There’s a nice interview with Radio 4 controller, Mark Damazer, in today’s Media Guardian. You can read the online version here.
The piece has an accompanying photo, but the version on the website is a little small. It’s worth having a look at the newspaper one for a few more interesting titbits!
For example, Damazer has a big file on his desk marked “Sony Radio Academy Awards 2009: Station of the Year – Under 300,000” – evidently the category he judged this year. So staff at BBC Hereford and Worcester might want to send a special something to him this Christmas (I may be wrong, but judges don’t tend to shout about the categories they’ve judged for the Sonys).
Next to that are a couple of binders marked “RAJAR” and “Latest RAJAR”. Given that we’re told in the piece that “Some much-loved programmes are on the brink of having to go” wouldn’t you just love to see what programmes have red underlining them?
There’s a nice big copy of a book called “Legal Guidelines for BBC Staff”. Perhaps this was pulled off the shelf recently when the Andy Kershaw episode of On The Ropes was stopped at the last minute?
I realise that PRs tend to come in and rearrange bookshelves for these sorts of portraits (and this one was by Eamonn McCabe no less), but other titles are fun to see.
Green Living for Dummies is interesting, and My Father: Reith of the BBC is of course there coming just after the end of this year’s excellent Reith lectures. BBC Security correspondent, Frank Gardener’s latest book is there too.
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman isn’t a title I’m aware of: perhaps it’s going to be a Classic Serial sometime soon? It was referred to during a recent Radio 3 programme Correspondence, and there was a 2002 documentary about the man on Radio 4.
Uncertain Vision is a recent examination of John Birt and Greg Dykes time at the Beeb. Curiously it sits alongside a long out of print biography of Joseph Chamberlain by one Enoch Powell.
Finally, the last book I can clearly make out is, perhaps rather appropriately, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain.
It’s all rather fun isn’t it?
[Updated to correct some rather embarrassing misspellings of Damazer’s surname]