Thommo's MacTaggart won't reference BBC3 tit docs

It gets worse. I arrived at our hotel-cum-1950s-boarding house at 9pm last night, after finally worming my way onto a connection from Stansted, only to be met by a message asking me to ring Lucinda immediately. With a sinking feeling I did just that and learned that my business/dance partner will not be coming to the ball, having suffered a frozen shoulder while reclining on her sofa watching the lunatics in the Ultimate Big Brother asylum.

The first thing I did on receiving the news was to ring H and ask her to get me an upgrade, reasoning that if I was going to suffer this ghastly farrago alone, then at least I should do so with a measure of comfort. By midnight, miracle of miracles, I was safely ensconced in an executive double in The Glasshouse and was feeling more reconciled to my lot. But this morning, as I munched my way through a traditional Scottish breakfast, a shadow fell across my table and I looked up, mouth full of potato scone, to find Roy Ackerman asking to join my table (in an otherwise deserted restaurant). It was a full quarter hour before I could extricate myself, a very long 15-minutes indeed in which Roy name-dropped Channel 4’s new haircut (or DA as he calls him) even times and Saint Jamie a round dozen. Eventually I simply got up, while Roy was mid-sentence, and, citing an urgent call of nature, walked away.

Having taxi-ed over to the conference centre to register early, and avoid running into any more ‘Roys’, I am now back at my hotel, writing this and leafing through the festival brochure. It is only now that the difficulty of negotiating the weekend without Lucinda to support me is starting to sink in. Tonight I’ll have to enter the McEwan Hall naked and alone for The Bishop’s MacTaggart Lecture, running the gauntlet of nudges, stares and whispers. In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be seen dead amongst the back-stabbers and smiling assassins, but Natasha from Newsnight has already rung to confirm my availability this evening and if I blow her out there is no way that Luce will swallow my significantly enlarged hotel bill. I could try and wangle a copy of the speech from the festival press office, but the thought of sticking my head in that bear pit makes my blood run cold. There is nothing for it, but to go and listen to The Bishop preach first hand.

And boy will he preach. No doubt he has been squirreled away in the Bodleian for most of August, dusting down his best Matthew Arnold quotes and working up an elaborate central metaphor, comparing the BBC to some pillar of Athenian democracy (and managing to obliquely equate Cash in the Attic to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the process). There will be copious mentions of Attenborough and The Proms and the more donnish elements of BBC4’s output and no acknowledgement whatsover of all the Holby-style guff and Canny D’s tit docs.

Whisper it ever so quietly, but I have a soft spot for the DG, despite the cant and the arrogance. He courted me pretty assiduously during the fall-out to the Queengate affair, when it looked like Jana Mouskouri might have to be locked in a Broadcasting House edit suite with a Glock pistol and a stiff measure of scotch (it was only the BBC's inability to match my terms that saved her bacon). And there is something I find endearing about his creative insecurity (according to Thommo, he is responsible in part or in full for just about every half decent programme idea to come out of the corporation since the 1980s and most of Channel 4’s BAFTA winners from the noughties,

But even I am forced to wonder whether he is cut out to be leading the Beeb at this crucial juncture. The forces conspiring to fatally weaken the dear old girl are stronger than at any time in her history and it will require an inspired general to defeat them. But like the Highlanders in Braveheart refusing to face down the English cavalry under the command of the Scottish nobility, the BBC's foot soldiers are rebelling against their commander.

Thommo has reached the top of the BBC's labyrinthine bureaucracy thanks to the sort of sinuous, serpentine management skills that would have blossomed in The Vatican under Cesare Borgia, but I fear the time has passed when the corporation is well served by intriguing and politicking, obfuscation and the endless protection of self interest. What is needed is a fundamental and above all honest reappraisal of its size and creative purpose in a fully digital world. But honesty is the last qualtiy we can expect from the man who swore blind he had no interest in becoming Director General a mere matter of weeks before he did so and, to make matters worse, blamed Sonia Gandhi's 'inner voice' when confronted with his lie.

Preparing for the hell of MGEITF by flying Ryanair

If you are about to take leave of your senses and enter the seventh circle of 21st Century hell - also known as the Media Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival - then what better way to prepare yourself for the inferno than flying Ryanair.

