Tender spot

The tender documents for the contract to produce Mastermind and Celebrity Mastermind on BBC1 give John Humphrys job security as presenter til July 2021 - a month ahead of his 78th birthday.

The two-year contract, producing 31 episodes of Mastermind and 10 Celebrity Masterminds each year, is worth close to £3m. The average cost of an episode - £36,041. The tender says the show has to be 'made' outside London, and preferably close to either Salford, Glasgow or Belfast.

"We wish to maintain the intellectual rigor of the programme, the precision of the questions and the format overall but we would be interested to creatively refresh the programme within these constraints. We wish to appeal to a broader audience potentially using social and digital."

And, personally, I'd prefer they'd adopt the English spelling of rigour, avoid split infinitives, and stop using adjectives as nouns......