Mr Thompson has yet to go into detail on his programming.He told staff: “Next year will be a year of transition, though I hope you’ll see some striking changes in the schedule. But the following year is one we’re building from scratch, as if we were scheduling a new channel.”He revealed improved revenue forecasts had allowed an extra £8m to be added to the 2002 programme budget, which would be used to improve the channel’s performance with younger viewers.Mr Thompson also unveiled a restructuring of Channel 4’s commissioning team, which will reduce commissioning departments from 13 to eight and will integrate the E4 commissioning team with Channel 4′ s Comedy and Entertainment department.He added: “That subversive, bold, risk-taking spirit is there to be reawakened and could be stronger than ever. It’s a spirit you can only really foster when you’re small and fleet of foot.”. A flagship “golden handcuffs” scheme to pay the country’s top teachers an extra £15,000 to work in inner-city areas has been ignored by all but a handful of schools who qualify. That is why the Government is supporting the recruitment of and retention of outstanding teachers in the toughest schools.”If we can get our best teachers into challenging schools, we will add huge value to the nation. It can be the difference between a life with a career, a family, prosperity and life on the margins.”Headteachers at the conference, held to present awards to newly qualified heads, said schools had boycotted the plan because it was “divisive”.Kenny Frederick, head of George Green school in Tower Hamlets, east London, said: “I want to appoint people who want to come and work here because they like the school. We’ve been fast-tracking teachers and good teachers could soon get a head of department’s job but it is divisive to just give £5,000 to recruit someone.”John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, added that heads were reluctant to use the bonuses because they “distorted” existing salary structures.Mr Miliband said that Gordon Brown’s comprehensive spending review – due to be announced next week – would include measures to help education in deprived communities.The Chancellor would be setting special “floor targets” – minimum standards for schools and pupils in deprived areas.”We need to raise performance at the bottom as well as in the middle and at the top,” Mr Miliband added.

“I am ambitious for children in deprived areas because I know they have the brains, I’m convinced they’ve got the potential but they don’t have the chances.”Meanwhile, a report from the education standards watchdog reveals that flagship government schemes to improve inner-city education are putting too much of a management burden on headteachers.David Bell, the new chief schools inspector, told a London conference yesterday that the Ofsted report – on the Government’s education action zones and excellence in the cities plan – revealed “a management cost” to schools involved in the scheme. He also urged schools and governing bodies to say “no” to schemes if they were too time-consuming.. As the new girl in the theatrical m?ge that was No?Coward’s Belgravia office in the 1940s, Joan Hirst – or Joan Sparks, as she was then – might have been expected to be rather in awe of the situation in which she found herself. Joan Doris Belasco, secretary: born Londonderry 18 March 1914; married 1962 Geoffrey Hirst (died 1975), (one son with Franklin Sparks); died Northwood, Middlesex 1 July 2002. In his hilarious self-parody Present Laughter (1938), Coward’s alter ego complains, “Everybody worships me, it’s nauseating”, to which his secretary replies, “There’s hell to pay if they don’t.”Perhaps as a result of her own lowly position in this arrangement, Hirst was a guarded figure, rarely venturing her own opinion in public. As her stepgrandson Duncan Knowles, who worked for her in later years, recalls, “She was a fantastic critic, but she always wanted to know what you thought first, because she didn’t want to offend anyone.” It is ironic, then, that for all the theatrical colour of her employment, her early years were just as remarkable and – though few knew the details of her own biography – were more than a preparation for her future life “She understood the artistic temperament,” notes Knowles In a sense, she was playing a part. “Joan Sparks” might have appeared to an archetypal, upright English girl; but appearances could be deceptive, and not even her own name was quite what it seemed.She was born in Londonderry in 1914, into a family steeped in the theatre.

Her parents, Gerald and Doris Belasco, worked as actor managers for Alfred Denville’s repertory company, among others, and like Joan’s grandfather (who founded London’s Vaudeville Theatre) and her great-grandfather, used the stage surname James. Having run a cinema in Ireland, her parents moved to Yorkshire, where, at a musical evening in Dewsbury, Joan met Franklin Sparks, a pianist and composer; they were introduced by another musician, Geoffrey Hirst, to whom she was already emotionally attached. But it was with Sparks that Joan began a serious relationship. Their son, Robin, was born in 1937; only as an adult would he learn that his parents had never actually been married.Joan accompanied Sparks around the country in his life as an itinerant musician, taking jobs herself for the Gas Board and staying with friends and family, including her younger sister, Pat. The relationship with Sparks ended shortly after the Second World War, and Joan moved to London, working as a secretary for the Actors Orphanage, of which Coward had been President.In 1949, she was engaged by Lorn Loraine to type up the Master’s diary.

She was judged a satisfactory addition to the “Family”: Graham Payn, Cole Lesley, Joyce Carey, Gladys Calthrop and Loraine herself, a self-sufficient circle of friends, factotums and lovers; Coward, who had a babyish penchant for nicknames, dubbed her “Sparky”.At the same time, Joan had also became secretary to Michael Redgrave, moving to Chiswick to be near his house there. The mornings were spent working for Redgrave, then she’d take the bus into town to work for Coward. It was an arrangement which had its echoes in her respective employers’ own “brief encounter” during the war (when Coward and Redgrave had been lovers), and ended only when Redgrave’s career “moved on”.Yet it was Redgrave, perhaps more than Coward, who represented for Joan her true love of the theatre, a memory of the days when “the dress circle were the best seats in the house”; it was Redgrave’s work in Ibsen, Chekhov and Shakespeare that echoed Joan’s own desire for “intellectual integrity”. She continued to visit Redgrave until he died, and remained close to the next generation: Corin, Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave were all fond of her.In 1962, Joan married Geoffrey Hirst – the man who had introduced her to Franklin Sparks 25 years previously, and with whom she had kept in touch throughout They were, by all accounts, “kindred spirits”. The couple moved into a basement flat off King’s Road (where a neighbour was Stephen Ward, who, during the Christine Keeler affair, committed suicide in the flat next door), then to a top-floor flat in Cadogan Square, acquired for them by No?Coward. Geoffrey Hirst died in 1975 after a long battle with throat cancer; Joan was privately devastated by the loss.Coward himself died in 1973, but such was (and is) the global reach of his fame that Joan’s duties continued almost busier than before, more especially with both Cole Lesley and Graham Payn living in Coward’s Swiss home in Montreux. The Cadogan Square flat was a cornucopia of Cowardiana, countless photographs and press cuttings carefully filed away (with the assistance of Michael Cox, and latterly, Duncan Knowles).It was here that I was summoned, shortly after embarking on a biography of Coward, to be vetted by Joan Hirst over tea and biscuits.