Thin pickings

No sign of a major improvement for the second edition of Top Gear Retuned in the States, still failing to make the Top 100 of cable shows. Top Gear USA, made for the History Channel, running on Tuesday nights, was up 100,000 viewers to just over 1m, rising to number 33 in the daily chart. BBC Worldwide tells us that the Evans/Leblanc TG launched on BBC Brit in South Africa to 'record-ratings' [sic]. They say it won twice the overnight audience for the old trio's last series opener, and the biggest audience for BBC Brit since the channel launched in 2015. It doesn't offer an actual figure.

BBC Director of What's Left Of Strategy and Digital James Purnell told a conference in London that Auntie was only now worried about three things heading to Charter Renewal - the BBC's creative freedom, the NAO poking around BBC Worldwide and the composition of the unity board. Barely anything, really.

Congratulations to Mark Wray, former journalism training boss at the BBC, now in a similar role for the Press Association. Maybe there's growth to be had in preparing newspaper hacks for the 150 new licence-fee funded jobs covering local authorities from 2017.