I am sitting writing this in what passes for a bar in Biarritz Airport, having just been fleeced of an additional €40 by one of Michael Ryan’s fork-tailed minions, for failing to check-in online in advance for my return flight. To make matters worse, as I sat sulphurous with rage after this brush with a very modern devil, I glanced up at the departures board to be informed that my flight to Stansted was delayed by three hours, meaning I will miss my intended connection north. Having shat in my mouth, the spawn of Satan is forcing me to swallow it.

And what further mortifications await me in bonny Scotland? The last time I attended the festival, after Hincks begged me for moral support in his first year as festival chair, I had a suite at the Sheraton. This time, with Luce controlling the purse strings, we are staying in a small family hotel so close to the airport that they may tannoy us to come down to breakfast.

The whole weekend will be a chastening reminder of my changing circumstance. When your commissioning budget runs to nine figures, as mine did not so very long ago, then you are a very big beast indeed in the Edinburgh undergrowth; like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, you can disturb the surface of a hundred glasses of sauvignon blanc just by coming within half a mile of the bar of The George Hotel. You may combine Steve Hewlett’s waistline with Alex Graham’s hairline, but you’ll still attract admiring glances and awe-struck whispers from the desperate crowd of networkers as you sweep by.

But this year, for the very first time, I will be joining the milling throng of desperate supplicants, pretending to listen to the gripes and grumbles of my fellow producers while scanning the room out of the corner of my eye searching for anyone with even a passing resemblance to a commissioning editor. I will have to endure the endless smirks of my fellow indies – the sort of c-graders that I've managed to keep off my lunch list for the last thirty years - as they inquire how I am finding life on their side of the fence. For some reason, the laundry scene from The Shawshank Redemption keeps popping into my head.

I begged Luce not to make me come, but she was absolutely adamant, doubly so after the Broadcast profile she was counting on fell through (despite the assurances of some thirteen-year-old at Freuds that it was ‘in the bag’). I have explained to her that barely anyone that matters goes to Edinburgh these days – most BBC executives don’t want ‘mini bar at the Caledonian’ popping up in the Mail’s next account of corporation expenses and the Channel 4 lot don’t see the point since the Soho House closed its doors. But Luce waved aside my protests, insisting we need to raise our profile and let anyone and everyone know that Admirable Productions is open for business. She has me lined up to offer Newsnight a comment after The Bishop’s opening night sermon and is egging me on to ask a question at the Post MacTaggart Q&A the following morning.

It will only take The Bearded One to pretend not to recognise me, as I stand there mic in hand beneath the house lights, like a right Rodney, and my ritual humiliation will be complete.

Pat Llewellyn's big glass box and the cash splashing out of her wazoo

The one thing I didn’t spot nestling amongst the knickers and the gin as I rifled through Lucinda’s luggage on Friday morning was the 'Paper Brick', a.k.a Admirable Productions 10-year Business Plan. She dropped it in my lap at the most unwelcome moment late yesterday afternoon, just as the sun was losing its sting and E and I were gathering our energies to mosey on down to the tennis court in the village for a set or two in front of the disapproving stares of the local pétanquists. “I think you better stay here and do your homework,” Lucinda said, appropriating my racquet and balls and putting a faintly predatory arm around E, who shrank from her visibly. My first instinct was to tell her to shove her monstrous document very firmly where the sun hasn’t shone since Bill the Banker left her, but then I reflected on whose divorce settlement was bankrolling this whole independent production malarkey (thanks Bill!) – at least until a commission or two is forthcoming – and I decided to bite my tongue and knuckle down to my reading with what little grace I could muster.

It’s not exactly a secret that I don’t really do strategy. The extent of my forward planning during three decades in television has been leaving room for pudding. So to say I found the work heavy going is the mother of all understatements. The turgid, Birtian prose numbed my brain, the endless charts and spreadsheets swam before my eyes. By the time Luce and E returned from my game of tennis (she puce and impossibly sweaty, he like Kurtz after confronting 'the horror') I was fit for murder.

