been so far leading the betting.

Miles Goslett in the Mail On Sunday backs up a story from the Evening Standard earlier this week that FT Editor Lionel Barber is in the frame, quoting "a source" thus: ‘Chris Patten would almost certainly regard it as a personal failing if he simply hired one of Mark Thompson’s deputies such as [BBC chief operating officer] Caroline Thomson. He wants someone new working at the BBC who is not associated with the current regime and he is known to be a devoted reader of the FT. It is fair to say he would like Lionel Barber to apply.’

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Form book 16

Online bookmaker Bodog has entered the fray in the 2012 DG Stakes. They make George Entwhistle (sic) 2/1 favourite, followed by Caroline Thomson at 7/2 and Helen Boaden at 4/1.

Across the field, Controller BBC1 Danny Cohen has drifted out. Last week he was as short as 5/1 with Paddy Power - now he's on offer between 12/1 and 10/1. This probably reflects his commitment to the job in hand at BBC1 to Steve Hewlett on the Radio 4 Media Show.

There's been a reversal in the positions of two potential runners from the Channel 4 stable - Jay Hunt is now shorter (in odds) than David Abraham, at 16/1 and 20/1 respectively.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Vocal warm-up

What would represent success for BBC1's new Saturday night talent show, The Voice ?  BBC spinners are trying to damp down expectations. Dan Wootton in The Mail today quotes "a source" at the BBC as saying ‘If it doesn’t get more than ten million viewers, as Call The Midwife did, then it’s nothing short of an expensive disaster.’  A BBC spokesman says that's "crazy - XFactor, Britain's Got Talent, and Strictly all launched with half that".

Last Saturday, in about the same slot as The Voice, the final of Let's Dance For Sport Relief notched up an average of 5.7m. The BBC will surely want to do better than that.  The machine is hard at work this morning, with Tom Jones on the R2's Chris Evans' Show, Holly Willoughby on R1's Chris Moyles' Show, Voice contestants on BBC Breakfast - even Capital Radio have featured judge Danny from The Script.  The only Voices off message have been R2's Paul Gambaccini, in the Radio Times ("The Voice is a karaoke competition, full stop") - and, as you would expect, Simon Cowell, concerned, I think, less about Britain's Got Talent and more about The XFactor.

Voice launches around the world have done well. France - 9.1m, 38% share, Denmark 1.1m, 60% share; Ireland 708,000. But in the States, American Idol, which plays on Wednesday, has just edged back in front of The Voice, which is broadcast on Mondays.

The BBC is sensitive about the cost of the exercise - but Controller BBC1 Danny Cohen says the audience expects the best, and "the tone is more fitting to BBC values".  Will the tone of the press coverage follow suit ?

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Reality bites

MediaCityUK big screen visualisation















MediaCityUK big screen today




Form book 15

Some odds and ends...

Spooky. The Evening Standard tips FT Editor Lionel Barber for BBC DG: Lionel Barber turns up on Newsnight, in the boss chair on Paxo's right, for a Budget discussion.

There's continued puzzlement amongst long-serving BBC watchers about lack of press mentions or betting odds for Peter Bazalgette - who usually figures in the odds for top media jobs much earlier than this.

The MD of (Australian) ABC, Mark Scott, seems to have ruled himself out of the race, according to The Australian: "My contract has 4 1/2 years to run," he said. "I fully expect the next director-general to be British." Is it a denial of interest, or a non-denial ?  Could he, like Mark Thompson at C4 in 2004, have a "Sonia Gandhi" moment ?   Mr Scott is priced between 14/1 and 20/1 with the bookies.

With friends like these: media grandees Roy Greenslade and Ray Snoddy are tipping Helen Boaden. Stephen Glover, in the Mail gives her this charmless and probably unwelcome endorsement: "I'm told Ms Boaden may lean fractionally more to the Right than the others [internal candidates], but none of them could be fairly described as conservative with a big or small ‘c’, and it is unimaginable that anyone of such a persuasion could become director-general of the BBC".

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Company news

Conservative MP David  Mowat, who represents Warrington South, has discovered that 320 "non-talent-based" employees (that reads badly, but probably means staff who are not on-air) are paid as if they are companies. He told the Commons....

"Tax avoidance matters are at the heart of this thing about us all being in this together. I sent a Freedom of Information request to the BBC to ask them how many employees they had who were not having tax deducted at source. The answer is that they have 320 non-talent based (staff), so this is administration employees, earning more than £50,000 a year but (for whom) PAYE and National Insurance is not deducted at source. I would ask my own frontbench, who are conducting a review across the whole of Government in terms of making sure this isn't happening but which explicitly excludes the BBC, to reconsider that."

The last "non-talent based" employee who was paid through a company that I can remember was John Birt.


Form Book 14

Media Monkey in The Guardian yesterday noted market moves in the 2012 DG Stakes for Ofcom chief executive Ed C Richards, cut from 12/1 to 6/1 by Ladbrokes. "They report new accounts being opened up in London and the home counties, purely to punt on the regulator in chief."  The money also altered Paddy Power's thinking, who made Ed even shorter, at 11/4.

