Has the BBC dropped the ball on Gary Lineker again? The Beeb got itself into a mess earlier this year when they suspended the Match of the Day host for sharing his political views, then backtracked.
Now Lineker has launched a new football podcast with BBC colleagues, and the corporation isn’t making a penny. Yesterday, Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards released the first episode of The Rest is Football, which topped charts. It’s made by Lineker’s Goalhanger firm, which makes successful history and politics shows in a “The Rest Is...” series.
The three, who are presenters for Match of the Day, are among the BBC’s highest earners. Lineker is the Beeb’s best-paid star on £1.35 million, while Shearer gets £445,000, and Richards around £200,000. They are freelance, so can work elsewhere.
However, some BBC staff are irritated the Corporation didn’t think of making a podcast in-house. When we contacted the Beeb, they confirmed they aren’t involved, and said the presenters can work elsewhere as long as it doesn’t “conflict with their BBC work”.
Given that the show is an analysis of English football, some crossover is surely likely.
No goodbye for Tony Blair
Has Tony Blair’s life after Downing Street been “one long prime ministerial cosplay”? That’s the tragi-comic verdict of a new deep dive on Blair’s Institute for Global Change published yesterday by Unherd.
In it, writer Tom McTague reveals Blair still takes home a box of papers to read each weekend, just like the red box he had as prime minister. The ex-PM also has a media grid, just like that devised with Alastair Campbell in his decade at No 10, as well as a “policy unit” and “delivery unit”. One former TBI worker likens it to the film Goodbye Lenin, in which a communist wakes up from a coma in the Nineties and is convinced by those around them that the Soviet Union is still going.
With over 800 staff, Blair still wants to have influence. He recently anointed Sir Keir Starmer as his heir at a TBI conference, and some Labour policies look similar to those coming out of the TBI. Perhaps he isn’t past-it after all.
Fleabag supports the up and comers
Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge is up in Edinburgh for the Fringe, and is providing some inspiration for struggling comics. Her one-woman show Fleabag debuted there in 2013 to a mixed reception (three stars in The Guardian), before becoming a global hit. She has posed for selfies with a number of up-and-comers. Earlier this year, Waller-Bridge launched a £100,000 Edinburgh Fringe fund to help 50 aspiring creatives, because the festival has got so expensive in recent years. It can be a dispiriting month: one woman found fame this year with a tearful picture after only one person came to her show. If the person was Phoebe, it might have been OK.
Thomas Straker shakes off a bad week
It was helicopters at the ready for the third Gentleman’s Journal long summer lunch at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Train loving TikTok star Francis Bourgeois swapped his usual mode of transport to touch down on the lawn. He was joined by actor Harrison Osterfield, music maker Che Lingo, and models including Hugh Laughton-Scott.
Chef Thomas Straker — whose recent picture of the eight white men in his kitchen sparked a diversity row — got over a bad week by having fun in a mini sports car from The Little Car Company. Those who weren’t in copters got driven in by chauffeur company Wheely.
