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Happy Hallowe’en!

Wednesday 30th October

The BBC have sacked Angus Deayton as presenter of Have I Got News For You. This is because of revelations — I don't know the details and I don’t much care — about his private life in the nastier Sunday tabloids. So anyone doing anything that’s publicly visible can’t have a private life and can’t make mistakes, then?

We’re not talking Blue Peter here (and nor are we talking about, as far as I am aware, the sort of behaviour of which a former Blue Peter presenter has been accused): HIGNFY is not aimed at children, and Deayton is in no sense a role model for anyone — indeed he has been for practically the whole run of the series the butt of as many jokes as he has dished out. In fact, it is widely accepted that the success of the show is largely down to the interplay between Deayton and the other two regulars. Sacking him threatens that, and sacking him for something unrelated to the programme is downright foolish.

It’s claimed that the focus on his life was distracting from the stories they should have been concentrating upon, but Deayton had always responded well — some months ago opening with: “And this week’s loser is… presenting the show.” When Christine Hamilton attempted to throw attention off her husband last week by criticising Deayton, he shrugged and said he supposed he was disgraced, which only highlighted the difference from the disgraced former Tory MP who has never admitted to any wrongdoing.

The Guardian puts this in the context of other events this year:

[W]ith the ditching of Michael Barrymore and the precarious professional position of John Leslie, it has not been a good year for badly behaved television presenters.

However, no one has been found dead in Deayton’s swimming pool following an orgiastic party, no one has accused Deayton of rape; as far as I know he has been accused of having consensual sex and taking cocaine. Perhaps he might be criticised, but what he does in his private life without hurting anyone else should be his business.

If no one in public life — defined as loosely as possible — can have anything other than a whiter-than-white private life (as defined by the most narrow-minded of moralists), then the only people who will be left in public life are going to be the most odious of people: narrow-minded moralists who insist on telling everyone else how to live their own lives.

The question of who replaces Deayton has produced a number of possible names: Dermot Murnaghan (would he be able to stand up to the wit of Merton and Hislop?), John Sergeant (who might be good but is working for ITN at the moment — although he does retire in December), Stephen Fry (who surely risks being far too verbally skilled for anyone to stand up to him), Andrew Marr (could be good, but would he want to do this when he is currently the BBC’s chief political reporter?), and Clive Anderson (who is sharp enough, certainly).

Take one success, remove one third of the main ingredients, what are we left with? We won’t know until Friday…

While I was putting together the recent weblog entry which mentioned the Edinburgh Filmhouse I noticed something that I didn’t have time to go into at the time. The Filmhouse site has been redesigned, and although I haven’t really explored it it does seem to be greatly improved over the old site. It was clearly designed using Adobe GoLive 5. I can tell that without looking at the source, and so can anyone else visiting the site. In a breathtaking example of incompetence, the title element’s contents have been left as what I assume is the GoLive default: