A question thrown up while MPs were arguing over gay marriage is whether fundamentalist Christian teachers should have a legal right to propagate creationism in the classroom. This cropped up while opponents of gay marriage were fighting a rearguard action to ensure that any religious group or individual with a religious objection to gay marriage was protected from anti-discrimination law.

'But what’s the point?' Paxman asks Peake. 'You’re just drifting around, aren’t you?'

Chris Evans will take on the Today programme and Christian O'Connell for best breakfast show at the Sony Awards.

Tony Hall, the new BBC Director-General, has pledged to end a culture of excessive redundancy payments for executives and promised that he will not accept a pay-off if he fails in the post.

Broadcaster Eddie Mair has dismissed reports that he could be in line for Jeremy Paxman's Newsnight job following his gruelling inquisition of Boris Johnson.

"Are you looking for a job?" James Naughtie asked Dame Ann Leslie on Radio 4's Today, a note of panic in his voice. Now there's an idea. As one of the programme's guest editors, Leslie, the veteran foreign correspondent who famously went to war in a fur coat, arrived like a blast of cold air in a sticky sauna. You can imagine plenty of previous guests proffering feature ideas cobbled together by their agents, but not Leslie. She was first in the office, her sleeves rolled up and ready to kick some serious butt.

The Independent's media editor on the search for an outsider to wipe the slate clean after the Newsnight ‘paedophile’ report and Entwistle’s resignation

At least a dozen senior BBC executives have left or changed their roles as a result of the abuse scandal.

These are the darkest of days for the BBC. Weeks after the corporation was plunged into turmoil and self-recrimination over the decision to pull a Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile, it is paying an even bigger price for having compensated for its caution by reacting in the opposite way; rushing out another Newsnight programme on child abuse, this time accusing an unnamed "senior Tory" who we now all believe was intended to be Lord McAlpine.

What's going on?

25 November 2011 Newsnight editor Peter Rippon gives the all-clear for investigation into claims that Jimmy Savile abused children.

You can't hear some presenters without wishing they'd shut up

Other, cleverer people incessantly tell me how supernaturally useless Little Ed is in every way, and why. They dismiss the defence, by way of praising his agenda-dominating boldness (knifing Murdoch) and prescience (good capitalism vs horrid capitalism), with a withering curl of the lips. Yet despite the brutal consensus that the guy is a fatally risible hyper-nerd, the only serious flaw I can find in Ed Miliband – and even this feels too trivial to mention – is that he happens to be Ed Miliband.

For all the good that his 'relaunch' will do him, Miliband might as well have spoken in Klingon