We've heard this before of course but the fact that these companies have come back to the table suggests there's a real appetite for the deal.
If it goes through it will be the largest private equity deal since the credit crunch hit and may signal the bottom of the dealmaking market.
Also next month bankers expect to complete the delayed syndication of around £800m used for the buyout of publisher Emap, a further sign of movement in the hitherto moribund media sector.
Mind you, the fact that it's taken 14 banks to rustle up £2bn is still a sign of uncertain times.
Just over a year ago any one of these would have ploughed in with £2bn of its own.
In the wider world Coca-Cola is offering an eye-watering $2.3bn for top Chinese juice maker China Huiyan Juice Group, three times the company's current market value.
Coke is awash with cash but at least it's prepared to spend some of it.
What will Abu Dhabi do next?
Go into the film production business of course, a business that's about as risky as football.
The government-backed Abu Dhabi Media Company says it's going to invest £1bn in up to eight films a year over the next five years. These will be in Bollywood as well as Hollywood.
It's setting up a new company called imagenation abu dhabi to manage the investment.
This comes hard on the heels of the Abu Dhabi United Group's proposed £200m takeover of Manchester City (it's still doing due diligence although it's already shelled out £32.5m for Real Madrid forward Robinho).
One wonders what trophy asset they'll be after next. A fashion house?
Brown tinkers with the housing market
PM Gordon Brown's package of measures to stem the flow of blood in the housing market have been well received (shares of housebuilders actually rose on the news) although it's hard to see them making much of a difference.
As ever with Brown it's a bit of micro-management, he's so determined to make sure only the needy qualify (as with tax credits) that a lot of people will be disappointed.
Reducing the period of time before people qualify for mortgage assistance from the current ludicrous 39 weeks to 13 will probably make the most difference to hard-pressed homeowners, particularly as unemployment mounts. But it won't get the housing market moving.
What Brown really needs is a Bank of England cut in interest rates coupled with the Bank broadening its special liquidity scheme to accept 2008 packages of mortgages as collateral for loans (at the moment it will only take them up to 2007).
But few people think his old mate Mervyn King will help him on either score, immediately anyway.
The continuing fall in the value of the pound gives King and his Monetary Policy Committee an excuse to maintain rates at 5% as this makes imports more expensive (although it helps exports these don't affect inflation).
Oil as ever is the key commodity, particularly as it's priced in dollars.
But the oil price keeps falling -- some oil futures were traded at $105 a barrel yesterday. And we even have the Iranians saying that Opec should cut production to support the price, a sure sign that they feel it's further to fall.
So there might be some good news on the horizon for Gordon Brown and the economy after all.
BT's Verwaayen takes over at Alcatel
Out of the frying pan into the fire you might say. Ben Verwaayen quit as CEO of BT three months ago after doing a sterling job weaning the one-time state monopoly off telephony into selling big IT and communications contracts to international companies.
Now, in a surprise move, he's taking over as CEO of telecoms equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, the result of a Franco-US merger two years ago.
You'd think that, after his experience at BT, Verwaayen would know what a dog telecoms equipment has proved to be (BT was a big customer of Alcatel).
But maybe he knows something we don't. He'll certainly get an easier time from analysts in France than BT enjoyed here in his reign.
For all Verwaayen's achievements the BT share price remained resolutely earthbound.
TNS and WPP chase each other up
The share prices of researcher TNS and bidder for the company WPP have been anything but earthbound, TNS hit a year's high of 280p yesterday while WPP also rose strongly.
Both slipped back today along with the market but this seems to be driven by fears that falling commodity prices will hit some the FTSE 100's hitherto best-performing companies.
It's still a possibility that someone else will enter the fray.
The sharp rise in the dollar against the pound means that UK companies are cheaper for US companies to buy than they have been for years (which may be one reason the Informa deal is back on).
Nielsen is probably too big to be allowed to buy TNS. Number two in the research market, healthcare giant IMS, might be interested though.
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of 北京赛车pk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.