Ed at Ofcom has had his moments with the BBC. He had a stand-up with Greg Dyke, post-Hutton, and Greg described him as that "jumped-up Millbank oik".  Ed rubbed up Mark Thompson the wrong way over "top-slicing" the licence fee. He believes the BBC should reveal how much it pays top talent. He recently drew Lord Leveson's attention to the £150k fine Ofcom imposed on the BBC after the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross/Sachsgate broadcasts - when the BBC had clearly not recognised the error of their ways, and needed to surrender some more licence-fees to the regulator.

Ed comes via Portsmouth Grammar School and the LSE. At Portsmouth, he was apparently "an outstanding sportsman, Chairman of the Sixth Form Council, a highly effective prefect, a ferocious debater and founder and bass guitarist of the School Rock Band".  In 2010 he entertained fellow Old Portmuthians with a lecture and slide show about Ed C Richards - the minutes say it was a triumph.

No-one.. could possibly have anticipated the brilliance of the next 2+ hours! Notably upstaging David Cameron, Ed, without any notes or autocue but with tremendous verve and enthusiasm and total fluency, addressed us for two hours in accompaniment to the power-point outline of his meteoric career in politics and the media. As the Chief Executive of Ofcom, Ed has been hailed by the business community as "the most important figure in the UK radio and TV sector and in the fixed-line and mobile telecommunications industries" but to achieve such elevation in a mere 22 years entailed considerable success in many career fields. In this way the audience was treated to fascinating glimpses of a number of different career experiences, all of them seen from the top and all of them in themselves worthy of an individual lecture !


Real form book students may like to contrast Ed's performance at the Edinburgh TV Festival, in 2009, when he appears to send his interlocutor (and potential rival candidate) Peter Fincham to sleep.


One stepping stone in shy Ed's meteoric rise was the BBC itself, where he ran strategy under John Birt.  But his history in programme-making is short - a spell as researcher at Diverse Productions, with no obvious programme credits. His wife, Delyth, has more experience on-air, from a spell as reporter for the World at One and PM. She went on to become a member of the Welsh Assembly, and now runs the London operations of the charity "Dressing For Success".

Do you need programme-making experience to be DG ?  Today's Guardian editorial, which has the imprint of Rusbridger, is definite - only a programme-maker schooled in journalism, like Mr Thompson, should be entrusted with the responsibilities of running the BBC.

Primaries

And the 2012 DG campaign is being fought out even in the feature pages of The Cumberland News - an interview with COO Caroline Thomson. 


“I think we got the local radio proposals slightly wrong,” admits Caroline. “Because I see the Radio Cumbria people a bit and listen to it a lot, I perhaps clocked that quicker than other people did within the BBC. I was up here during the Whitehaven shootings. I know how important the staff were. We’d tried to protect local radio. But we hadn’t protected it enough.”


New readers, please note.  The DQF decision, now being reversed, to share local radio programmes in the afternoons and evenings came from Helen Boaden's News Division.

Form Book 13

Crikey. Just Day Two since the semi-official invitation for runners and riders in the BBC 2012 DG Stakes, and "friends", "supporters" and "insiders" are still on the mobiles, one hand cupped over their mouths - this time to the Independent's Ian Burrell.

 "Supporters of Caroline Thomson, the BBC's chief operating officer, urged her to stress her editorial credentials as well as her obvious talents as a manager. Ms Thomson is a former commissioning editor at Channel 4 and trained at the BBC as a journalist, skills she drew on while reporting from the scene of the 2007 Cumbria rail crash."

Ah, but Helen Boaden does Industrial Relations, apparently..

With her track record as a programme maker and award-winning journalist, she is in a better position than many of her rivals to carry the support of 20,000 colleagues during a period of intense upheaval. "There's a danger that you lurch from one strike action to the next," one BBC source said. "It requires really strong leadership from someone respected inside the BBC who knows how to get stuff done."


You'd guess George Entwistle's best hope would be that these two females and their "supporters" would  wreck each other's chances, and George would come through the middle. I think they've though of that.


The male internal candidate thought most likely to beat the two women to the post is George Entwistle, the head of BBC Vision, though he is from a similar mould as Mr Thompson and his appointment might be seen outside the organisation as unambitious.



Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Page ambience

Latest news from Jo Wickremasinghe, Head of Product, Weather and Travel News at the BBC.

"In November Melanie Seyer gave a detailed overview of the BBC Weather Design Refresh in Pictures. In that post Melanie described our plan to introduce page ambience as a way for us to inject personality into the site, by reflecting the current weather at your selected location. Today we've rolled out page ambiences for both UK and International locations. The ambience reflects the latest forecast for the selected location."


There are no current plans for your keyboard to spray water at you when it's raining. If your keyboard gets hot, see your dealer.

Critical acclaim

They were thinking about laying trails of World Cinema DVDs, or quality Pinot Noirs, to tempt him out. In the end, he came quietly.  For a couple of years, uber-critic Mark Lawson has exercised "droit du seigneur" over an enclosed space in the refurbished area of "old" Broadcasting House.  He treated it like an office on his day trips from Towcester.