“Who wrote this awful shit?” I demanded of her, not bothering to wait until poor E was out of earshot. “Damian did,” she barked back, anticipating my mood and ready for combat. “And he’s not expecting to be paid for it so you could be a little bit more grateful.” Damian is one of Horsman’s protégés who has somehow attached himself to Luce in Bill’s absence; he’s typical of the wonkish, asexual little worms that have infested the BBC and Channel 4 with a plague of PowerPoint presentations over the last few years.

Oh, he’s expecting to be paid for it all right, I thought, but restricted myself to saying, “Hasn’t he heard of an executive summary?” At that, Luce stomped off in a tremendous bate, leaving me simmering, but she came back in half an hour, in a more emollient mood, after a shower and with a good slug of gin inside her. “Just leave the business plan to me,” she said, making the wicker creak as she leaned her considerable weight on the back of my chair, “but please don’t say we don’t need one. Get this wrong and you’ll be living hand to mouth from one Dispatches to the next, putting all your assets in your wife’s name for fear of going into liquidation and shopping at Morrisons.”

“Good God!” I shuddered.

“Precisely, darling. But get this right and we could be Pat Llewellyn, with so much money gushing out of her 'wazoo' she can afford to blow a million quid building an impossibly large glass box on the back of her house to showcase her impossibly tall, impossibly bald and impossibly grumpy husband and still have enough left over to buy up most of southern Wales.”

At that, Luce went inside, leaving me with plenty to ponder, including the shape and scope of my favourite Welsh woman’s ‘wazoo’. I love Pat, but I think Tim Hincks may be a better, more gender appropriate role model for me. Now where can I buy a beige Nehru jacket and a fluffy white cat?

You won't find me on Hen Con's Twitter List

Lucinda arrived last night, long after midnight, just as we had almost given up on her and were about to drag ourselves away from the Scrabble board and off to bed.

Having turned down Mrs O’s very generous offer to collect her from the airport, Lucinda contrived to take more than nine hours to make the 80km trip via train and taxi. This does not augur well for Admirable Productions, given that she is supposed to be the business brain in our new partnership.

Clearly drunk on arrival, Luce made great play of “bearing gifts”. This morning, however, as she lay snoring like Hogzilla, I went through her luggage and her largesse appears to extend no further than a litre bottle of Bombay Sapphire (for her personal consumption over the next week) and an extremely dog-earred copy of last week’s Broadcast magazine. (She has also, incidentally, brought an improbably large quantity of lingerie in a variety of sizes and colours! Ye gods. Who or what is she planning to pull?)

Who should I see staring back at me from just below the masthead but Hen Con, looking like Skeletor's daughter run amok in a cosmetics store. Either Broadcast had blown its entire photography budget on airbrushing this single photo or its subject had spent the best part of a day in make-up, because dear Henrietta looked not a day over 32, apart from her neck which looked about a fortnight shy of fifty.

The accompanying profile was so gushing, I nearly yakked last night’s roasted vegetables back onto the patio (when did Broadcast turn into the TV industry’s equivalent of Hello! Magazine btw?). The Queen of Queensway (or was that Sebastian?) was described as having ‘legendary people skills’, but these don’t extend apparently to wasting time maintaining relations with people that are no longer useful to her (try finding yours truly on her Twitter list!). She may well be a “world class schmoozer” but she has sometimes flirted with the lower leagues as a producer (Sofa Melt, anyone?).

If those lickspittles at Broadcast wish to regain an ounce of credibility, I suggest the next time this painted lady submits herself for interview they restrict themselves to a single question.

So Ms Conrad, what first attracted you to the multi-millionaire, Liz Murdoch?

Dirty Des, Dawn and her love of all things fornicatory

Fuck me sideways with a rolled up copy of OK magazine (complete with DVD cover mount of Katie Price’s Topless Pilates).

In a bid to keep my wife sweet, I have ostentatiously kept my new iPhone switched off since we arrived in Armagnac (not really any sort of sacrifice, if truth be told, seeing as without H on hand to help me I couldn’t work out how to turn it on) and have therefore been bereft of news from home.

However, I managed to get online for the first time in nearly three weeks this morning, while the Right Hon. Mrs O was down in the village bartering furiously for fresh baguette at the Hereux Acheteur, having finally swallowed my pride and bribed the Little Madam to show me how to operate the infuriating gizmo (at the cost of two tickets to Lady Gaga at the O2 in December).

