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!