But the future for the BBC's Arts teams is the wide-open spaces of "new" Broadcasting House. And over the past few weeks, as producers and editors of Radio 4's Front Row have braved life in this tundra, Mark has been creeping back to his comfort blanket - in an area now owned by BBC Radio 4 features.

I understand Mark has now been reconciled to his new observed open-plan life - do as you would be done by, I say.



Insiders lead in the paddock

With 24 hours to think about it, four bookmakers are now offering odds on the 2012 DG Stakes. Paddy Power make George Entwistle and Caroline Thomson 2/1 joint favourites; George is a 5/2 favourite on his own with both Ladbrokes and Stan James; William Hill make Helen Boaden their favourite, at 2/1.

Shortest priced outsider with all four is Michael Jackson.

Form Book 12

I wrote in a piece for the BBC's Ariel that there might be some delicate jostling between internal candidates for the DG post, and one could expect press mentions from "insiders" who we really just on one side or another. The Telegraph has rewarded me - and the jostling by "insiders" is actually quite robust.

Today's article says former Chairman Sir Michael Lyons favours a female successor "It would be great if the best candidate is a woman. I wouldn’t want to compromise on the criteria [just to have a woman].”

Then it speculates on Helen Boaden, director of BBC News Group, saying according to sources at the corporation [she] has already embarked on an internal PR campaign to secure her post.

“She has started copying senior management into emails, where she wouldn’t have before, expressing her views on strategic issues that are not part of her direct remit. It feels like she is auditioning,” an insider said. A separate source close to the BBC, however, denied she was campaigning for the position. Another source said she was well-suited to the role. “People like her because she speaks her mind. She’s tough in areas like cost-cutting, but she also trusts her lieutenants and she has strong editorial judgment. She’s good at spotting and pre-empting problems.”

The Telegraph goes on: Ms Thomson is the most senior internal candidate but is an unpopular choice among staff because she does not have a production background. “She is a very old-fashioned, BBC blue stocking type. She’s seen as too posh,” one source said.

One BBC, eh ?

Monday, March 19, 2012

Form book 11

So, dear readers, time for another look at the BBC DG 2012 Stakes formbook, using as our guide the odds from Ladbroke's, who have offered a market for the first time.

George Entwistle 5/2f (2/1jf with Paddy Power)
Mark Thompson's anointed "son", his Powerpoints on reorganising Vision to make cuts have gone down well with the Trust. 

Caroline Thomson 3/1 (2/1jf with Paddy Power)
Pretty determined that if it's going to be a woman, it'll be her. If de-mob happy Thommo starts ducking out of meetings and morning conference calls, she gets to chair...

Helen Boaden 7/2 (9/2 with Paddy Power)
Has drifted a tad in the odds since the Trust and public rebuffed cuts to BBC local radio and regional current affairs

Michael Jackson 4/1 (7/2 with Paddy Power)
Has ousted Peter Fincham as the shortest-priced outsider. UK work now includes non-executive director with STV. Candidate last time round, now described as "veteran" at 56. Thommo was 46

Ed Richards 6/1 (12/1 with Paddy Power)
A new arrival in the outsiders list, the Ofcom CEO did strategy for the BBC under John Birt, and went on to do the same for Tony Blair 

Danny Cohen 12/1 (5/1 with Paddy Power)
As well as coming up through BBC3 and BBC1, Project Jewel (reorganising Vision), was his baby, as was the pre-cursor of DQF, Putting Quality First. Thommo wrote strategy stuff for Birt, including Extending Choice.... 

Peter Fincham 14/1 (9/1 with Paddy Power)
Left the BBC after the dodgy trailer for A Year With The Queen. Hard to believe Adam Crozier has not handcuffed him financially to ITV


Tim Davie 16/1 (14/1 with Paddy Power)
Tried to close 6Music and The Asian Network, now wants to find a new word for podcast and get radio "visualised"


Jay Hunt 16/1 (14/1 with Paddy Power)
Has just nicked racing off the BBC. Could she follow the Thommo route from C4 back to Auntie ? Or will it be her boss..... 


David Abraham 20/1 (14/1 with Paddy Power)
With Jay in tow, has he done enough with C4, currently struggling to keep ahead of C5 in viewing figures ?


Further reading: a contribution to BBC staff's esteemed organ, Ariel.







And they're off...

Mark Thompson has finally confirmed he's stepping down as Director General of the BBC in Autumn this year. He expects to narrow down a handover date once a successor has been appointed.

I'm now predicting we'll know the successor before Wimbledon, in late June. That would give time for a little internal shuffling, if the chosen one is from inside - or some gardening leave, should they come from a rival broadcaster.  Perhaps now our bookmakers' will re-open their books.

Mark's email to staff is a little shorter than his speech to the Royal Television Society last week, which is a much more rounded view of the health of the BBC. Today's short version is like a missive from young Mr Grace...

It’s because of your efforts that the BBC I will be leaving is so much stronger than the BBC I inherited back in 2004. Trust and approval are at record highs, our services are in brilliant creative form and we’ve demonstrated beyond contradiction that the BBC can be just as much of a leader and innovator in the digital age as we once were in the analogue one. Now more than ever, to audiences at home and abroad the BBC is the best broadcaster in the world. It’s been a great privilege helping you to keep the BBC in that top spot over the past eight years.

