Talk of the Trade

Executive exit

GREG DYKE and Sir Christopher Bland may have decided to leave London Weekend Television following Granada's takeover, but the other senior executives want to stay on. Behind the scenes there is fury at the way Mr Dyke, in particular, has gone - leaving the rest of the staff and directors to cope as best they can - in spite of Granada's extensive attempts to woo him.

Melvyn Bragg said yesterday: 'I am staying. As far as I know, everybody else is.'

Granada's Charles Allen, now chief executive of both companies, has been having amicable initial briefings with top programming staff, and a more formal meeting has been called for next week.

Auntie's accounts

UNLESS the White Paper on the BBC suffers the same fate as the White Paper on privacy and the press (shredded last week after the Prime Minister ordered a rethink), it will be out after Easter and retreat from an earlier insistence that the BBC's transmission network be privatised. But it will demand that the BBC should have a transparent accounting system preventing commercial activities from being subsidised by the licence fee. This is the sort of area that a heavyweight new governor, the banker Sir David Scholey, should be au fait with.

Ghoulish glossy

A MAGAZINE devoted to murder, Killers, will be launched next week as publishers cash in on the British public's seemingly insatiable thirst for the macabre. The glossy bi-monthly will home in on classic cases, providing lurid details about crimes, manhunts and trials.

As well as focusing on John Duffy, the Railway Monster of the Eighties, the first issue gives readers the chance to win murder books worth pounds 100 in a competition in which they are asked to match five murders with their locations.

Although the editor, John Sanders, said the magazine, produced by Headway Home and Law, would not be covering the Gloucester case for legal reasons, the backlog of past murders would take the title well into the next millennium.