Hot plate

With all those meeja types running Oxford Colleges - Gardam, Hutton, Damazer, Rusbridger, plus former BBC Chair Lord Patten at the top - it's not surprising that a former editor of Today, and now Panorama, might appeal in the role of Director of Public Affairs and Communications for Oxford University.

So Ceri Thomas moves on after 25 years with Auntie, having joined from LBC in 1991. He had the benefit of a year as a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard, and the dubious fun of acting as No 2 across news in 2012, when big bosses Helen Boaden and Steve Mitchell 'stepped aside' in the wake of the McAlpine mess-up at Newsnight. He also acted as 'prisoner's friend' to the unfortunate Peter Rippon, who was the Newsnight editor who turned down the first big Savile story.

Ceri went to Manchester University, is a fan of Northern Soul and was the first person I met who boasted he had a plate-warming oven. Let's hope he can remember how to cope with crowds; his new department has 37 listed staff, way above the current slimline Panorama team.