All original

"Love will set you free", this year's UK entry for Eurovision, has had mixed success as a song title, whatever tune it's set to.

Whitesnake's single of that name last year, written by David Coverdale and Doug Aldrich. was only released digitally.  It doesn't seem to have made the bestsellers lists.

In 2010, Australian Andrew Mann and Mantra recorded their "Love will set you free".

Sunloverz (Frank Sanders and Bernd Johnen) featuring GTO offered this in 2009, co-written with Helienne Lindvall.

Italian trance-specialists Starchaser (aka Fausto Fanizza and Thomas Schwartz) produced this in 2007, featuring singer Steve Edwards.

Those who think Smokey Robinson can do nothing bad should try his "Love will set you free" from the 1986 turkey, "Solarbabies".

They didn't think you cared...

This week you will be severely marketed by the BBC. Olympic torch coverage, The Voice and Engelbert Humperdinck.

No room to shed tears over the loss of tv coverage of all British horse-racing to Channel 4.  They hope. The Grand National has been televised by the BBC since 1960.  Last year the live transmission caught the attention of nearly 9 million viewers, and BBC Worldwide sold rights to 140 countries, garnering an estimated audience of 600 million. 

BBC horse-racing has been brought to you by indie Sunset + Vine since 2004, under Jeff Foulser.  Their parent company is Tinopolis.  Channel 4 Racing's current provider is the rather smaller Highflyer Group, based at Teddington, run by Simon Moorhead, with Andrew Franklin and John Fairley.  Expect a tough tender battle next year.  

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Eary

Extracts from gulfnews.com's review of Engelbert Humperdinck's most recent gig, ten days ago in the Madinat Jumeirah's Johnarah Ballroom, Dubai.

Technical glitches fail to deter the King of Romance


Amazing is the word that perhaps best describes Humperdinck, who deftly brushed aside the frequent stumbling attempts by technical staff to set right his faulty in-ear monitors, as he dived into classic hits like A Man Without Love, Quando, Quando, Quando, Love Story and Am I That Easy to Forget.......There were moments when you could have been excused for wanting to beat up the sound technicians as Humperdinck's vocals dipped or waned, but all that was forgotten as the singer who will represent Britain in next month's Eurovision song competition belted out a wonderful medley of songs that featured the best-selling Spanish Eyes, 10 Guitars and Love Me With All Of Your Heart.



Just ask...

Anna Ford's appearance on Desert Island Discs today gives her an opportunity to kick Mark Thompson over discrimination against older women on the screens of the BBC.

It's in contrast to her last media outing, with the Telegraph's Judith Woods in January, in a piece entitled "This may be the last interview I ever give". Says Judith of her subject, she has nothing to sell and, far from being an attention junkie, claims she would happily give her fame away “to a passing tramp”.

But wait....there is one thing, she admits, that would instantly coax her out of her quietude – a phone call from Kirsty Young. “The one programme I would love to appear on is Desert Island Discs,” she glows. “That’s the ultimate accolade, much better than winning any award. “If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I would take with me a recording of the sound of English birdsong. Could there be anything more life-affirming?”

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Tweet tweet

Sky News is losing two top Twitterers from its team. Neal Mann, who tweets as @fieldproducer (c43,000 followers) and Ruth Barnett, @SkyRuth (12,000 followers) are moving on from Osterley.  55,000 is more than daily sales of The Scotsman.

Neal says he's "seeing what's out there" after three years with Sky. Clearly he has a Twitter brand that might be transferable, whereas SkyRuth, who is joining Swiftkey as Head of Communications, will have to change.

The last big media Twitter transfer was Laura Kuenssberg, who, as @BBCLauraK acquired 58,000 followers by the time she left for ITV in June last year. Now, as @ITVLauraK, she has close to 76,000.

Before we get too excited, Chris Moyles has 2.1m followers, Piers Morgan 2.0m, Lord Sugar 1.6m, Richard Bacon 1.4m - who all clearly use the platform as a force for good and enlightenment. I have 318, and would appreciate a few more. @tradingaswdr. Please.

Friday, March 16, 2012

The Salford Job

“It all happened really fast. At first I thought it was a group of drama students filming a project as it is not something you would ever expect to see here".

This from an anonymous eye-witness to this afternoon's attempted armed robbery at MediaCityUK, reported by Quays News. There were apparently three men involved, waiting in a red Mini with an 02 plate. Two, wearing balaclavas threatened (with either a machete or an axe) the driver of a Security Plus Ltd cash-in-transit van. Reports say something in the van exploded, with red dye coming out.  Tweets say the men may have got away with just £150, and the van driver is fine; the Mini has apparently been recovered.

Bum notes

Swedish songwriters have written this year's entry for Sweden - Euphoria, by Loreen - and they've also had a hand in eight others that will be belted out in the Crystal Hall, Baku at the end of May. Spain, Italy, Norway, Malta, Ireland, Cyprus, Greece and Finland have all turned to Swedes in the hope of a Euro-win.