And what do I find? The boys and girls back home are all a Twitter over the takeover of the channel formerly known as Five by Dirty Des and his henchmen (pictured above bidding a fond farewell to Five's erstwhile owners at RTL). There is even, miracle of miracles, a message from Dawn, apologising for missing my leaving do (for a rendezvous with her latest baby mother, no doubt) and offering to buy me lunch on her corporate Amex before the big Dick gets his sticky fingers on it.

From what I can tell, sitting pool side next to a six-foot inflatable plastic swan and squinting into a screen the size of a fag packet under the blazing southern French sun, the industry’s reaction to Dirty Des buying his way onto terrestrial top table is much the same as if he’d dropped his trousers and taken a dump onstage at the VLV’s autumn conference. But then the television industry has always been appallingly sniffy about being owned or managed by anyone who is a) good at making money b) has never produced a programme (preferably a long boring one about something ineffably dreary) and, c) didn’t work at LWT or the BBC in the 1970s or 1980s.

Now a certain level of squeamishness about the porn thingy is understandable, but I hate to remind those with short memories that it was the old rat mother himself, G. Reg Dyke, who suggested erotica to stiffen Five’s late night schedules in his successful bid for the licence back in the mid 1990s. G.Reg has gone on to be canonised (the patron saint of chippy bastards and BBC pensioners everywhere), while Des is derided as a filth peddler. I guess it’s all a question of presentation.

No doubt Long Acre’s dwindling band of brothers will even now be wavering over whether to put their pride and their principles before Mr Desmond’s chequebook or to clip on their clothes pegs and take the plunge to Lower Thames Street. However much she may bitch about it over lunch at The Ivy, Dawn is surely a candidate to head south given her professed love for all things fornicatory (professional rather than personal). And I guess The Woolfeman will follow slavishly in his mistress’s footsteps given his lack of shame (and given that he pretty much always does). But for the rest of them? Who knows? Many will be put off by Tom Bower’s tales of Desmond’s notorious bullying and proprietorial interference, but they should look on the bright side. At least they’ll be able to tell a good Nazi joke without facing the sack.

They should also thank their pitifully diminished expense accounts that they didn’t fall into the cool, dry and highly ambitious palms of the new hairstyle over at Channel 4. Even a pornographer is ultimately preferable to a P45.

For all the froth and blether, in the end, like everything else in telly, it will all come down to the lucre, whether filthy or otherwise. In the relatively unlikely event Desmond proves to be more than empty braggadocio and coughs up enough to turn Five into a proper commissioning broadcaster once more (instead of an extended experiment with AFP*) then I suspect staff and suppliers (Admirable Productions included) will hold their noses and knuckle down. If, as many predict, the commissioning pot stays empty and Five follows the Daily Express down the path to media absurdity then at least we can console ourselves with one thought.

It will not have had far to fall.

* Advertiser funded programming (or atrocious fucking poop)

Fighting talk from the BBC’s Snork Maiden

My copy of Broadcast is hand delivered via bike just as an Addison Lee minivan arrives to take us to Stansted (H has emailed me the details of the channel’s courier and taxi accounts and I fully intend to make use of them until someone cottons on). Mrs O is scornful. She has been agitating to leave for the last thirty minutes, giving her time aplenty to trash Duty Free, and thinks her shopping time has been cut short by our wait for the magazine’s arrival. “You can read that shit online, you know,” she hisses, going to sit beside the driver and slamming the passenger door for particular emphasis.

The wait (and my wife’s displeasure) proves worth it, as to my considerable delight I find Janice Hadlow quoted prominently predicting that BBC2 will overtake Channel 4 for the number of hours of drama on air by 2012. Now, as fighting talk goes, this is hardly on a par with Achilles calling out Hector in front of the gates of Troy… the Bright Young Things at Horseferry Road are too busy competing with MTV Base, Sky Real Lives and Red Hot Fetish to pay much attention to poor old BBC Saga. And Janice has conveniently opted to exclude Hollyoaks from her calculations, which is a bit like Britain saying it has greater exports than China, excluding plastic tat.

