Thursday, December 4, 2014

Re-gifting

A frustrating evening for BBC Director of Television Danny Cohen. In his new role as Ivanhoe to Lord Hall's Lionheart, he made an impassioned plea to the squires and varlets of the Press, while dispensing Christmas mead, for support in the run-up to Charter renewal - and then got the social media hump when he saw the front page on the left.

I offer below some of the tweets between Danny and the Mirror's deputy TV editor, Mark Jefferies, with interventions from showbusiness editor Tom Bryant. Mark missed out on the mead, and filed his story from Down Under, where he is a guest of ITV's I'm a Celebrity. Please scan through - and stay with me...
























From my point of view, this is not a way to move forward with one of the few papers that will generally back the BBC, and Danny needs to calm down. It is, as he says, an annual chestnut from Fleet Street, but a good press team would have a better rebuttal than "lazy" and "poor".

And actually, the BBC story isn't that bad. The headline figure is a total for repeats across the four big channels - BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4.

The Mirror's stats show BBC1 at 47% repeats, up from 30% last year - but ITV is up from 28% to 57%, and Channel 4 is up from 59% to 72%, with BBC2 stable at 72%.

My issue is not enough repeats. No sign in my schedule of the odd Marx Brothers or Fred and Ginger movie to aid a festive doze.

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