The Indy has an interview with Tyler Brûlé, whose new media show, The Desk, is about to be launched on BBC4.

It sounds interesting:

“We started talking about this audience who were expats in one sense. They are the New Europeans — they work in one city, their home town is somewhere else, they have a partner who lives in another place — but we felt that there was nothing for these people. Here, the weather ends in Dover or Aberdeen, and there’s almost no recognition that we’re sitting in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.”

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Brûlé criticises British broadcasting media for being “parochial” in its coverage of domestic news — it is for this reason that he now listens to the BBC World Service rather than Radio 4′s Today in the morning — and says that The Desk will be a programme which “can live in this country, but it can also live around the world”.

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Another example of the global perspective Brûlé expects to bring to The Desk is how they would have reported the tsunami. “In the early stages, nobody on this side of the world had really woken up to the scale of it,” he says, “and everyone was turning to ABC in Australia for their reports. It was extraordinary how wrong and how slow to react the news channels were. Then there was the big struggle over how much emphasis to give to Westerners — how much can you cover 200 British missing when you’ve got 100,000 dead in Indonesia?”

Who does he expect to watch the show? “Forty per cent of my fantasy viewers are the converted — those who work in advertising, branding, they’re studying media, they’re journalists,” he says. “There’s going to be another 40 per cent who are real news addicts. There’s a large chunk of people who have their favourite correspondent — who have a crush on Ben Brown, or who love Christiane Amanpour. You feel that you have a relationship with these people if you spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. The other 20 per cent are looking for quality programming, and for us to take a bit of a punt and look into our crystal ball to say where things might be heading.”

I hope it works: sounds like it will be required viewing for the media navel-gazers in the blogosphere.