Corrie's Antony Cotton helps show it isn't all bad news

Good news on the employment front - Poundland has created 24 new jobs in Doncaster with the opening of its 200^th store.

While this doesn't go far in negating the potential loss of 30,000 announced earlier in the week, this is clearly fantastic news and therefore worthy of a press release. So thanks to Bottle PR for that.

To mark this exciting event, Poundland drafted in Coronation's Street Antony Cotton to cut the ribbon and declare Poundland Doncaster ‘well and truly' open.

Does this opening of another ‘everything for a quid' shop in south Yorkshire mark the sign of those much-loved ‘green shoots' of journalistic cliche? The expectant world awaits your judgement Mr Peston.

I rather fear it isn't however otherwise Alistair Darling would have done the deed.

Woolworths and Farepak - compare and contrast

Two years ago, Farepak went bust leaving more than 150,000 of its customers who had invested in the savings club largely penniless and with little hope for much of a merry Christmas.

Fast forward to today and the collapse of both MFI and Woolworths and Gordon Brown has moved quickly to make very public messages of support in the media with pledges that Woolworths will stay open over Christmas and that help would be given to those employees who may be made redundant.

This is of course worthy stuff - losing your job is worse than losing your Christmas savings. But it's still strange that for Farepak's customers, the government did the absolute minimum to support them and that they still haven't received any compensation from its creditors.

It'd be nice to think that Brown is showing compassion that his predecessor at the time of Farepak did not. But I'm left with a sneaky feeling that its customers were quietly ignored because they were generally on low-incomes and therefore not as visible to the media and to voters as what looks set to become an increasingly boarded-up high street.

What's your favourite newspaper cliche?

I've been disappointed so far that no newspaper has applied that lazy old cliché ‘if it didn't already exist, you wouldn't invent it' to the long-running and apparent demise of Woolworths, although I'm sure it will happen at some point.

This led me to thinking, what other clichés irritate you? They are particularly prevalent in sports reporting although anything ever written about the Scottish or Scotland normally has the epithet ‘brave' or ‘bravehearted' attached and this really annoys me.

And if you don't mind clichés, what other companies do you thing wouldn't be invented if it didn't already exist?

Shove it up your *** Mark Thompson

 Anyone else watch Mark Thompson's and Michael Lyons' performance before the Commons culture, media and sport select committee? There was pitiful little evidence of either wearing a hair shirt - in fact, neither looked that they were particularly bothered to be there.

Thompson said that the BBC had been responsible for a ‘serious editorial lapse'. No Mark, it had been responsible for a complete lapse in taste, judgment and management by allowing personally offensive material to be recorded in the first place in the name of entertainment - the fact that it was broadcast is secondary to this.

As for Lyons, his claim that the BBC Trust had still not decided Ross's fate looked disingenuous given that the BBC had already trumpeted his glorious return.

The BBC Trust was brought in to replace the discredited Board of Governors following the Gilligan affair. The problem is, that like its predecessor it has no power and is too allied to the management of the organisation. Perhaps it's time for the BBC to come under the auspices of Ofcom and receive proper regulatory control like the commercial media operations against which it seems determined to put out of business.

Time for TV to slaughter the vegetarian Holy Cow

This week the head of Channel 4 Julian Bellamy has defended the right of television to risk offence in its winter programming launch.

‘Audiences know what to expect from Channel 4. They want us to push boundaries, challenge orthodoxies, take risks....even if that means our programmes are not to everyone's tastes,' he said.

And, to varying degrees, I'm inclined to agree with him.

However this is coming from a programmer whose channel I noticed, when watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, insists on broadcasting an obsequious warning before any programme that features an animal being killed or butchered.

The only minority that it is absolutely forbidden to offend, it seems, is vegetarians. How absurd. Why is this? And will Channel 4 ever be 'brave' enough to broadcast the reality of animal death without a warning?

Time to bring back the ITN Jobs Totaliser

Anyone else old enough to remember when News at Ten used to end its reports with a run down of company closures and job losses at the end of the forecast? Sandy Gall or Anna Ford would gravely inform the assembled nation of the closure of a steel-works or mass redundancies at a regional manufacturer, with a tally of total job losses for the day.

Occasionally there'd be a thin ray of good news - a service-based company, such as a contract cleaning company, a caterer or a security firm would make a few hirings - but the overall impression was apparent; the recession was well and truly happening. On a longer-term note, it also revealed that the nature and structure of the UK's employment base was shifting away from industry and toward services.

But what would it look like today if News at Ten's current anchors Mark Austin or Julia Etchingham introduced a similar strand? With Virgin Media axing 2000 jobs one day and BT 10,000 the next, the numbers look worse than back in the early 80s. And what's more, there doesn't seem to be any good news of any company or sector hiring anyone.

In another throwback, perhaps Mayor Boris should resurrect the giant unemployed totaliser so beloved by Ken (when he was still Red) and display it pointing toward the Houses of Parliament from where, once again, this whole sorry mess seems to have emanated.