But by Janice’s standards, this is pretty pugilistic stuff. She may look like Anne Widdecombe’s younger and prettier sister, but she has none of Doris’s renowned thirst for combat. The only thing ferocious about Janice is her intellect. She is the BBC’s Snork Maiden, the nearest thing that British television has to George from Rainbow.

Do I detect the clunking fist of The Bishop at work here? He was reported to have reduced poor Janice to a puddle during a "passionate conversation" in front of 25 startled colleagues at a BBC strategy meeting in April, saying her channel lacked identity. Perhaps she thinks that coming over a bit Lauren Cooper with her former paymasters at Horseferry Road - “Shameless? Am I bovvered?” - will get the DG off her back.

The bearded one, of course, has a penchant for throwing his considerable weight around, having driven the Beeb’s other blonde controller, Lady Kitten Heels, to distraction with his background sniping. He’s pissed her off to such an extent that she is desperately flashing her calves and whispering sweet “come-and-get-me’s” to the new haircut at Horseferry Road.

Between us girls, if I was Ms BBC1, I would be pretty pissed off that Ms BBC2 escaped a mention last year, when the former was so publicly savaged for her association with her husband’s training company. The Snork Maiden is married to one Martin Davidson, Commissioning Editor for History and Business within BBC Knowledge and a prolific supplier to BBC2. Nothing untoward there, of course. I only observe that Martin polished his credentials for such a powerful job at the BBC during a long stint at RDF Media, where he enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the history, arts and religion department under one J.Hadlow.

Fincham controlling ITV marketing is like the Taleban taking over Top Shop

Ye gods. I almost choke on my caramel macchiato as I read on mediaguardian.co.uk that ITV’s marketing head, David Pemsel, has flounced out after being asked to report to a certain Director of Television. Fincham’s head must be getting so big it’s no wonder he seems incapable of lifting his mobile to his right ear to return my fucking phone calls.

It’s been the mother of all turnarounds for Peter. I remember him ringing me from a biking holiday in some godforsaken corner of Europe shortly after the Queengate affair, weeping like a schoolgirl over the shafting that The Bishop had administered (with evident Jesuit relish), and swearing blind to me that he was done with “the liars, tarts and arseholes who run this filthy business”. And yet here he is, just three years later, spraying further largesse over the delectable Christine, commissioning more of Lambert’s cynical poop and cosying up to The Grocer and The Postman.

Now I’m not exactly renowned for my love of our Marketing brethren, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for Pemsel. For starters he has a surname that might better serve as a brand name for pile cream. And he’s been pushing water up hill for years in trying to develop a coherent brand identity for ITV, when really we all know the only logo that’s fit for purpose is a picture of Simon Cowell smashing an immaculately waxed fist into the face of your typical C2DE viewer while Ant and Deck pick their pocket from behind.

It’s true that ITV’s saccharine and frankly powder puff marketing efforts haven’t exactly been wowing the Promax juries of late, but handing over the sweetie jar to Fincham is the equivalent of letting the Taleban take over Top Shop. Because commissioners (and producers for that matter) are really the LAST PEOPLE ON EARTH to look to for a remotely objective assessment of a programme’s merits! You'd be far better off asking Paul the Octopus which shows to give the 100 TVR treatment and which to bury deep, like rotting fish heads, in the multi-channel listings where their stench will hardly register.

Besides, most programme makers interest in marketing boils down to a single, neanderthal question… can I have a poster? A poster that preferably adopts the Ronseal approach to creativity by limiting itself to revealing the programme’s title (in six foot high letters), the time and date of transmission (three foot high), the broadcasting network (one foot high) and a head shot of any recognisable talent (in whatever tiny space is left). It’s very much the Australian approach to advertising - It’s a pie! It’s got meat in it! Buy one!

Still, now I’m about to join the ranks as a humble producer and no longer have the power to veto a marketing brainwave with a quizzical arch of a single eyebrow, perhaps I ought to be celebrating this slight rebalancing of the relationship between those who make the programmes and those who merely promote them. Anything that knocks those jumped up little twats, in their cargo pants and K-Swiss sneakers, down a peg or two, is surely to be celebrated.

