It’s hard to know where to start when considering the shambles that is ITV at the moment. The place is starting to appear like a de-masted and rudderless Ship of Fools adrift on the high seas, heaving around looking for both a captain and first officer to put a joint hand on the tiller.

Sir Michael Bishop looked like a good prospect for Chairman. He’s smart, he’s got media experience (having been Chairman of Channel 4 in the mid 90s), and he has a £223m cheque from the sale of his BMi stake to Lufthansa burning a hole in his pocket. So, time for some good works with some media luvvies, then. But after a sniff around, he came to the conclusion that the ITV board was so dysfunctional and the broadcaster’s situation so bleak that he’d rather spend a quiet Christmas having a few pina coladas in the Caribbean. (As BSKyB holds a massive ITV stake, the last thing the seeker-after-a-quiet-life will want is Rupert or James Murdoch on the phone every five minutes.)  So Bishop, like Tony Ball the hard-man prospective CEO, dropped out of the running.

This means the latest round of opprobrium has been directed full and square at head-hunters Russell Reynolds, who have the task of finding both a new Chairman and CEO – and appear to have made a ghastly mess of it. And the agony isn’t over: they are back to square one, with everyone now waiting for them to make fools of themselves all over again.

The ITV job is a poisoned chalice. It may well net Russell Reynolds hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees, but it’s the search from hell. Not only is the organisation in a mess, in dire requirement of a new strategy, but the whole place (like so many media holes) leaks like a sieve. Thus the search has been an embarrassingly public affair, which headhunters don’t like unless they are controlling the leaking.  

It doesn’t make sense to slag off the whole profession, though. Luke Johnson suggests that media head-hunting is a piece of cake because all the usual suspects know each other. But ITV needs someone a bit special coming from a new angle. Headhunters may be a funny old lot, but when they do their job well they are a useful resource. They bring knowledge of the sector, discretion, impartiality and – one would hope – some degree of wisdom to help a company hire the sort of individual it requires. They also provide a buffer between the company and the job market, and have to take the blame for failure.

To conduct a search without a specialised consultant would not be easy. What is a Chairman supposed to do – get out his Filofax and start ringing around a few mates? Invite the hottest prospects for a round at Wentworth? Of course, intrinsically any organisation ought to be able to do this for itself, but it just doesn’t work like that. It would be seen as unprofessional.

So after five months of flailing around the ITV search has to go on. Maybe they’ll have the ship crewed up before the end of the year at least. It has to be a great opportunity for someone to make his or her name as one of the best turnaround stars in media history.