A press release too far

Most tasteless press release of the day comes from Publicity Heaven, puffing the success of a piece of technology that creates an online version of a newspaper's announcements page

According to the release, more than 17,600 people have visited the Limerick Leader's iAnnounce page following the death of a local man who was shot dead at the weekend and that 8500 virtual candles have been lit and 2000 messages of condolence left online. And what's more, the press release continues, this technology is also available for advertisers to interact with online readers.

Innovation should of course be welcomed, particularly in the straightened world of the regional press. But surely there are some things, such as the death of a man or the grief of a community, that should not be PR-ed for the benefit of media owners?

Deborah Meaden exposed

Deborah Meaden is a ‘marketing guru'. We know that because Evan Davies gravely intones it in the opening credits to every episode of Dragon's Den. Except that last night we found out that she wasn't; not really.

In BBC2's Dragon's Den: the Dragon's Story - an otherwise interesting series that I suppose is meant to inspire up and coming entrepreneurs in some way - we found out that the marketing guru who had ‘made her fortune in the hospitality and leisure business' was nothing of the sort. In fact, for ‘hospitality and leisure industry' read chain of ordinary-looking caravan parks in the south-west. Also hers was no heart-warming rags to riches tale (unlike James Caan and Theo Paphitis) - her parents had owned the park before she borrowed some money from the bank to buy them out.

As for her marketing credentials that are so proudly boasted about in every single episode of the show, Davies had to admit that this wasn't really the case although the show did go onto describe how she's been involved in the repackaging of one of her Den investments - some sinister Voodoo dolls that you can stick faces of your enemies on and are therefore ideal stocking fillers.

It all seemed rather patchy to me and I was left concluding that in the scramble to tell a good story, some over-claiming had taken place. As this isn't in the scale of Cookie the Blue Pater cat or the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross farrago, I won't be complaining to the BBC Trust - I'll leave that to Friday when Children In Need is back on, groan...

Hazel Blears - here's some reasons why Mirror readers should not run the country

Labour minister Hazel Blears thinks that readers of the Daily Mirror should run the country, according to today's errrr Daily Mirror.

‘We need more and more MPs who read the Mirror and fewer who write for the Guardian or Telegraph,' she says in the news story.

Well I'm all for a bit more diversity - particularly when the Guardian is involved - but let's look at the evidence based on the editorial content in today's Mirror and therefore, presumably, the issues that its readers care about.

Aside from coverage of Obama, the rest is questionable. Page 3 is dominated by celebrity tat - ‘Enter Robo Posh' - Victoria Beckham arrives at Heathrow airport dressed in leathers, while the second story on the page is about some bloke from Strictly Come Dancing may miss a show because he's injured.  A full page on X Factor follows ‘X Factor Rachel SACKS mentor Dannii', while there are also stories on Gwyneth Paltrow and a bloke who is scared of fireworks.

Do we really want people like this running the country? I think I'd rather have retired colonels and polytechnic lecturers any day.

Sky and Virgin Media kiss and make up and now need to move on

With the benefit of hindsight, the now resolved dispute between Virgin Media and Sky over carriage fees looks like a silly and rather arrogant little spat that should never have been allowed to happen.

When it broke out, it looked like evidence of an increasingly confident Virgin Media TV willing to bravely take on the Goliath-like Sky. Letters from then Sky chief executive, James Murdoch, were leaked to the press, legal threats were made while stories emerged over how much the loss of the channels was costing each party in ad sales and subscriptions respectively.

However given the more macro-economic and structural problems in the TV market, after dragging on for 18 months the argument was in danger of resembling two balding men fighting over a comb.

Pay-TV is potentially in trouble - evidence has emerged that consumers are considering scrapping pay-TV and turning to free-to-air digital alternatives. With the country poised to be completely digital by 2012, if the recession is as long as some fear then this dispute could have ended up costing both Virgin Media and Sky dearly.

For a full analysis of the challenges of pay-TV versus free-to-air TV platforms, see next week's Marketing.

For ITV, Hamilton's win comes tinged with some sadness

Over thirteen million people watched Lewis Hamilton heroically secure the Formula One Drivers Championship on ITV1 yesterday evening, but sadly for ITV it also marked the end of its coverage of the sport.

When ITV acquired the rights from the 1997 season, fellow Brit Damon Hill was still world champion and his success the previous season meant that it attracted a large share of a predominately male audience that that had traditionally eluded ITV, particularly in daytime, and ad spots as well as broadcast sponsorship were sold at a premium.

The acquisition generated much excitement among advertisers and agencies alike and those who complained that inserting ad breaks would ruin the viewing experience of F1 were proved wrong, while ITV proved adept at using its portfolio of digital channels to cater for their needs.

However as British hopes faded away over the years, so did interest from mainstream viewers leaving the hardcore of F1 fans and petrol-heads viewing what was also becoming a tamed-down circus. All that began to change when Hertfordshire wunderkind Hamilton emerged.

It's incredibly bad luck then that ITV decided not to bid for the rights just as our interest has been reignited meaning that F1 will return to the BBC. Given Hamilton's tender age, the absence of F1 in the future is likely to leave a hole in ITV's audience profile that it may find difficult to fill.