Digital TV Blog

Jonathan Ross has kept his job in the furore surrounding the prank phone calls that saw the resignation of fellow presenter Russell Brand and Lesley Douglas, the controller of BBC 2, it emerged last night.

However, the 48 year old has been suspended from the corporation for 12 weeks - sans pay - amid the ongoing controversy. Ross is the BBC’s highest paid presenter, with a three-year £18 million contract, and it is thought that his suspension will cost him up to £1.5 million.

The phone messages to the actor Andrew Sachs, broadcast on a pre-recorded BBC Radio 2 show, included boasts from the duo that Brand had slept with his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, and suggestions that Sachs might kill himself over the revelation.

Last night the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson said Ross’s contribution to Brand’s show “was utterly unacceptable and cannot be allowed to go uncensured or without sanction.” Whilst suspending Ross was an “exceptional step”, Thompson said he believed it a “proportionate response” to the star’s behaviour, stressing that Ross was on his “final warning”. He has also come under fire in the past for suggesting that Conservative leader David Cameron might have harboured sexual fantasies about Margaret Thatcher.

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Dr Who, Eastenders and Top Gear were among the shows to be honoured at last night’s National Television Awards.

Dr Who won Most Popular Drama, beating Desperate Housewives, Shameless and The Bill. David Tennant, who plays the Doctor, also beat his on-screen sidekick Catherine Tate to win the gong for Outstanding Drama Performance in a ceremony overshadowed by his resignation from the hit show, as well as the ongoing furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s lewd phone prank. It was the forth gong in a row for Dr Who, and Tennant’s third.

It was a mixed night for Simon Cowell. Although three of the shows he fronts were nominated for Most Popular Talent Show - The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, and Dancing on Ice - it was rival Strictly Come Dancing that won the vote. But his long-serving contribution to popular TV won him a life-time achievement award, presented by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Picking up his gong, Cowell congratulated Strictly on winning the talent show category. Backstage, however, Cowell was more forthright about missing out on the gong. “It’s bad enough losing but losing to that lot is a nightmare,” he said. “I’m p***ed off. I’m not happy.”
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Producers at Channel 4 may be coming up with some four-letter words of their own, as Alexander Armstrong pulled out of a deal to host Countdown at the 11th hour. Last month the comedian, better known for his part in The Armstrong and Miller Show, was offered a contract to become the fourth presenter in the popular quiz show’s 26-year history. He had previously said that would like to follow in the footsteps of previous hosts Des O’Connor, Des Lynam and the late Richard Whiteley.

But Armstrong reportedly withdrew days after looking embarrassed when ribbed about his prospective Countdown role on BBC1’s Have I Got News For You last Friday.

Armstrong will be the third person to turn down the Countdown job, after impressionist Rory Bremner and Sky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling. His sudden withdrawal leaves Channel 4 just two months to find a suitable replacement before filming of the new series begins in the new year.

A source at Channel 4 said “It is a race against time to get someone because the series begins filming in January. We were desperate for Alexander to do it.” The Channel has said that it is currently talking to a number of people about the presenter role, but that as yet “no decision has been made”.

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Last night hairy lothario Russell Brand announced that he had flown the coop from his Radio 2 post amid controversy over calls made to Fawlty Towers star Andrew ‘Manuel’ Sachs. It emerged that Brand had enjoyed a dalliance with Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baillie, and Brand, together with Johnathan Ross called to leave a message on Sachs’ answer phone; Ross is heard exclaiming “He f**ked your granddaughter!”, barely a minute into the recording.

In a statement, Brand outlined the reasons for his departure: “I got a bit caught up in the moment and forgot that, at the core of the rude comments and silly songs, were the real feelings of a beloved and brilliant comic actor and a very sweet and big-hearted young woman.

I have apologised to Andrew Sachs and I believe he has graciously accepted my apology. I have not had the chance to apologise to Georgina yet because I’m a little bit embarrassed and I thought I might make it worse.”

The phone messages were recorded last Thursday, and were broadcast last Saturday, between the post-watershed hours 9:00 and 11:00pm, and the story has slowly picked up steam throughout the course of the week.

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David Tennant is to quit his role as Britain’s best-known time traveller Doctor Who, the BBC said on Thursday.

Tennant, who took up the role as the tenth incarnation of the Doctor in 2005, will film five more special episodes, to be broadcast in 2009, before he leaves the popular sci-fi show. He will also appear in a Christmas special later this year. There is no series scheduled for next year because of Tennant’s commitments with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He made the announcement after winning the outstanding drama performance prize at the National Television Awards last night. The nomination saw him come head to head with Catherine Tate, who plays the Timelord’s assistant Donna Noble in the show. The series also beat Desperate Housewives, Shameless and The Bill to win the Most Popular Drama award.

