On edge

Former BBC News deep-thinker and Controller Radio 4 Mark Damazer has added his two-pen-orth to the debate about current standards at Auntie.

Whilst not quite as bald as saying (cf Roger Mosey) that the Corporation is in crisis, he's worried about its mental health. ‘It projects to most of its competition a sense of imperialism, huge, grand, swathes of self-confidence. Inside the organisation, it’s almost constantly on the verge of having a nervous breakdown and these two anti-logical traits live side by side.'

In News, he was worried about too many poor quality interviews; it's a 'culture where people are expected to be Humphrys or Maitlis’ but because they're 'in a rush to get to the next headline... there is not enough pausing and stopping about things that are said that are implausible and don’t stand up..... Frankly those interviews need a bit of reconsideration’.

When an interviewee misleads, 'they need to be stopped and the other parts of the interview need to be put to one side in the interest of proper scrutiny.’

One can imagine the mental health of the organisation fluctuating pretty wildly overnight Wednesday into Thursday, between Danny Baker's BBC career-ending tweet at just before 7pm, and his sacking, made public around 10.30am.