Today’s Most Entertaining Media Stories

Two stories have tickled me today from Broadcast magazine (“The Voice of British Broadcasting” – but mostly TV. Radio’s on p14 folks!):
Ian Wright has “quit” as a BBC pundit. He’s claiming that the BBC’s coverage of football is too stuffy. And he feels as though he’s the “comedy jester” of the team. In response, the BBC said “we wish Ian Wright all the best in his career with TalkSport” which is rather dry… I rather suspect that the reason that Wright is “quitting” is because his BBC gig has basically ended now that the BBC has no live football to broadcast. Yes, there’s Euro 2008 coming up, but Wright’s TalkSport gig might have precluded him from taking part in that anyway. So all in all, a little disingenuous?
The other utterly bizarre news is that those doyens of daytime television, Richard and Judy, who had previously announced the end of their spell with Channel 4, are now moving to… wait for it… UKTV!
Really?
Yup. They’ll be on an as yet unannounced new UKTV channel and will be appearing on a daily chat show from later this year and all of next year. Quite what this channel is, remains unclear. You’d expect it to appear on Freeview as well as Sky and cable, but there’s not really an obvious channel choice. UKTV currently only has Dave as a 24 hour channel having bumped UKTV History into a daytime only slot.
It’s possible that they could remove UKTV History from Freeview altogether, but given that there’s surely some significant investment being put into Richard and Judy, they’d probably want to get an early evening repeat of the show on air, so unless they can grab some extra capacity from another channel, I don’t know what they’re planning to do. All will undoubtedly be revealed.


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