The people of Austria may wish that they had as well. Their chosen ditty is by a charmless duo called Trackshittaz - the tv director may get a call from the BBC asking if their logo can be avoided.  Their song is called "Woki mit deim Popo". Here's an English translation of the lyrics, by someone called Effily - I can't tell whether it's an improvement on the original (there are readers who will let me know, I'm sure), but it has it's moments. Probably not suitable for reading aloud at work.

Shake your bum

We are ready, jewellery 24 carat, our beer has 12 degrees
Dialect, yeah, the two of us are stars, looting bars, we are ready
And all the people shout: “Heya heya hey”
We are party indians, wear feathers on the head

And now get your bosom out, the noodle soup gang arrives
Rednecks, yay, haven’t seen such exuberance for a long time
And they dance and they shake at the pole, at the ceiling
I am enchanted, rednecks, look how they sprawl, uh-huh…

Come on, shake your bum, shake your (ooh ooh) Shake your bum, yeah, yeah, that’s the way I like it Come on, shake your bum, shake your (ooh ooh) Shake your bum, as you are what I want

And I enter the club, the ladies have fine jewellery
But it’s there, there, where you don’t expect it at first
I only look at her, she dances at the strip pole
I’m ready, chap, lots of women, I don’t miss out on anything
"Noodle soup gang, what’s up?” and everybody shouts: “Ho ho”
And women are dancing, they only go low, low
She twists me around her finger, she wants a winner, winner

Your bum has feelings, your bum is a part of you
Don’t put it on chairs, your bum has an opinion, yeah
Your bum wants movement, so shake, shake, shake
Your bum wants encounters, come on, give it what it needs
Your bum doesn’t get tired, your bum tells something about you
Come, shake it, it wants it, so that the house starts vibrating
Your bum has to be ready, so shake, shake, shake
Your bum has to be ready, come on, give it what it needs

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Engagements

King's College, Taunton gets a visit from BBC Director of News Helen Boaden tomorrow, with a 2.00pm session in the Woodard Room.  This is a rare trip west for Helen; I wonder if the engagement was facilitated by Tim Willcox, an Old Aluredian, now reporter and presenter for the BBC News Channel. (Alured being an ancient form of Alfred, the king after whom the school was named when the Reverend Nathaniel Woodard re-founded the college as King Alfred's School in 1880).

Meanwhile, another DG hopeful Tim Davie has been in Barcelona today for Radio Days Europe.

Caroline Thomson's forthcoming engagements include the Rutberg Summit in April - not much travel, as it's in London, but still, it is Claridge's.

Cards

Is the poker game on the scheduling of Britain's Got Talent versus The Voice really over ?  Yesterday it seemed that the Texas Hold 'Em ITV1 duo of Simon Cowell and Peter Fincham had blinked, with BGT shuffling back half-an-hour on opening night,
Saturday 24 March, to run 8.00pm to 9.20pm. The BBC1 team stuck at 7.00pm to 8.20pm.

The twenty-minute overlap might completely disappear the following week; the Voice apparently has a long opener (Padding, Mr Cohen ?), and of course BGT will be awash with ads.


Lady lumps

Radio Times interview with Susanna Reid, moving to the big chair on BBC Breakfast from today, as the programme heads to Salford, and Sian Williams opts to stay in the south.

Newsreader Susanna Reid has poured scorn on people who claim her on-air attire is “too distracting”. The Breakfast host, who has attracted criticism for inadvertently revealing too much flesh while broadcasting, told Radio Times: “People seem to be shocked that women have breasts. There’ll be complaints that there is literally a shadow showing.”

Anne McElvoy in the London Evening Standard


My cynical guess is that Ms Reid’s bosses rather like her YouTube following in which the clips are not solely focused on her interviewing prowess. I have heard senior TV execs talk about women having “a following” in the circumstances when what they really mean is that they are simply thought worthy of a bit of brief lechery. It’s not exactly progress, is it? ......... 


I am not anti-cleavage: it is a great look for after work but not the way to exude seriousness of purpose while you are there. There are plenty of ways to dress well and alluringly without revealing your own personal grand canyon (or lack of it). If in doubt, keep it under control until the lights go down, and definitely before everyone else has finished their cereal.


Meanwhile, there were lumps on the Breakfast sofa this morning - lumps in the throat, with tearful farewells as Sian bade goodbye to fellow presenter Bill Turnbull and the Breakfast production team. 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

For candidates only

Lord Patten has proffered tips on leadership and boardroom skills to his favourite executive search and recuitment firm, Russell Reynolds - in video and script form.  Our Chris is a member of the RR Associates Board of Directors. Lord Patten's second favourite firm, Egon Zehnder is helping him find the next Director General of the BBC.

Here are the Lord's thoughts on how business leaders should communicate.

"I think it’s terribly important that they use real language. I think that it’s not just true of business, but it’s particularly true in business; senior managers can fall into using the sort of language which isn’t used anywhere outside the board room or the executive suite. There’s a sort of nerdish, geekish, management-speak which obviscates meaning, and too many chairmen and chief executives talk in that sort of language, the jargon-laden quality of so many managers - you never have a discussion, you have an “iterative process”, and it drives me mad."


Sadly, there are two failures here. Whoever has done the transcript has failed with the dictionary; obviscates isn't a word - Lord Patten actually says "obfuscates".  And, risking the wrath of the Chairman, it's a little loose to suggest "discussion" and "iterative process" are synonyms.

