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.