“I’ve had the most brilliant, bewildering and life changing time working on Doctor Who,” said Tennant, who described the part as the “best job in the world.”
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The BBC is to show scenes of an actor undergoing genuine torture during the new series of the popular show, Spooks. The drama, which tells the fictional story of a group of MI5 agents, will show the actor Richard Armitage (pictured) endure waterboarding, the infamous interrogation technique which simulates the sensation of drowning.

In the story, Armitage plays British agent Lucas North, who rejoins MI5 after spending eight years in a Russian prison. Armitage said that he had agreed to film the scene after reassurances from consultants at the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, and the CIA that waterboarding was “a humane way of extracting information without hurting people”.

However, his view changed completely after his experience. “I was strapped to a pallet and laid at an angle with a cloth placed over my mouth,” he said. “My arms and legs were tied, and we had agreed a signal that when it became too much I would bang my arms on my legs.

Dating as far back as the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding involves subjects being tied down on their backs, usually on a wooden board, with their faces covered by a permeable cloth. Water is poured on a cloth that blocks their airways, making it impossible to breathe without inhaling water. The process rapidly induces the most extreme panic in those subjected to it.

“You start to breathe in and out,” says Armitage, “but when the water just fills everywhere up it just hits you. It changed my opinion completely.

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Everyone who watches Big Brother is a drooling, brainless shuffling dimwit; that’s the premise of the new horror-thriller series Dead Set, showing all this week on E4. A zombie plague has gripped the country, and the only survivors are thought to be the cast and the crew of the Big Brother house, the usual bunch of nicely dressed, vain, pretentious, egocentric toss pitches (one character doesn’t believe that toes have bones).

Jamie Winstone (pictured) leads the cast, as TV runner Kelly, who survives the initial zombie onslaught, and then desperately tries to warn the housemates of the threat outside – of course, being Big Brother housemates, they all think it’s a wind up or some sort of task set by the production team.

Delivered from the pen of Nathan Barley and Screenwipe writer Charlie Brooker, Dead Set could have easily been a none-too-subtle satirical send up on the nature of reality TV (which is sort of is) but its more of a straight-up zombie action-packed brain-fest, or as Brooker himself says “ashamedly populist zombie-horror thriller” – there’s fake blood and plenty of it, and the gory bits are queasingly realistic.

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Television presenter Philip Schofield has denied that he “ambushed” reality TV star Kerry Katona during an interview on ITV1’s This Morning.

The presenter explained that he and co-host Fern Britton had not meant to cause offence in the live television interview when they referred to Katona’s slurred speech and erratic behaviour.

Speaking on the Chris Moyles Show on Radio 1, Schofield said that the star was “obviously very, very angry with us” for asking about her health, but said that the questions had not been planned; rather, they were prompted by her unusual behaviour.

He went on to explain that since Katona had arrived at the studio late, the production team had had no time to assess her condition.

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Arthur Armstrong is tipped to become the new presenter of Countdown, after reports that he has verbally accepted the job. The comedian and actor, best known for his Pimms adverts and his role in The Armstrong and Miller Show, is in the process of signing the papers. Clearly expecting written confirmation, Channel 4 has planned a celebratory dinner with Armstrong this week.

Countdown sources last night confirmed that Armstrong had been approached by Channel 4 asking him to be the quiz show’s new presenter, and that he had been “sifting through the contract”.

A friend of Armstrong said: “Alexander was delighted to be offered the job and can’t wait to get started. He is a big fan of the show wants to make his mark on it. The hope is he will bring in a whole new audience to the much-loved show.”

Assuming that Armstrong does accept the role, he will be the youngest presenter in the show’s 26-year history as Channel 4 seeks to capture a new, younger audience. His appointment will end months of speculation over who would replace Des O’Connor who, along with maths guru Carol Vorderman, quit the show earlier this year. Jeff Stelling, host of Sky Sport’s Soccer Saturday football results show, had also been linked with the role. Back in 2005, following the death of Richard Whiteley, Stelling had been considered for the job of presenter but Des Lynam was chosen instead. The search for a replacement for Carol Vorderman, who was controversially sacked from the programme over the summer, is still on.

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She wowed Sir Paul McCartney with a particularly rousing edition of the Home and Away theme tune and won over the judges by singing a bold medley that combined Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” with Rihanna’s “Umbrella” last week. Now, just eight days after comedian Peter Kay’s alter-ego, aka the overweight Northern Irish transsexual Geraldine McQueen, performed “The Winner’s Song” on her spoof talent show Britain’s Got The Pop Factor and Possibly a New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice, the single has shot to number two in the UK Charts missing the top spot by just a few thousand sales, which was claimed by the pop-punk star Pink for the third week running.

The Peter Kay’s joke record, co-written by former Take That singer Gary Barlow, marked a stunning victory over shimmering produced pop, beating the real winner of The X-Factor in last night’s singles chart. The single pokes fun at the rags-to-riches imagery evoked by talent shows with the lyrics: “I started with nothing / Now I have something / I proved them all they were wrong”.

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