Monkey’s attention is drawn to a name in the list of new members in the latest issue of the Society of Authors’ journal: Neville Thurlbeck, the former News of the World news editor and chief reporter, who received a six-month jail sentence for phone-hacking. It’s unclear if his book will be memoir, fiction or collected theatre criticism (he became the Surrey Comet’s scribbler in the stalls after leaving the Screws), but the prospect of Thurlbeck hobnobbing with world-famous authors at the society’s elegant bashes – its council includes the likes of AS Byatt, PD James, Andrew Motion, Philip Pullman and JK Rowling – will gladden the heart of anyone drawn to tales of sinners finding redemption.
This week sees the six-month anniversary of Radio 3 Roger Wright announcing he was off – a decision not unrelated to the appointment of Radio 2 boss Bob Shennan to the just-created post of director of music – which may represent a dazzling new record for BBC tardiness in job filling. But at least first interviews have taken place, and the word is that the contenders include two R3 presenters: Tom Service, the former Guardian chief classical music critic, and Petroc Trelawny, whose arrival from Classic FM in 1998 led to subsequent commercial incomers being known as “the Petroc Boys”. Also said to be in the running is Alan Davey, the chief executive of Arts Council England (and ex-DCMS bigwig), that is, rather than the former Hawkwind bass guitarist.
Evan Davis will start his new job as Newsnight’s main anchor on 29 September, Monkey learns, and of course will be required to personify the post-adversarial, post-Paxman approach to political interviewing proposed in a recent article by the programme’s editor Ian Katz (a piece clearly indebted to a lecture by Davis himself, which it quoted). Perhaps fortunately for him, though, he won’t be required to re-interview Rachel Reeves – celebratedly called “boring, snoring” in a Katz tweet after a party conference grilling by Paxman a year ago – and thereby put the new, gentler style – potentially even more boring – to the test of direct comparison. With peculiar timing, Davis will only come on stream for the Tories’ conference, having missed the Labour one.
Interviews are pending for the post of director general Tony Hall’s intern – as part of the Beeb’s diversity initiative, six top managers including Hall will be shadowed for a year by someone from a black, Asian or other minority ethnic background. Hopes are high that Hall’s TV supremo Danny Cohen will allow the bosses to borrow the spinning chairs from The Voice to make the selection process suitably up to date. It remains unclear whether signing a confidentiality agreement will be required, or if certain meetings will be shadow-free: all those daily chats with Alan Yentob, for example, or a network controller complaining about radio empress Helen Boaden, or (as is reported) David Dimbleby visiting Hall to secure one last hurrah as general election anchorman.
Jeremy Paxman made his final Newsnight bow by sharing a bike with Boris Johnson, and one’s sense of him turning more Tory by the day is confirmed by how he apparently spent the Scottish referendum run-in: salmon fishing on the Tweed with Sir Max Hastings, just on the English side of the border, like two Edwardian characters from a John Buchan novel. In the local pub after a day of poor returns, they met farmers who’d had an equally fruitless time at Kelso races. “Which of us had the worse day?” asked Paxman. “I bet we had less winners between us than you had fish,” said a farmer. Paxman was aghast. “Fewer! Not ‘less’ but ‘fewer than’,” he roared. After the two grandees had gone, the man he had scolded was consoled by one of his friends: “You’ve been corrected by Paxman, that’s something to tell the grandchildren.”
With political editor Tom Bradby left twiddling his thumbs until Good Morning Britain started on Friday with the result already decided (because ITV’s overnight coverage was left to STV), and the mysterious fiasco of a widely-billed Thursday-night Alastair Stewart programme that never happened, ITN scarcely covered itself in glory in its coverage of the referendum. And Geoff Hill, the editor of ITV News, is under fire internally for being overtly pro-no in a newsroom meeting with staff on the afternoon of the day of the vote: he would be “sorry” to see the union split, he surprisingly told them, admitting without apparent embarrassment that in saying this he had “given the game away”.
When acting editor Ceri Thomas emailed the remaining staff of “dead show walking” Panorama to tell them (“with extremely mixed feelings”) that deputy editor Karen Wightman was off to Al-Jazeera, some were baffled by his lengthy eulogy, but others were more stuck by the possibly telling way the ex-Today editor’s name still appears at the top of his emails. Has “Ceri Thomas – Radio News” forgotten – as another emigre from the wireless, the hapless former Newsnight editor Peter Rippon, was accused of doing - that he’s now running a television series? Or is he simply convinced the agony will be over soon?