Jamming

An important message tonight from the BBC DG Mark Thompson in a speech tonight, claiming that Iran was behind attempts to disrupt Auntie in the UK as well as abroad at the start of this month.  (The Times has the full story).

 "There was a day recently when there was a simultaneous attempt to jam two different satellite feeds of BBC Persian into Iran, to disrupt the service’s London phone lines by the use of multiple automatic calls, and a sophisticated cyber-attack on the BBC.”

On Thursday 1st March, BBC staff lost contact with the outside world via email, texts and the internet. It was the day before the Iranian elections.  This was one of the pieces that BBC Persian was trying to beam into Iran.  Worth seeing on Youtube for some of the angry and passionate comments below.



Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Have a .....

A correspondent receiving regional BBC bulletins branded Look East writes to tell me that the current drought is having unexpected impacts in his area. The late night bulletin last night carried a piece about concerns that the lack of rain would drive up the price of fruit and vegetables - this intoned over lingering shots of that well-known Essex staple, the banana.

Values

A series of whispers, to the The Guardian and The Mail, seems to be softening us up for the news that the BBC is about to lose tv rights to the Grand National, The Derby and Royal Ascot.  The rumour is that Channel 4 have offered £15m - double the current £7.5m BBC deal.

The bill for The Voice has been estimated at between £22m and £25m for two years.

Stumped

I'm more than baffled by the moves at BBC Worldwide. Governance goes one way, then another. Is the decision to make the DG act as chairman a long-term solution ?  Does it give the Trust chairman the arms-length control he clearly seeks ?  Does it shackle or liberate CEO John Smith ?  Doesn't it reduce external scrutiny ? Answers below, please.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Nothing but blue skies

Steve Hewlett, in the Media Guardian, has clearly been re-enchanted by Lord Birt. Whether it happened face-to-face, in his recent interview about the BBC DG succession for Radio 4's Media Show, or it was triggered by Matthew McFadyen's interpretation of the "croak-voiced Dalek" for the film of "Frost/Nixon" re-shown last night on BBC4, is not clear.

In Steve's regular Monday column, he argues that the current management isn't really up to a radical examination of Auntie's bloated body, and only a strategist of Birt's quality can do the liposuction required - which may well be to deliver John's ultimate dream of a BBC made up solely of pointy-headed commissioners, leaving all production, except news, to indies.

There are clearly some motes in Steve's eyes. He was editor of Panorama when John was issuing inky-blue post-its from his limed-oak eyrie at Broadcasting House. Birt thought Panorama largely passed the tests of the Birt-Jay thesis, and piled money in.

Nonetheless, the candidates will be interested in Steve's analysis, and even now will be trying to work out who it favours.

Steve cites two reports by John Myers as examples of eye-openers to the profligacy of today's BBC. The first report, on Radio1 and 2, was commissioned by Tim Davie, Director of Audio and Music - so he gets Hewlett creds for bringing in the outside view. However the Myers findings of duplication and generous staffing at Western House and Yalding should have been no surprise to a sharp executive seeking the top job - just look at the size of the buildings.  So Davie loses Hewlett creds for lack of radical insight and vision.

The second Myers report was on alternative ways of making cuts in BBC local radio - rather than merging afternoon shows on a regional basis, and sharing a pan-England show in the evenings. This one lies at the door of Helen Boaden, Director of News. The output cuts, now to be reversed, had her name on them.  However, the layers of management found by Myers are a direct legacy of the command and control strategies of Mark Byford, inheritor and chosen son of Birt, and had, quite recently, been defended by DG Thommo to MPs.

The candidate who'll be most pleased with Hewlett's analysis is George Entwistle, who's been quietly reducing the numbers of e-mail shufflers and meeting "crowd extras" of the Jana Bennett regime in Vision.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Live

So the new bit of Broadcasting House in London is officially "live", with the first broadcast by the Burmese section of the World Service - a phone-in, with listeners calling from Myanmar, and an interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, in a 45 minute broadcast this afternoon.  With the DG Mark Thompson watching on, there was a danger the attending suits would outnumber the broadcasters.

Over the last year there has been good news for Burmese journalists working in exile abroad; the year-old new regime said they could have visas to visit home, for the first time in 20 years. And live reporting from inside the country is becoming a regular feature, not a dangerous undercover trip.

On a quiet day, it's not surprising their new home makes an online lead for the Burmese service.














Later that same afternoon, the Sinhala service made their first daily broadcast from the new centre - with Sandeshaya (The Message).

Dry mouth

A mini-milestone for the new bit of Broadcasting House - word of a first catering complaint, with an attempt to charge for a glass of water in the basement staff cafe. Disclosure: I haven't checked this out with the BBC, in case this scoop disappears, as it should, in a puff of smoke....


Saturday, March 10, 2012

GENRE CONTROLLER FORECAST















"...and comedy and entertainment will be spread in a band between Salford and London. By noon, drama will be wherever Ben and Danny are having lunch..."

Friday, March 9, 2012

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 ?

Thursday, March 8, 2012

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.

Lead

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

Add caption

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

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...


