Monday 12 November 2012
If John Humphrys gets near Tim Davie, the acting BBC DG will be gone by the weekend
From now on, I look forward to anyone who's too flustered and incompetent to handle the questions put to them by BBC interviewers simply stalking ill-manneredly off the set, citing the corporation's acting DG as their role-model.
As Kirstie Allsop tweeted: Someone give that poor lamb some media training.
Comes across as the type who should really be flogging time-share apartments. What a frightfully unpleasant chap!
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I think that what you are witnessing - and possibly this answers the question you raised in your earlier post as to why competent producers seem to have taken leave of their senses - is an organisation in the middle of a collective nervous breakdown. An alternative explanation is that there are two people called Davie in the BBC and in his haste Patten rang up the one in charge of the stationery cupboard.
ReplyDeleteHad you accepted Pang's offer of the job, gone off to celebrate at an all night shebeen with the Pogues and then rounded off the morning with a couple of horse tranquillisers do you think that you could possibly have turned in a more abject performance? Even a performance of The Fulminators' greatest hits would have made a more convincing case for the defence.
I suspect you're right - the Savile case appears to have driven the News directorate mad. I also suspect that having endless tiers of management in place gives organisations the wholly mistaken impression that they're being tightly-managed. As one of the performers on The Now Show pointed out today, if the programme's producer wanted to refer a joke upwards for vetting purposes, there are seven layers of management available to run it past - but, of course, that didn't stop Sachsgate.
DeleteYes, I'm pretty sure an impromptu performance by The Fulmiators would have seen Dermot Murnaghan trying to get me off camera as quickly as possible.
What got me was the studied insouciance of arriving clutching the trendy styrofoam coffee cup and the suit without a tie [was it Barrie Humphries who said this mode of dress always made you look like an alcoholic?]. At least he was not sporting the standard BBC Yassar Arafat beard stubble. But at least the McAlpine debacle has given us a respite from all these zany pictures of Savile.
ReplyDeleteThe DG job? Why not the beetle-browed Yentob? This would have the great benefit of removing him and his ghastly programmes from our screens.
For some odd reason Mark Thompson only adopted his ginger stubble after getting the DG job. I personally find red hair attractive, but it's not a good colour for chin hair, especially if it doesn't match what's on top. I notice that Davie began sporting a tie on Monday or Tuesday of last week. Good move. As for the omnipresent styrofoam tub of coffee, I'm not quite sure what that's about, as these people undoubtedly have hi-grade cappuccino machines in their outer office for their PA to operate.
DeleteActually, Yentob's not a bad idea, because we'd at last know exactly what the BBC's "Creative Director" was being paid to do, apart from making crappy, self-indulgent Cultcha programmes. His performance being interviewed by Emily Maitlis on Newsnight last week was execrable, as he sought to smear other broadcasters by claiming their head people wouldn't have resigned as honourably as Entwistle - apparently forgetting that we don't pay their executives' salaries via a poll tax.