✒ Lord Hall launched a diversity initiative on Friday at Walford underground station on the EastEnders set, but the private reactions of other top broadcasting executives are said to have been uniform and adverse. They had been working with the BBC on a joint strategy for recruiting more ethnic-minority commissioners, an insider reveals, and hence the likes of Channel 4’s David Abraham and ITV’s Adam Crozier were surprised, to put it mildly, to find the DG making an unheralded BBC-only announcement. It appears they rang him to say so, though whether anyone went into Walford mode and said “Hall – shut it!” “behave!” or “you’re out of order, you opera slag!” remains as yet unknown.
✒ The mountaineering term “Munro-bagging” is becoming increasingly familiar in broadcasting as the BBC’s newish head of newsgathering, Jonathan Munro, bags more of his former ITV colleagues to join him, thereby making himself unpopular with people on both sides. BBC journalists complain that the likes of Lucy Manning were hired without advert or interview at a time of hundreds of job losses in BBC News; while their ITV News counterparts – who see Munro as a Coriolanus figure, taking revenge for being denied the top job there he is said to believe he was promised – resent the stripping away of talent, with his hirings such as Manning and Penny Marshall joining Newsnight’s Laura Kuenssberg and editors or producers Jess Brammar, Ed Campbell, Toby Castle and Chris Gibson in recently defecting to the BBC.
✒ Among the less-remarked aspects of Manning rejoining Munro is her BBC title of special correspondent – Ed Campbell, who ran away with her from ITN, is to be editor, special correspondents. Although currently this well-paid role only seems to involve overseeing Manning and chief-correspondent-to-be Gavin Hewitt, the exciting prospect is of a second tier of elite hacks, energised challengers below the god-like level of the so-called “on-air editors” (people like John Simpson and Nick Robinson). Like the editors, they can expect a Mount Rushmore-like team image on the BBC website, and no doubt their own regular show like BBC1’s The Editors … but hold on. Visit the online home of The Editors, and you sense that all is not well with the mighty ones. That Rushmore image hasn’t been updated, and the last “monthly” show was in early March, which suggests neither BBC News chief James Harding nor BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore gives a toss. Once Campbell’s cubs are up to strength, the weary old alpha males will be there for the taking.
✒ Last week’s Cannes Lions advertising festival at last saw Mail Online publisher Martin “Jurassic” Clarke, the bashful king of the world of celebrity, coming close to becoming a celebrity himself. True to his aversion to publicity, he was missing from his site’s extensive, Hello!-like photos of goings-on at the Mail Online yacht, including a visit from Lord Rothermere and festivities for MO’s new spin-off in Oz; and he managed to see off a Murdoch hack’s attempt to use an iPad to film him partying (though what exactly occurred is disputed). But the first red-carpet image of Clarke did appear in the Australian, and from now on every other organ on three continents will be targeting him; hopefully he will turn up in their versions of Sideboob Alley, whether getting red or emotional at a reception, or (as with the Mirror’s pics of the Sun’s Jeremy Clarkson) looking chubby or wearing ill-advised clothing on the beach. Game on!
✒ Correcting the Times’s misreporting of his remarks to Jon Snow in a C4 News pre-retirement interview, Jeremy Paxman wrote to the paper on Friday to point out that when he said “I hate this place” he meant not the BBC but “the new building in Portland Place” (where he and Snow were talking). Whereas he was “proud to have worked at the BBC for decades”, Paxo went on, New Broadcasting House is “every bit as hubristic, absurd and uncomfortable as the BBC series W1A suggested. It is also much grubbier.” Could it have been hygiene, previously an unsuspected motive, that finally pushed the great man over the edge?
✒W1A, meanwhile, appears to be still continuing, but in reality rather than on screen. Among the daily fresh instances of “real W1A”, Monkey was particularly struck by an article in the BBC in-house journal Ariel revealing that the NBH hot-desking crisis experienced by Hugh Bonneville’s character in the sitcom is now so acute and stressful – one interviewee says there’s “no chance” of getting a hot desk after 9.30am – that the beleaguered BBC manager in charge is proposing “to make them bookable”. As this would entail a booking system and “tracking people who are using the desks more than they should be” (and presumably employing trackers and desk-bouncers to make sure they don’t), the piece seems right to suggest that it spells the end of the dream of “flexible working”.
✒It was hard not to enjoy Radio Times TV editor Alison Graham’s giant harrumph attacking the idea that Twitter now wields more influence than pro reviewers (Twitter “is really just yelling down an empty lift shaft … it can only react. Critics are the influential ones. WE are the ones who start the conversation”). Great fun, and not the least bit puffed-up, yet Monkey can’t help feeling her time would be better spent alerting her reckless editor Ben Preston to the perils of The Curse of the Radio Times. Despite warnings here based on the sudden, RT-spurred exits of Jeremy Paxman and Roy Keane, Preston went ahead with a Steven Gerrard cover for last week’s issue (depicting the England captain as scoring and, oh dear, yelling “now bring on Uruguay!”) and the rest, as they say, is misery.
✒ With Glastonbury at the end of this week, some will be looking forward to a resumption of hostilities between presenter Lauren Laverne and Jack White. Laverne upset the retro rocker, who warms the Saturday night crowd up for Metallica, at a previous Worthy Farm appearance by making a joky remark about him “looking elfin”. White “started screaming, using horrendous personal swear words”, she recalled in an interview, and became “more and more angry, like he was going to explode. Then he just stomped off.” Round two sounds more appealing than two hours of Metallica’s relentless thrash metal.
