Lord Currie of Marylebone, Ofcom’s chairman, hit out at the BBC for saying that there is no such thing as the “excess licence fee” (the cash earmarked for digital switchover) and provided considerably more comfort for ITV and Channel 4.

The message was clear enough – a raid on the £3.4 billion licence fee money to prop up Channel 4 is very much on. On the BBC, Lord Currie said that it was an “inconvenient truth” that there “is a sum of £800 million over the lifetime of the current licence fee settlement which is not within the BBC’s baseline”. He added that it was “dispiriting and ultimately futile” for Channel 4 to settle for the managed decline that it will suffer if it does not get some sort of financial help. ITV was promised a future regulatory settlement that was “much more limited, explicit and transparent than hitherto”. Take those as hints.

— ITN, better known for making News at Ten, seems to have found a modest hit in Diagonal View, a collection of “And finally . . .” items and other videos of the amusing, odd and downright strange from the ITN library. You can find it on YouTube, with clips including the infamous three-headed frog (almost certainly two frogs trying to mate with a third), and it is the eleventh most watched professionally produced UK media site on YouTube. Clearly, quality television is not what people want online.

— LazyTown, the Icelandic humans and puppets children’s television show broadcast by the BBC and in 50 other countries, is set for the big screen, remarkably, to the delight of the health-obsessed. Its creator, Magnus Scheving, the man who brought us the notion of “sports candy” (aka fruit and veg), is in London to chat up the film studios. Scheving, incidentally, doubles up as chief executive and as the lead character, Sportacus.

— A worrying statistic from Numis Securities. Value of every new newspaper reader: £80. Value of every online reader: £2. Hard to recruit 40 online for every newspaper buyer lost.

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