Monkey does not go to my leaving do

I am nursing a hangover. A small one, but a hangover nonetheless. My first since taking the pledge, at the Right Hon. Mrs O's insistence, after the incident in that Edinburgh karaoke bar the year that John Birt delivered his second MacTaggart (an event of such stultifying dullness that the only human response was to drink and drink and drink again). My mouth is dry, there is a small angry throb at both my temples and I am unaccountably anxious. In short, I feel just like I do before a meeting with Michael Foster, the smallest and angriest throb of all.

I had no intention of drinking, but by 8.45pm the bar was empty of the old, familiar faces and it was a choice of leaving my own leaving-do at least two hours earlier than is strictly respectable or having a vodka or three to see me through. So when the tall Somali girl from our diversity team - who sounds like she’s named after a Vauxhall people carrier - asked me for the umpteenth time why I wasn’t drinking, I told her I was and sent her off to the bar to get two of whatever she was having. She came back with a brace of Strawberry Mojitos and a couple of friends even darker, more desirable and less pronounceable than she is. The evening is a bit of a blur from then on, if I’m honest.

Sipping a recuperative mug of peppermint tea, I scanned Media Monkey online this morning, curious to see if any of my guests were amongst The Guardian’s roster of narks and grasses, but there wasn’t so much as a sniff. I’ll check the site again after lunch and if word still hasn’t reached King’s Place of the legendary grandiosity of my send-off, I’ll email the details myself.

Any account of the proceedings will need to gloss over the embarrassing dearth of senior industry bods in attendance at The Ivy Club last night. I thought I saw Peter Dale lurking in the shadows (looking more Gollum-ish by the day) and The Wolf Man was conspicuously present, but he hardly counts on the grounds that a) he practically lives in The Ivy b) he would attend the opening of a tin of John West salmon, and c) his commissioning pot is so small these days he makes Hamish at More4 look positively well-hung. Of the bigger beasts, Fincham had taken the precaution of sending his apologies the week before, citing an unavoidable clash with his great aunt’s birthday (a likely story, just the wrong side of insulting), but I didn’t hear a peep from Dawn or Jay or Janice and Stuart M was a no-show, despite him emailing to assure me he would be there ‘come what may’. The Channel 4 lot were out in force, as they bloody well should have been, but they’re such a bunch of thirtysomething no-marks these days I swear I can hardly put a name to a face, (aside from S, of course, who has several names for each of her faces). But the biggest disappointment was Canny D, the miserable ingrate, who I’ve known since he was jailbait. Considering how I helped him escape unscathed from the great Celebrity Big Brother debacle and the strings I pulled to get that irritating little blog shut down, a brief supportive cameo is the least I was expecting.

If anything the video testimonials were even thinner. After all the exclusivity deals I’ve signed across three different decades for four different broadcasters and all the lunches and handbags and Jo Malone gift sets I’ve bought, you’d think the bastards could find time to film a short tribute or two. So where were Ross and Ramsay, Brand and Bleakley, Clarkson and Peter Kay? Too busy counting their millions, I suspect. Justin Lee Collins, Super Hans from Peep Show and The Star Formerly Known as Carol Vorderman is NOT an acceptable ‘guard of honour’ for my passing out parade from high-ranking broadcasting executive to lowly producer.

All this won’t seem to matter quite as much once I’m sitting by the pool in Armagnac. Mrs O and I and the Little Madam fly down on Friday, Ryanair to Biarritz. E is at Tennis Camp until the 23rd, but has condescended to join us after that. Five weeks in the French sun, with only Lucinda’s visit in the second week of August threatening to slightly overshadow such a blissful prospect. She is insisting on coming down to discuss Admirable Productions longer-term strategy - or ten year plan as she is calling it - so that we’re prepped and ready for the Broadcast interview that Freud's have set up for their Edinburgh issue. I’d rather not think any ‘longer-term’ than the first citron presse at the end of Friday’s journey, but will grin and bear it in the spirit of our new partnership, although I’m not much looking forward to seeing Stalin in her swimming costume. Still, it surely can’t be quite as bad as the time I bumped into Lorraine Heggessey, wearing nothing more than an electric blue monokini, on the first day of a two week stay at Mark Warner’s in Kos.

Finding that on the sun lounger next to you would give anybody a bloody hangover!