SO what happens next? Sir Fred stands in for Noel Edmonds on Deal Or No Deal and Eric Daniels is cast as a contestant in Call My Bluff. You think I'm joking? Well, you could hardly make up the storyline about our banks and it just gets more intriguing.
Lloyds boss Daniels failed to agree a deal with the Treasury for its toxic debt, and we're not sure whether to believe him when he says the HBOS merger was a good thing.
Stephen Hester, Fred's replacement at RBS, did his stoney-faced best last wee
k to present the case for a bank that is trying to rebuild itself as "the premier financial institution it once was". His words, by the way. He's doing his level best, but the task ahead looks mighty challenging, even though his chairman Sir Philip Hampton, confidently says RBS is simply "in the category of too big to fail".
There will be a lot of change. As we revealed last week, the bank will offload businesses as it shrinks to its core activities, pulling out of places it didn't know it was in, thanks largely to the reckless acquisition of ABN Amro that helped RBS to a £16bn writedown last week and a place in the history books.
Now we face the prospect of RBS being effectively 95% owned by the taxpayer. It should change its name from the Royal Bank of Scotland to the Royal Bank of the State. We're all stakeholders now and, let's face it, the relevance of Scotland is becoming ever weaker as the Treasury will be running the show for years to come and Hester will spend more time on his Oxfordshire estate than meeting customers in Coatbridge and Carstairs.
With arguments raging over former CEO Sir Fred Goodwin's pension, the bank's bosses have been forced to re-write their own rules to make sure no one else joins the board with a guarantee that they'll trouser a fortune whether or not they do a good job.
It will be difficult to deny him his £693,000 a year but it's sad to see Goodwin display such arrogance in the face of nationwide public hostility. He's clearly as good at judging the public's mood as he was at spotting a great deal.
Waiting for normal service to resumeTHE turmoil among the big boys of channel three must make entertaining viewing for Rob Woodward, chief executive of STV.
Woodward was parachuted in two years ago as part of the team that replaced the old guard at the former SMG with a plan to roll back its multi-media interests and return the company to its core television activities.
He's done that and has been awaiting the rewards. Unfortunately, it has coincided with a pretty rotten time for the media, with advertising revenue down and cost-cutting top of the bill.
There was a time when Scottish Television executives boasted that they could turn up every morning, flick a switch and wait for the flow of programmes and revenue to flow in from the network's output down south. Licence to print money? You bet.
But no longer. ITV has its own problems, as detailed in our feature on page 5, beginning with its difficulties in competing with the multi-channel competition.
It also has hefty debts and a big pension to service, not to mention the media-wide slump in advertising. Its colourful boss, Michael Grade, has recently bounced the idea of a merger with Channel Four and Five, though without telling them first.
Woodward believes that a revitalised STV, stripped of its non-core divisions, can further distance itself from ITV, believing that the relationship between them is outdated. He is promising more Scottish output, though it must be of a quality that truly deserves replacing something from the ITV network. That shouldn't be too difficult.
Stop playing silly Bergers with capitalINSPIRING capital? Visitors to Edinburgh ought to be greeted by those red triangular signs bearing a man with a shovel. Welcome to the City of Roadworks. Love or hate the trams project, was it really necessary to dig up the whole city centre at one time? Why not phase the project so that the city was not reduced to rubble and everyone could get about their daily business?
At least the row with the contractor Bilfinger Berger is close to being resolved, which means work on Princes Street, the main thoroughfare, should soon resume with the cash-demanding German firm being put firmly in its place.
