Anybody been fired ?

If Lord Grade, 71, jumps the various hurdles that might see him back as BBC Chairman, don't expect a relaxed "White Knight" at the helm, just there to wind down the Trust. His contribution to Charlotte Higgins' excellent series of Guardian essays on the past and future of the BBC offers this Lordly rant on the recent BBC1 dramatisation of Jamaica Inn.

"How do you explain the fact that Jamaica Inn gets on the air, and you can’t hear a word anybody’s saying? Question: how many BBC drama employees went on location? How many watched the rushes? How many went to the rough cuts? How many went to the fine cuts? How many went to the sound mix? How many people saw the finished version? And yet it ended up on the air. You can make terrible programmes: you can think of The Borgias, lots of horrible programmes on the BBC, but at least you could hear what they were saying. I mean that is unforgivable … You can’t understand how it could happen at the BBC. Has anybody been fired? Who are these people that passed that for transmission and wasted £3m of licence payers’ money?”

Easy boy. Elsewhere, BBC bureaucrats are more worried that Lord Grade might return with PA Ros Sloboda still at his side. This formidable woman is pictured alongside her boss in the National Portrait Gallery, and herself made a major contribution to the Charlotte Higgins' series, on the sacking of her previous boss, Alasdair Milne.