Bunting

Be careful what you wish for. An incandescent Daily Mail editorial this morning rips into the BBC again for the coverage of the Jubilee pageant on the Thames - and, in a magnificent handbrake turn, says it would be a disgrace if Ed Richards of Ofcom was appointed as the organisation's next Director-General.

A wise man of my acquaintance points out that the BBC production team clearly decided in advance that the flotilla concept was intrinsically too slow, and thus tarted it up with a series of BBC-organised fairground sideshows. This is in tune with the current preference of BBC1 to "showcase" the UK through kaleidoscopic glasses manufactured by the apparent success of The One Show, where all human life is falls into three categories.  It's odd; or it's something that needs to be explained slowly but shallowly; or it's a plug.

The Mail's editorial fails to recognise that the Jubilee coverage "problem" lies, editorially, with the internal candidates, who, admittedly at arm's length, would have known what to expect when they lined up the teams for the various big events.  The Sunday was always going to be Jubilee Lite.