BBC

Brits dominated nominations at the recently announced 2015 Emmys with Game Of Thrones leading the way with 24 nods.  

Highly acclaimed period dramas Downton Abbey and Wolf Hall were given three nominations each. The ITV show set in the 1920s is nominated for Outstanding Drama Series while the BBC Tudor drama is selected for Outstanding Limited Series.

Emma Thompson, who starred in the live broadcast of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is up for Outstanding Actress in a mini-series.

The BBC Trust "has proved itself a busted flush" as increasingly fractious charter renewal negotiations between the Government and the BBC gather pace.

Shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport Chris Bryant MP told a packed RTS event Tuesday evening that the public broadcaster's regulator had markedly failed in its duty to protect the interests of licence fee payers since the UK general election. 

John Whittingdale is a conundrum. A politician who can seem old beyond his 55 years, he has been in Parliament since 1992, nine years longer than David Cameron. And, although only a few years older than his boss, Whittingdale’s style and political heritage are soundly late-Thatcher era, with a voting record that is pro-fox hunting and anti-gay marriage.

Yet, the freshly minted Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport also confounds stereotypes of the shire fogey with a mild interest in Gilbert and Sullivan.

In a smooth transition, the personable Polly Hill has become the BBC’s new Controller of Drama Commissioning. She takes over without so much as dropping a script from LA-bound Ben Stephenson.

Her new job is one of the most coveted and powerful positions in UK television. Hill is responsible for the wide range of drama across BBC One and BBC Two, an estimated budget of £200m annually, spiced with the challenge of devising a new online policy, principally for BBC Three. She also has oversight of EastEnders, Casualty and Holby City.

Monday

Idris Elba: No Limits

Discovery, 9pm

Drag racing, aerobatics, rally driving and land speed record attempts might seem like the perfect training ground for a would-be James Bond, but Luther star Idris Elba has denied that he will be taking that baton from Daniel Craig.

Writers of contemporary media history need to be brave. They also, of course, want to be read. Professor Jean Seaton, the official BBC historian, has a crisp style, a fine grasp of the period 1974-87 and has authored an absorbing book, with the power to annoy and stimulate debate.

As the title, Pinkoes and Traitors (taken from the Dear Bill letters of Private Eye), announces, the prose is leavened by light touches.

For an insight into the day job of the BBC Director-General two years into his role, I pop into Tony Hall's plate-glass eyrie at New Broadcasting House. I arrive in the aftermath of one of the regular encyclicals that DGs dispense.

He's sung the praises of the BBC's place in a "thriving, free and competitive market", an alternative to what a colleague terms the "Joni Mitchell" school of heartstring-tugging about the Beeb's innate brilliance.

Michael Jackson's stellar career encapsulates much of the creative history of TV during the past 30 years. He was an innovative independent producer back in the 1980s, reinvented BBC Two in the 1990s, and went on to run Channel 4. There, he launched Queer as Folk, Ali G and Big Brother, before crossing the Atlantic to work for the legendary mogul Barry Diller.

Today, still based in New York, his career has swung full circle. Jackson is once again working as a producer.

When Tony Hall needed someone to investigate Jeremy Clarkson's attack on his producer, he looked north and summoned Ken MacQuarrie, the calm and reserved Director of BBC Scotland.

As an experienced member of the Editorial Standards Committee, MacQuarrie was an obvious choice. His terse report sealed Clarkson's exit. What the Top Gear presenter made of the enigmatic Scot, his polar opposite, remains the stuff of speculation.