It’s a light! It’s a fan! It’s both! And it’s powered by my USB port. Essential for dark nights in the tropics. Quentin brought it back from the Antipodes. It’s badged by Intel. Perhaps they’re getting out of the chip business.

You may remember an idiotic BBC Panorama ‘expose’ of the terrible threat to our children posed by Wi-Fi networks. Here’s Wellington Grey’s useful graphical summary of Panorama‘s investigative methodology.

From Guardian Unlimited…

Seeking to popularise business stories and taking the consumer’s point of view has led to lapses in impartiality at the BBC and has provided ammunition for critics to accuse the corporation of “dumbing down” its business journalism, according to an independent report published today…

What’s this? Ideas in the Daily Telegraph ! Pardon me while I lie down in a darkened room.

The great merit of the Torygraph in the old days was that it was a terrific read — especially if you were interested in the more sordid kind of court case, sports and crosswords — and entirely devoid of any attempt to improve your mind. Sigh. How times change. The marmalade was thicker in those days, too. Have I told you about the Boer War, by the way…?

Thanks to Bill T for the discovery.

Amazing thing, this Internet. I’ve just had a phone call from Anthony Holden, a good friend I haven’t seen in ages, because he’d noticed that I’d quoted him in my post about mismanagement at Channel 4. He kindly pointed out that the Chairman of that benighted channel is Luke Johnson, not Johnston (now corrected — see below). The really interesting thing, though, is that Tony — who despite being a great emailer from earliest days could never be described as geeky — is now a driving force behind a site devoted to poker, one of his abiding obsessions and a subject on which he has written a couple of good books. Not only that but one of his sons has developed Dropping Knowledge, an ingenious site devoted to “the promotion of international understanding and the promotion of art and culture”.

It’s weird what’s happening at Channel 4. A channel which began as the most innovative and interesting experiment in modern broadcasting history has become unbelievably tacky. Following on the fiasco of the racist exchanges on Big Brother comes this.

Graphic images of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, are to be made public for the first time next week in a Channel 4 documentary that has been condemned as ‘grossly intrusive’ and bound to cause distress to Princes William and Harry.

One photograph shows Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor, Frederic Mailliez, who had been travelling in the other direction and who had not yet realised the identity of his famous patient. It is clear that the princess has been thrown forward into the footwell behind the driver’s seat. At the front of the car, a passing student is shown trying to help Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana’s bodyguard….

My mate Tony Holden, who knows about these things, is quoted in the same article as saying:

‘It’s grossly intrusive and beyond the bounds of anything remotely tasteful, and will no doubt upset her sons enormously.’

Holden said he was aware that such pictures existed but that the media had acted responsibly in self-censoring them. ‘One has heard about British journalists looking at them and not only refusing to publish them but wiping them from the system so people in the office could not be voyeuristic. I didn’t think anyone would sink so low as to broadcast or publish them,’ he said.

My guess is that there’s something seriously wrong with the top management in Channel 4. Luke Johnston Johnson, the Chairman, is a restaurant entrepreneur, not a broadcaster. Andy Duncan, the Chief Executive, is a cheeky chappie who goes around dressed like a financially-challenged undergraduate. Both seem to have tin ears for public disquiet. Both probably believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. They’re wrong.

Accurate, stinging assessment by Marina Hyde of Channel 4’s ludicrous hypocrisy about those racist interludes on the last series of Big Brother…

The overriding sense one gets from reading the report and listening to the various reactions of involved parties is the staggering and unabashed contempt in which the viewer is held. In Martin Amis’s novel Yellow Dog, the staff on the tabloid it features refer to readers, quite straightfacedly and at all times, as “wankers”. A circulation dip means the paper has “lost wankers”. A new feature called “Wankers’ Wives” is suggested. As record complaints banked up at Channel 4 in January, one can honestly imagine executives rubbing their hands with glee that another load of “wankers” had stoked the ratings even higher.

Naturally the channel’s director of television, Kevin Lygo, was careful to avoid creating this precise impression when mouthing a few platitudes following Thursday’s judgment. But perhaps he’d care to revisit the interview he granted to Broadcast magazine in late January – several days after he had been privately notified of the incidents that have now come to light – in which he explained that the race row had saved the show from being dull.

“This was in danger of being the most boring Big Brother that we’d had in many years, maybe even ever,” he prattled to the trade journal, whose readers are presumably deemed savvy enough to “get” how this kind of controversy can be a good thing. He added that Channel 4 had “made the right decisions all the time”.

Positively wafting off the pages of Ofcom’s report is the sense that both Channel 4’s and Endemol’s cultures are terminally introverted and smug. Yet both companies’ delusions of even basic professional competence should be shattered by their staff’s apparent inability to distinguish between media mischief and entirely justified suspicions on behalf of the people who pay their wages that four venal halfwits had been bandying about the word “Paki” in the name of light entertainment…