Quintin Jardine's blog

And so farewell to Will, Mac, Don, Sloan, Jim, Maggie, and most of all Charlie. A day after the end of The Missing, Sky Atlantic showed the finale of series three of The Newsroom. It’s gone, and it won’t be back, but you can bet Tom T Hall will be thanking the producers for boosting his pension fund.

That’s the way to finish a series: you give the addicts the resolution they want, throw in a little sadness, then batter it to death with schmaltz and happy endings.

Mind you I’m going to miss Will MacAvoy. I wish we had a real news anchor like him on British TV, but we don’t. Adam Boulton makes a decent fist of it, and then there’s the amiable but essentially dim Eamonn Holmes, but both broadcast to minority audiences on Sky News. The main line channels are bereft of such talent; half an hour ago, I switched off BBC Breakfast and escaped back to the recorded Newsroom. I don’t like Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchkin at the best of times, but when the talent-free zone that is the abrasive Steph McGovern joined the party, my hand leapt of its own volition to the remote.

The only solution i can offer is for BBC to pretend that Will MacAvoy is real and to hire Jeff Daniels to present its mainline news programming. With a budget in excess of five billion, I’m sure they can afford him.