Media: The Word on the Street

THE FINAL straw for the BBC's sports coverage supposedly came when the corporation lost test match cricket to Channel 4. Surely, after the weekend's events, it is time the person who lost the cricket to C4 got a major promotion? Channel 4 has so far shown just three tests. England lost two and drew one. Sky boasts that it has an unblemished test match record with the England team. Every domestic test it has shown, England has won. Admittedly, it's only shown one domestic test, but hey, given the England team's talent for defeat, that's one more victory than the channel has any right to expect.

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PERHAPS THE cricket has got the whole of Channel 4 down. What other logic could explain the channel's decision this week to launch its autumn programming season on a Sunday? It gave no advance warning to journalists, there was no star-filled launch party like other channels, it just sneaked out press releases to half-empty newspaper offices. Surely it can't be that ashamed of its new shows? Most newspapers managed to carry small stories on some upcoming programmes, but how things have changed: the Daily Mail didn't write a word on the new season, even though there's a new series on pornography in history and a sex-obsessed game show hosted by Denise Van Outen.

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OH DEAR. Channel 5 and Broadcast magazine were so close to making up and then they blew it. Earlier this summer, Channel 5 chief executive David Elstein personally cancelled 78 subscriptions to the magazine and banned Channel 5 ads from appearing in the weekly. He was apparently miffed after Broadcast said that the channel had contributed to British broadcasting about as much as Nato had contributed to Serbian broadcasting. A rapprochement was planned at last Wednesday's Channel 5 autumn season launch. Broadcast's editor Steve Clarke went personally and everyone was jolly nice to each other. Then Thursday's Broadcast contained an article by Mr Clarke accusing Channel 5 of being all marketing and no programmes. It also said that its programming director Dawn Airey would be a disaster if, as tipped, she got the job to run BBC 1. A fresh round of recriminations has begun.

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THE PRESENCE of Katie Derham as chair of a session at the Edinburgh Television Festival entitled "News and the Cult of Personality" smacks of an irony by-pass taking place among the organisers. Ms Derham is ITN's media and arts correspondent and has had some shifts newsreading. She is also, through no fault of her own, the object of her very own personality cult. The acolytes in this cult are tabloid editors who have managed to write about the attractive 28-year-old reporter no less than 56 times in a little over a year. She has been declared the winner of a supposed "battle of the news girls", and one tabloid editor is described as "besotted" with her. So there should be plenty of coverage of that session then.