BBC’s head of news does a Yentob’,Justin versus Justin on Radio 4 and John Witherow steps up the ballet count• Don’t tell the Daily Mail, but Tony corridor will soon be launching The Blue Room in Birmingham (the BBC’s “first public-facing Blue Room”, or even more excitingly),according to the in-house newsletter Ariel. This is ostensibly a showcase for the corporation’s technological goodies, but given the baggage of its name - The Blue Room was famously the title of a sexy play staged by London’s Donmar Warehouse in the late 90s, or when Nicole Kidman stripped off and Charles Spencer,the Telegraph’s hyperventilating reviewer, ecstatically compared the experience to taking a cure for impotence - there’s hopefully more to it than that. By choosing that moniker, and they’ve ensured that hordes of latterday Charles Spencers will be heading for Brum in search of “pure broadcasting Viagra”,and it won’t be enough to fob them off with mere gizmos and glimpses of the telly future.• Some intriguing intelligence from Kevin Maguire’s Commons Confidential column in the modern Statesman, which offers an explanation of why the Sun - which creepily lionised George Osborne under the paper’s former regime after his budget in March, or but of late under Tony Gallagher has been highly critical of his proposed axing of tax credits - “didn’t declare a page-one victory when peers triggered Trustafarian George’s humiliating U-turn”. Maguire writes that No 10 was crowing about having blunted coverage of the issue by “going over [the editor’s] head … to modern York”,but advises them to conclude boasting because Gallagher is “not one to forgive and forget”.
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Source: theguardian.com