Coming soon to a small screen near you: a TV adaptation of former 3am girl Jessica Callan's memoirs, Wicked Whispers. No word on which broadcaster has snapped up the rights, but Monkey hears there was quite a bidding war. The TV version throws up the intriguing question of who will be cast as Callan and her ex-3am colleagues - as well as former Mirror editor Piers Morgan.
Nick Leeson, perhaps. Marty Feldman, if only he hadn't died in 1982, would have been perfect for Morgan's successor Richard Wallace. Callan, meanwhile, was overheard suggesting she would quite like to be played by Angelina Jolie.
Eyebrows were raised at the Independent on Sunday when their latest work experience person turned up in the party pages of the London Evening Standard's ES Magazine. Perhaps they shouldn't have been surprised, because the intern is Charlotte Casiraghi, Princess Caroline of Monaco's daughter. It can only be a matter of time, given editor Tristan Davies's love of posh celebrities, that he blows all the savings made through the paper's redundancy programme and gives Casiraghi her own column.
Monkey is grateful to Simon Elmes's exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) book, And Now On Radio 4, published to coincide with the station's 40th birthday. Without it we might not have known about the time Libby Purves once threw a chair at her nemesis and one-time Midweek producer, Victor Lewis-Smith. "I did throw a chair at him once.
It was a very small chair and it didn't hit him. A small, harmless chair. But you see, there's so little of that in Radio 4.
" Or the reason why former continuity announcer Peter Donaldson sounded occasionally hurried while reading the shipping news. His colleague Eugene Fraser "used to come into the studio when you were reading [it] and set fire to the bottom. So you had to speed up to get to it before the fire did.
" Glory days. Channel 4 will have looked at the overnight ratings for the Billie Piper drama, The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, almost as closely as ITV2, where it had 1.8 million viewers last week.
Channel 4 developed the Belle de Jour drama before abandoning it because it did not like the scripts. Monkey's quote of the week: "I hate Blue Peter." From the Blue Peter message boards after the show's second apology in six months.
Congratulations to the "Radio Times subbing team" for being shortlisted in their category in the Magazine Design and Journalism awards. The timing of this particular accolade was not ideal, however, after the RT's masthead called contributor Julie Kavanagh "Julia" and its listings confidently looked forward to England playing Italy at one-day cricket. It should have been India.
In next week's Radio Times - why does no one watch BBC5? Monkey's quote of the week (2): "It was a technical response to a technical hitch." John-Paul Davidson, producer and director of the BBC series Michael Palin's New Europe, after the view of the sea through the porthole of Palin's boat was superimposed in the first episode.
"The view out of the porthole was burned out, so we keyed in a shot of the sea that was taken from the same sequence ...
" explained Davidson. Fakery? The very thought.
Allan Hall has pulled off a unique treble. Not content with publishing simultaneous articles on Auschwitz photos, as Monkey noted last week, in mid-market rivals the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, the industrious hack also managed to place a not wholly dissimilar piece in the Jewish Chronicle. Sample quote from the Express: "These photographs exemplify the immortal phrase of Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt - 'the banality of evil'.
" JC version: "These photographs exemplify ...
" Well, you get the picture. At least writing it a third time allowed Hall to correct a blatant booboo in the Mail article, in which an archivist called Rebecca was curiously referred to as "he". You can catch up with Monkey every day at media.
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