Tuesday, March 6, 2012

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.

You'll like this


Monday, March 5, 2012

Cowell v Cohen ?

It looks more and more like The Voice on BBC1 will be going head-to-head with Britain's Got Talent on ITV from 24th March.

One door opens...

According to Gillian Reynolds in The Telegraph, today is the day the revamped Broadcasting House formally "opens". The three output big cheeses, George Entwistle, Vision, Helen Boaden, News and Tim Davie, Audio and Music, will be photographed as doors between "old" and "new" BH are opened.

It will take the rest of the year before the new extension is fully operational. A move over a month, like the Guardian managed to King's Place, is not for the risk-averse BBC. There's always a risk of being too cocky about new buildings - five false fire alarms in eight weeks are taking a little edge off shiny new space in Salford.

The question of who "owns" the completed building is thus dependent on whether or not it is judged a success - by staff, the licence-fee-payers, and, most importantly, the papers. Mr Davie seems to have done a reasonable job spinning himself and the BH concept to Gillian. Rowan Moore, in the Observer, thinks there have been too many architects involved, and the result lacks cohesion.

The staff, of course, will judge the building by its catering provision. I understand, after some humming and ha-ing, the contract has gone to the BBC's current suppliers. Aramark UK is part of the Aramark Corporation. Worldwide they have contracts with 2,000 hospitals, 2,200 colleges and universities, 400 sports stadiums, 160 oil rigs and mines, and 500 prisons. A perfect match.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The scenic view

I've always been interested in the lives of Panorama reporters. I once was involved with helping them move from Lime Grove to White City. They wanted private offices in the new open plan building - I looked round their space on several occasions and could see nothing going on in any offices, let alone stuff that needed to be done in private. So we tried to block that, but the editor went to the top, and 12 offices for pairs of producers and reporters were built, requiring major work on the air-conditioning.  The offices were stripped out by the next editor.

The current editor of Panorama, Tom Giles, is featured in the Guardian. He says that next year he's down to five "core" reporters, Paul Kenyon, Shelley Jofre, Richard Bilton, Raphael Rowe, and John Sweeney, plus freelance Jane Corbin, to produce the London-based share of 40 half-hours a year, plus seven one-hour specials.  Tom says the average cost of Panorama runs at £225k per hour; he gets £500k from BBC1 to fund special investigations, and £6.5m a year to run the rest - that figure has apparently been protected by DG Thommo from DQF cuts.

51 Panorama programmes from the last twelve months are available online. Here's the list of reporters who've done more than one show.

Shelley Jofre 4
Richard Bilton 4
Declan Lawn 4
Vivian White 4
Paul Kenyon 3
Jane Corbin 3
Samantha Poling 3
Raphael Rowe 2
John Sweeney 2
Tom Heap 2
Hilary Andersson 2

The 51 shows also include two repeats - a 1966 report by John Morgan in California, and an 1975 programme about Sandhurst.

Quiet wedding ?

Controller BBC1 Danny Cohen married his long-term partner Professor Noreena Hertz at the end of last month. Matron of Honour was Rachel Weisz, accompanied by hubby Daniel Craig - Dan apparently gave the bride some tips on bouquet-holding ahead of the ceremony - and Gina Bellman was one of the bridesmaids. Guests included Charles Saatchi with Nigella Lawson, and Vivienne Westwood, who made the bride's dress.

The ceremony was held in the oldest synagogue still in use in the UK, the Bevis Marks in the City of London, completed in 1701.  It's not far from Danny's old school, City of London.

Noreena's choice of a Westwood creation acknowledges her fashion heritage. Her mother and father set up knitwear company Crochetta in the 1970's, and got a boost when Paul Michael Glaser wore one of their cardigans in Starsky and Hutch. Noreena last year expressed firm views about other knitwear.
"I grew up in a home where I was literally told from a young age, 'no daughter of mine will ever wash a man's socks', and I am pleased to say I never have."

There's no word on the reception. Did it feature music by Danny's personal favourites, The Alarm ?

Open season

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, with prompting from The Sunday Telegraph, has stuck an unhelpful fork in two BBC hot potatoes - the next presenter of The Today Programme, and the 2012 DG Stakes.

This first, from Political Editor, Patrick Hennessey.

Currently, the BBC’s leading news radio programme has just one female presenter, Sarah Montague, whose voice, critics say, can get lost among the strident male tones of John Humphrys, James Naughtie et al. Unlike some of his more risk-averse colleagues, Mr Hunt is keen to join the fray. “I’d like to see many more female presenters across the BBC, and across all our broadcasters,” he says. He is conscious of protecting the BBC’s independence, and that it would not do for the Culture Secretary to tell the organisation “what to broadcast”, but his personal view is clear: “If you ask me would I like to see that, yes, I would – and I think the BBC is conscious of that, and they are actually trying to change that.” 


This is unhelpful because the current presenter-designate of The Today Programme is Nick Robinson, who's had good pairings with Evan Davis over a couple of summer stand-in stints. He needs to come off the road soon as Political Editor, so that a new face can be established before the next General Election. Now he may have to wait until either John Humphrys or James Naughtie hangs up his bakelite headphones. And the Culture Secretary's remarks will make this summer's testing of potential new Today presenters into a mixture of blood sport and beauty contest.

