A surprise front-runner has emerged to take over the soon-to-be-merged ITV. None other than Greg Dyke, 56, the Director-General of the BBC, who made his fortune at LWT.

The source of the speculation should be branded with a large government health warning. It is Peter Mandelson, the twice fallen Cabinet minister, and acknowledged master of the fine arts of propaganda and political spin.

Michael Green, the head of Carlton, was widely expected to be chairman until he was ousted in a boardroom coup. Mandelson, whose personal criticism of Dyke over the Gilligan affair suggests a private agenda, claims that he has inside information.

“City gossips speculate that Dyke would be happier returning to commercial TV and even hint that he has been approached by the very fund managers who knifed Michael Green,” Mandelson writes in his column in GQ magazine.

“I have about as much evidence for that as Andrew Gilligan had for his reports about my mate Alastair Campbell’s role in the Iraq dossier.”

Undaunted by his lack of hard evidence, Mandelson continues: “That said, many in the broadcasting industry have a hunch that Dyke and ITV would be a rather happier fit than Dyke and the BBC. I find it hard to disagree with that.”

The BBC, predictably, disagrees with Mandelson. “Greg is very happy here,” a spokesman said. Mandelson’s mischief is nothing to do with the fact that Dyke, who most people assumed would be true to his word and stay at the corporation until he is 60, is one place ahead of him at 12 in the magazine’s Power List for 2004.

Baroness Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, made the show her choice. Colin Blakemore, head of the Medical Research Council who devised the BBC series The Mind Machine, agreed: "What hope is there for the cultural advance of mankind when such tedious, odious celebration of nonentity and idiocy is so universally admired?” Roger Scruton, honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham, proposed Big Brother or Sex and the City in today’s Times Educational Supplement survey. But he has not got a television on principle “because the nature of the medium intrinsically lowers standards”.

Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, avoided Big Brother, but said that he could not avoid everything of questionable value: “The most mindless stuff that I am forced to watch is football, because my wife is a fan.”

Shreds of evidence

More evidence of the team being assembled by Richard Desmond, who runs the Daily Express, to buy The Daily Telegraph. Desmond held a lunch at the Express offices with executives from Commerzbank, the German financial institution, and intriguingly, Fred Goodwin, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was named yesterday in an Enron-related suit. Worryingly for the Telegraph, Goodwin is nicknamed “Fred the Shred”, a title earned for his skill at cutting costs, or more to the point, jobs.

Widders puts oar back into reality TV

TORY MP Ann Widdecombe, the unlikely star of Celebrity Fit Club, is being linked to a new reality TV show in which well-known Oxbridge alumni recreate the gruelling university boat race.

Widders and 17 other graduates will undertake an intensive six-week training programme led by two Olympic rowers. The series showing the preparation for the celebrity boat race will air as a daily programme on BBC3 in the week leading up to the official race.

Other names in the frame are Timmy Mallett, Michael Palin and Will Self, while from Cambridge producers are considering Jeremy Paxman, Richard Whiteley and Simon Schama. Widders, who lost 36lb on Celebrity Fit Club, will take it very seriously. The Cambridge crew has been warned.

PS . . .

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