Newspaper Article

When the top brass want to ban the bomb

Ingrams, Richard

2010

Overview

As so often, it has been left to Private Eye to draw our attention to an unsavoury truth - in this case that Mr Richard Desmond, or Dirty Des as the magazine affectionately refers to him, is not really a suitable person to be given control of one of our major TV channels, ie Five. One obvious reason, of course, is that Desmond's experience of TV to date consists in putting on what is politely referred to nowadays as \"adult entertainment\", the nature of which may be gleaned from the names of his programmes, eg Dirty Talk, Filth and Red Hot Fetish. It is now up to Ofcom to decide if that sort of thing disqualifies Dirty Des from taking over Five. The regulations state that they have to be satisfied that a successful applicant must be \"fit and proper\", but an Ofcom spokesman tells the Eye that this applies to a company, not an individual. Just how they can read that into the regulation may not be immediately apparent to the outside observer. But it suggests that all DD has to do is float a new company to make the application and the prize will be his. And if the only opposition comes from Private Eye, it's hard to see how he could fail.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Postgate, Oliver