GB News And Maybe No Brillo

Just two weeks after the launch of Gammon Broadcasting™ News (“Bacon’s News Channel”), its star presenter and chairman, former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil, left the building. He has not returned. And despite repeated assertions that he will drag himself away from his reassuringly upmarket Petite Maison on the French Riviera and return to the not-at-all-metropolitan London location of Paddington next month, it may never happen.

Brillo told anyone who would listen that GB News would not be a UK version of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse). But that is what GB News is fast becoming, with Neil Oliver telling viewers that he is not going to allow his teenage children to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, thus emboldening the occasionally violent anti-vax wackos.

At around the same time, Brillo was telling his followers “Anti-vaxxers protest BBC coverage of pandemic by storming a building in White City. A building the BBC vacated in 2013 and is now luxury flats. Is there a link between stupidity and anti-vax? Opinions vary but evidence is growing”. Also, whisper it quietly, he isn’t Tweeting about GB News.

All of this has fed the insatiable appetite of the 24-hour rolling News Speculatron, to the extent that the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph has broken ranks and said what more and more people within the industry are thinking, under the headline “Tears and technical chaos: Andrew Neil weighs up his future at GB News”.

The supporting article asserts “There is now growing speculation that Neil will never return to the airwaves amid rumours of a bitter rift with his chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, who is thought to be keen to remodel the channel along the lines of opinionated US television”. Opinionated US TV meaning Fox News Channel.

Crikey Andrew, it says here you've been bladdy fired!

Or, in Frangopoulos’ case, Sky News Australia, shouty, crass, abusive and off-the-chart right wing TV. The CEO looks to have the upper hand here: Brillo’s 2000 hours weekday show has been taken over by Colin Brazier, whose daytime berth alongside Mercy Muroki has already been filled. That looks like they’re assuming Brillo won’t come back.

The Tel reckons so. “Insiders believe Neil has been frozen out of decisions due to the rift with Frangopoulos … After the channel was brought low by persistent technical problems, an advertising backlash and plunging audience ratings that left some shows temporarily nursing zero viewers, there are fears that the former Sky News Australia boss is now hell-bent on forging a ‘British Fox News’ with the full backing of the board”.

A British Fox News. Peddling any and every wacko conspiracy theory going, just to make sure the audience tunes in and stays angry. The kind of conspiracy mongering that Brillo assured GB News viewers would not be happening on his watch. Small wonder that speculation is now rife that it is no longer his watch, as someone has told the Tel.

“We now operate on the basis that Andrew has been sidelined and regard the chief executive as very much the boss. We haven’t seen Andrew’s fingerprints on any decisions for sometime now … It’s almost like he was never there. We hear rumours that relations between the chairman and chief executive have completely broken down”.

Andrew Neil should have retired after leaving the BBC. Rather than someone retiring him.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by adding to its Just Giving page at

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/zelostreet9