Richard Desmond's purchase of Channel Five has been completed for just over £103 million. Now the hunt starts for viewers, and for programmes that they will watch.

Already he's saying that he might buy Big Brother from Channel Four to add to the wall-to-wall CSI and Neighbours. Memo Richard Desmond: No-one watches Big Brother. If he wants to build on the paltry 5% of audience share that Five presently enjoys, he's gonna have to do better than that. A lot better.

Fashion favourite of the chav, Burberry, is buying out its franchise stores in China in a £70 million deal that will see it take control of marketing, IT strategy and customer services for its 50 outlets in 30 cities across the country.

The luxury goods brand also plans to open more stores as the label-mad Chinese show a strong taste for Burberry, which saw profits last year of more than £14 million. It's a promising move for the business and the stock market agreed as Burberry shares rose 3% on the news.

The fashion world went into a dizzy spin this week when Posh Spice – Victoria Beckham – was given the job of creative design executive at Range Rover. This is the future of the British car industry?

She'll be working on a special edition of the Range Rover Evoque – a smaller sleeker version of the Chelsea tractor – along with the people, who, you know, make actual cars. I. Can. Hardly. Wait.

The BP share price fell to a 14-year low – dipping below 300p – at one point yesterday over worries that the cost of cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could lead to a short-term funding crisis.

No stranger to the short-term funding crisis myself, I can understand how the company feels. But talk of difficulty could be way too premature as BP turns a massive revenue every single day of the week and could just fund its debt through profit. Then there's the option of calling in a favour from old friends in the Middle East – much like Barclays did at the height of the banking crisis.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is having lasting repercussions, not only on the environment, but on the British giant's financial and political position.

With President Obama slating the company and hitting it with a £47 million interim bill, the whole world now has its sights on BP as it struggles to put a lid on the affair.

Repossession figures always make grim reading but at least the latest news from the Council of Mortgage Lenders brings some cheer: the number of homes repossessed in the first quarter of 2010 was at a two-year low.

Around 9,800 poor souls had their property repossessed during the three months to the end of March, 8% less than during the previous quarter and 26% down on the same period of 2009. More good news followed as the CML reported a fall in homeowners who were behind with repayments, with the number of people in arrears of at least 2.5% of their outstanding mortgage dropping to 186,300, 10% less than a year earlier.

There is a helluva a lot of chat about how the Government plans to cut the national debt and all parties tend to offer variations of the same solution: cut back the services we expect them to pay for.

When in fact, what they will probably do is simply raise taxes. It's a lot easier to talk about when there is no election for four years and it definitely avoids those unpleasant strikes the bring the country to a standstill.

The car industry has come back with a vroom, announcing that car production in the UK during March was up by 90% on the same time last year, a record for any month.

It was during the early months of last year when the industry really was in the doldrums that Honda actually stopped production altogether for four months at their Swindon plant.

Now the bounce back saw a total of 117,622 cars made in March this year, representing the fifth month in a row of growth following the huge dip in production at the start of last year.

Putting the boot into shoe chain
For the second time in two years, footwear chain Faith is in trouble, and was placed into administration yesterday, threatening the jobs of 362 full-time staff and 1,382 part-time workers across their 78 stores.

Britain's biggest mobile phone operator, Orange, is abandoning the network it has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on, and signed up to use British Telecom's, in a move that will double its broadband reach and put it head to head with the market big boys BT, Virgin Media and Talk Talk.

Orange has spent the last few years, and a shedload of cash, installing its own equipment in local BT exchanges, but is thought to have needed further significant investment to get its network up to scratch for expansion. Since its merger in the UK with T-Mobile, Orange has nearly 30 million mobile phone customers but only 840,000 broadband customers on a network that reaches about 65% of the population.

Strangely coy for once, Ryanair is refusing to put is surprising £22 million profits boost down to the strikers at British Airways.

But it seems the Irish tactic of selling 'alternative arrangement' fares to those stranded by the strikes, as well as leasing three BA aircraft to add on extra flights, is just the ticket.

The demure budget airline is attributing the increase in profits to "somewhat stronger than expected" passenger figures in the last couple of months.

How quaint.