Meanwhile, perusing the parade ring before the 2012 DG Stakes...

Mr Hunt goes still further and says it would be “wonderful” if a woman succeeded the current director-general, Mark Thompson, when he steps down within months. Candidates to take over include Helen Boaden, who runs BBC News, and Caroline Thomson, the corporation’s chief operating officer. The BBC has never had a female “DG”. “Well, it would be wonderful to have a female DG, just as it was wonderful to have a female prime minister. But I think the worst possible thing would be if an individual became DG because they were a woman. And so I think we’ve got to be really careful to make sure that we’ve picked the best person for the job and not picked someone because of their gender.”


These remarks, bland and guarded as they may seem, are not helpful for George Entwistle.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Three dozen

FOI factoid, thanks to the excellent website What Do They Know ?

As at the end of the last financial year 31 March 2011, 36 BBC staff were in receipt of a basic salary greater than £200,000 per annum. The total of these annual salaries was £9,233,698, representing 0.3% of the total collected in licence fee income for the last financial year 2010/2011 - £3,513 million.

Or the annual contribution of 62,601 licence-fee payers.

Broadcast continuity

The alarms at the BBC's offices at MediaCityUK keep detecting fires that just aren't there. It seemed to start in 10 January, with this interruption to the late night Tony Livesey show.



Then on 22 February, it happened to Tony again, and another little bit of the Bacon/Palin interview kicked in. The next morning, Nicky Campbell's phone-in fell victim to another false fire alarm; Bacon/Palin was still the trusted standby. This time Radio Manchester went off air as well. Both were back in under ten minutes.

Today, it was Football Focus on BBC1 that had to go to a standby tape, as Dan Walker, Lawro and Martin Keown shuffled off the set built within the BBC building.



I've no real insight as to what's going wrong. The BBC has a penchant for very sophisticated "early warning" alarms, that attempt to detect smoke by regularly sampling air, and shining lasers through it for particles that shouldn't be there. One operative has tweeted that one of the earlier false alarms was caused by a "Raman laser pulsing problem".  Google provides no clues to what this really means - so it maybe from the Bumper Handbook of Baffling But Credible Sounding System Failure Excuses from your building maintenance team, now clearly well-thumbed at Salford Quays. These are issued in rotation to get programme makers off their backs while they try to find out what really happened.

I will predict, however, that the next time it happens on Five Live, you won't here Michael Palin.



Moving

Kanda Bongo Man
"Real people" start moving into the new bit of Broadcasting House from this weekend. Crates are being packed, after three days of tented events to mark the move of World Service from their home at Bush House. It's the suits (or shirts'n'chinos) of management who leave first from the twisty corridors and marble floors to the carpet tiles and glass vistas of the new building, to join the pathfinding technologists, worrying away over switching systems and the like.

Meanwhile, the Persian and Arabic teams, already in new build of Egton House, along with BBC London, may be puzzled at the renaming of that wing to honour John Peel  - at least, until someone explains to them that this is probably A GOOD THING; one of the few names the modern, nervous BBC management can agree on. Whether or not John would have thought it an appropriate or necessary tribute is a different matter.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Take note

Remember these names. Licence-fee payers and Lord Patten. Their track record gives little clue to the likelihood that they are sleepers, put inside the BBC to bring the organisation down.

Katie Taylor, the BBC's head of entertainment and events, said: "Not since the 70s have we had such an established international musical legend represent the nation … Engelbert's experience leaves us in no doubt that he will be able to deliver a standout performance in front of 120 million viewers worldwide."

Derek McLean, the BBC's creative director of entertainment, said: "Engelbert has an incredible musical history and heritage, especially in the UK and Europe. He's working with some of the best people in music to come up with the UK's song for this year's Eurovision. We're very proud to have him on board."

  • A correspondent with connections in Great Glen, Leicester, says Englebert occasionally joins locals for a game of golf. Some have noted that the great man's hearing is not what it was...

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Do get in touch....

Iffy sort of day for the BBC's IT providers - many staff have lost their lifelines to the outside world, through email and texts. Thus 5Live Drive is without the audience contributions that Peter Allen so enjoys; and certain newsroom types have been keeping their info-junkie tendencies fed through Smart phones, with Twitter swipes at the BBC's contractor, ATOS.   And on of top that, another fire alarm evacuation at MediaCityUK.

Price tag

It's all about the money, money.  There are fanfares for Sian Williams, at risk of being marooned in London as Breakfast heads for Salford, instead joining the Reverend Richard  Coles to present an extended Saturday Live on Radio 4. And it's utterly fearless of Controller Gwyneth Williams to say Sandi Toksvig and John McCarthy (presenters of Excess Baggage, axed to make an extra 30 minutes for Saturday Live) will be "accommodated" in the longer show. But I bet the total production costs for the new hybrid are less than the sum of the previous two.

And in pay negotiations, the BBC historically opens low - this year 1% - and the unions claim high - 6%. The clever trick is to find out how much money corporate finance have put in the budget, and claim higher by around 1%. That would save quite a lot on conference room and biscuit booking.

Other people who read this.......