Sir Peter Bazalgette – known simply as “Baz” to colleagues and so many others across the creative industries over which he has towered for the past four decades – recently stood down as Chair of ITV, marking the end of another chapter in his long career.
It’s 6:00pm in London and I’m watching CNN. In Washington, before Trump has finished an insane, incendiary speech about election fraud, his supporters have moved off and started assaulting the Capitol building. This is an extraordinary, deranged Bastille moment. I’m WhatsApping my American friends in the US and UK. They’re already viewing. But US media are outside the building… what’s going on inside?
“Great fears of the Sicknesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.” The very first mention of the plague in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, on 30 April 1665. Fast forward 355 years and there’s this on 11 January on the ITV News site: “Health authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan are reporting the first death from a new type of coronavirus.”
Up early to listen to radio news in the shower before I turn on for my daily dose of Good Morning Britain. Pay debates rumble on in the media kasbah.
The day after Carrie Gracie resigned as the BBC’s China editor, here she is presenting Radio 4’s Today, but barred from curating the news story about herself. A magnificent confusion worthy of Evelyn Waugh or David Lodge at their best.
The item itself is less than helpful, since the programme’s guest doesn’t seem to know the difference between equal pay and the gender pay gap.
Burns, who stands down from Channel 4 later this month, told an audience of senior broadcasters, MPs and producers that its not-for-profit structure continues to be successful.
Since his appointment in 2009, when the UK economy was on its knees, Channel 4 had delivered consistent yearly growth in advertising revenue, he pointed out.
Burns reiterated his opposition to privatising Channel 4, an option back on the Government’s agenda.
However, he said it was worth considering if the broadcaster should make a fixed financial return to the state.
Did the broadcasters’ coverage of the last general election actually determine its outcome? This was one of the key questions asked during what session chair Martha Kearney called an “inquest” into how television handled the run-up to polling day on 7 May.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg certainly thought so. He argued that there was too much of a focus on the possibility of a Labour/SNP tie-up and this “had two very big consequences. One, it had a determining factor on the outcome.
John Whittingdale is a conundrum. A politician who can seem old beyond his 55 years, he has been in Parliament since 1992, nine years longer than David Cameron. And, although only a few years older than his boss, Whittingdale’s style and political heritage are soundly late-Thatcher era, with a voting record that is pro-fox hunting and anti-gay marriage.
Yet, the freshly minted Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport also confounds stereotypes of the shire fogey with a mild interest in Gilbert and Sullivan.
Apparently, I've not contributed a diary since 2010. Perhaps I only get invited in election years. In May 2010, I was also asked to review the different channels' election coverage by The Guardian.
On that occasion, I called it decisively for Sky News. ITN was fine but less dramatic. And the BBC, with its ship-of-fools party and an over-academic Vernon Bogdanor and a swingometer that couldn't cope with a three-way race and, and, and...
