✒ Much self-hugging at Radio 2 ("wow, congratulations all involved" tweeted Chris Evans), where the children's short story competition, 500 Words 2014, attracted a spectacular 118,362 entries – up on around 90,000 last time. But there may be a few frowns too once the bubbly has been guzzled. If you allow five minutes per entry, that adds up to daunting total reading time of perhaps 10,000 hours, even before the celebrity judges get involved. A horde of radio toilers may have to be seconded to work full-time on getting through the pile, unless Radio 2 controller Bob Shennan is prepared to make radical economies to fund paid readers. Or unless he orders normally pampered DJs such as Evans, Ken Bruce and Steve Wright to get through a story during every record.
✒ BBC bosses have recently been crusading for diversity, with television supremo Danny Cohen making headlines by insisting on token women on panel shows and pushing for Match of the Day to be more diverse too. Rather different noises were emerging, however, from another part of the BBC woods, as drama chief Ben Stephenson and BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore proudly announced plans to adapt Agatha Christie's non-Poirot/Marple books, such as those involving her young interwar detective duo Tommy and Tuppence (with David Walliams, 42, slated to star as Tommy) – tales bound to display even less ethnic diversity than hideously white Midsomer Murders, being set in a Britain before postwar waves of immigration. Christie's resulting lack of modern political correctness can be gauged from the original title of the mega-selling whodunit Stephenson and Moore were most excited about: And Then There Were None was Ten Little Niggers when it appeared in the UK in 1939, but is now known by the name her American publishers sensibly preferred.
✒ These are confusing times for Telegraph readers. Apparently in denial, Benedict "The Cardinal" Brogan still calls himself "deputy editor" in his online biog and on his Twitter feed, although editor-in-chief Jason Seiken's reshuffle supposedly took place "with immediate effect" over a week ago, and included The Cardinal's demotion. And former editor Tony Gallagher, the main casualty of Seiken's shake-up, has been tweeting about working as a rookie cook in a top London restaurant's kitchen, as if hoping to prompt a call from MasterChef. Surrounded by foreign fellow-staff, preparing Moro's "Moorish" dishes mixing Spanish, Arabic and Middle Eastern influences, the onetime Daily Mail man gives the bamboozling impression of having come out of the closet post-Telegraph as multiculturalism's biggest fan.
✒ Equally troubling are the mixed messages on Ukraine. Telegraph leaders, like a Friday analysis piece by David Blair, have unsurprisingly viewed the revolution in Kiev as a praiseworthy, heartening "genuine popular upheaval", and dismissed president Putin as "programmed" to see the protesters as "playthings of western intelligence". Yet in Russia Beyond the Headlines, the Russian government-backed pull-out inexplicably distributed once a month with the paper, a report was darkly headlined "Kiev's Maidan voyage is headed for deep and treacherous waters", and a columnist thundered "Will Ukraine's hotheads trigger a new cold war?" Also potentially disturbing readers' breakfasts was the propaganda pull-out's unqualified verdict on Sochi 2014: "Russia celebrates a golden Games to remember: a dazzling Olympics confounds the critics and delights the world." In the Telegraph proper, views were rather more cynical.
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