Ears

Whatever's left of the BBC's Monitoring Service is heading out of Caversham and into the sixth floor of Broadcasting House in May next year.

The BBC has to pay for Monitoring, as part of a previous licence-fee stitch up, and the long-term budget will now be entertaining, moving from a freehold country mansion to premium leased-office space in the centre of London, presumably with a complete new set of technology tools. Some of this will be defrayed by the sale of Caversham, on the market for nearly a year, and now marked as "Under Offer" by the BBC's preferred estate agents, Lambert Smith Hampton. 

Paying for Monitoring out of licence-fees must be very frustrating when Foreign Office money is coming back into other parts of the BBC faster than the BBC can spend it. BBC World Questions now has added Jonathan Dimbleby (occasionally billed as 'Dimbley'), travelling with entourage to Paris, Washington, Nairobi and Mexico.