22 FEBRUARY 1975, Page 25

Will Waspe ' )

While the campaign running up to the referendum on the EEC cannot be said to have started officially until the Prime Minister gives the word, outlines the renegotiated terms and phrases the crucial question, I hear that the IBA and the BBC have jumped the gun on it. Producers of current affairs programmes (at least on radio, and I suspect on television) have had instructions to maintain a strict balance between 'for' and 'against', exactly as in election campaigns.

Nose for news

John Bratby is not only an artist of prodigious output, but' one with a particular flair for topicality and news-value, not to mention public relations. Bratby never lets his wall space at the Royal Academy (his right as an RA) go begging, and among his hangings this summer, I hear, will be a portrait of Lord Lucan. A recent portrait?

Foxed

John Howkins, pinch-hitting for Elkan Allan in the Sunday Times got his Foxes mixed this week. Writing of the Sunday-night EMT film. Duffy, he commented that James Fox was "more at home in BBC l's The School for Scandal." As well he might have been, but, as it happened, the actor in the Sheridan play was James's brother, Edward.

Import

Would anyone think we'd have to import a TV quiz game in these hard times? ATV would. They've bought a show called Hollywood Squares from America, have retitled it Celebrity Squares, and will put it on — in a £20,000 set — as a replacement for The Golden Shot later this year. And it's just a glammed-up version of Granada's old Criss-Cross Quiz.