Category Archives: Media

Just over halfway through now, and The Apprentice is proving to be compulsive viewing. In my previous post on the matter I felt sheepish about admitting to watching it, but I make no such apology now; it is the best thing on the box by a goodly way.

Alan Sugar has made a few strange decisions when firing people, but his broad thrust has been right; getting shot of the pointless planners and management consultants, the people who “give good flipchart” as Adrian Chiles says on “The Apprentice; You’re Fired”. It is encouraging that he can see through the business-speak bollocks of the likes of Mani, Alexa and Samuel, and I can see the door beckoning for Sharon and Tuan in the near future and for the same reason. They may be nice enough people, but they are basically rubbish.

Despite being (or perhaps because I was) a failed salesperson in a previous life I am gradually warming to and gaining a grudging respect for those candidates who ooze sales talent. Paul and Ruth in particular can seem arrogant at times, they can be too smug and too bolshy respectively, but both are charm personified and hugely impressive once they are wooing a customer. More importantly they both appear competent, an attribute most of the other candidates lack. How it will all pan out next week though when pitching to corporate clients will be interesting to see; acting like a second hand car salesman is great when you are, well, selling cars, but Paul’s cheesy and wince-inducing presentation to advertising execs a couple of weeks back doesn’t bode well.

My main concern, though, involves Syed. He continues to act the up-himself oaf, without any obvious qualities other than his own self-deluded self-belief. Tragically, Alan Sugar looks to have a blind spot where Syed is concerned, as he did with Jo; last Friday on Jonathan Ross he was full of praise for the lad. Then yesterday on “…You’re Fired” Mark Frith went on about how the next few weeks would show us the redemption of Syed, and that the public would swing round behind him. Short of Syed receiving a personality transplant I can’t see me backing him, but my real worry is that Mark Frith has inside knowledge, and that his prescience is actually down to having viewed the preview tapes and knowing the outcome. The Wikipedia entry for The Apprentice shows Syed to be one of the few candidates who doesn’t have their own website listed; is that because he doesn’t need one, having won the job of being the apprentice months ago?

I await with breath bated and fingers crossed.

Update 10/4/06: Syed does have a website, here! Yay! Not much going on there (you can take that to be about Syed or his website) but hope springs eternal. Thanks to this comment on this post at Blogjam for the information; Blogjam is a new blog to me, but the post on The Apprentice is fantastic, essential reading if you want to know who really should win the contest. The answer may surprise you.

BBC Three presents… Dog Borstal

Now I really have seen everything.

I don’t really know what’s going on. I have traditionally eschewed reality TV programmes, pretty much. I tend to see bits of I’m A Celebrity… when it’s on as Ant and Dec are usually good value, I found myself watching some of the first series of Big Brother while it was still a novelty, and I even saw the fag-end of the second series of Fame Academy when my wife got into it; but that is about the end of it. Celebrity Love Island, The Farm, Simply Come Dancing and the rest of them pass me by; or rather I cross over to avoid them.

So what is going on now? First I got hooked on the last series of Celebrity Big Brother, largely I suppose because the evil triumvirate of Galloway, Burns and Rodman held such an awful fascination, and now I am watching, enjoying and even looking forward to the next episode of The Apprentice.

It is a sensation akin to rubbernecking really, I suppose, and I can’t help it. The thing is, I could always see why some people watch the celebrity reality shows; they feature people who you (may) have heard of and who you feel you know. It can be interesting to see another side to some famous faces, and indeed many celebs go on purely to show the public how they “really are”. In the event Celebrity Big Brother surprised me in that I didn’t expect to see another side to George Galloway, I was pretty sure he was happy with his public persona and that we would be subjected to it ad nauseum. I knew that when the series finished I would still think of him as an idiot; I just didn’t expect him to be revealed as also being such a nasty bully.

But why watch The Apprentice? Who cares what a group of unknown egotists get up to as they try and suck up to their would-be boss? Not me, I thought. The only effect the first series had on me was to unleash the mildly irritating Saira Khan into my consciousness, and I thought this new series would hold the same level of interest. However, for lack of anything else on telly I watched the first episode of the second series last week, and I haven’t looked back. I fear I’m hooked.

Yesterday’s episode for example showed the two teams, one of boys and one of girls, designing and selling their own calendars in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital. In fairness I reckon that is a tricky challenge, a tough one to get right. The most obvious idea for the calendar, for it to be full of pictures of kids, is too obvious; but the lads went with it anyway, dressing babies up as teachers and policemen and printing a cheap, tatty and unimaginative calendar that looked like it had been run off on a pc with a cheap printer using the nastiest font available. The girls’ calendar was made up of pictures of cats, beautifully photographed and produced, but tragically balls all to do with Great Ormond Street, and with the dates on the calendar so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them. Then both sides pitched to three sets of buyers; the resulting presentations were at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but both utterly awful. Nargis for the girls showed that as a salesperson she makes a great pharmacist; she looked like she had never done any public speaking before, so surely this wasn’t the time and place to start. Her opposite number Mani stated before hand that he was an expert at this sort of thing, and he was, in his own mind. A more cheesy and insincere presentation it is hard to believe, until you realise that Mani is a management consultant, and then it all makes sense. To top it all, neither Nargis nor Mani thought it important to know how much their calendars cost when they went into their respective sales meetings.

It really is fascinating to see how inept (and indeed how downright odd) many of the candidates appear, how they just don’t seem up to it. I am sure doing The Apprentice must be pretty stressful, but it was still bizarre to see a good number of the contestants blubbing away when someone disagreed with them and they couldn’t get their own way. You could understand it if these people are wee youngsters plucked off the streets, all green and wet behind the ears, but they are mainly successful business people in their mid-thirties , old enough, and intelligent enough, to know better. Or so you would think.

They are not all as bad as each other, however; some seem to have a fair idea what they are doing, and in particular the girls appear generally more clued up than the boys. A good example of this was in the first episode where both teams had to pick a name for themselves. The girls apparently decided in a matter of minutes; one suggested “Velocity”, the others said “fine”. That was all that was required. The lads clashed horns for hours on end, agonising over this crucial business decision, before finally deciding on “Invicta”, in the face of solid opposition from Syed who couldn’t see why his suggestion – “The A team” – was shit.

It was high comedy indeed, and as if to prove it Harry Hill tackled the subject on last week’s TV Burp; but to no avail. Try as he might, no matter what he added to the raw material on show, nothing he said could make the situation seem any funnier than it already was. It is early days yet, but so far The Apprentice looks impossible to improve upon.

There are many things to be concerned about in the world today; Tony Blair’s relentless populist wheezes that repeatedly strike away at our historic freedoms, the continued nuclear brinkmanship over Iran, the fact that according to the tabloids (and who can doubt them) every potential teacher is a paedophile, or every teacher is potential paedophile, or something.

But one thing that has really frustrated me since the launch of ITV4 in November has been the way that their logo hasn’t fitted in with the image of the other three existing ITV channels. I know it shouldn’t, but it really has been bothering me, and led to a few sleepless nights I can tell you.

I needn’t have worried of course, someone was on the case, and yesterday we saw the fruits of their efforts, the new “idents” for the whole portfolio of ITV channels. And very nice they are too; I’m not knocking them. They are certainly not the sort of thing you can rattle off in half an hour, although personally, were I tasked with the job of designing the new logos I would be a bit fed up if I’d got bogged down with them for more than an afternoon. It would take me a short while to select the neatest font, a bit longer to pick the most appealing colours, but that would be about it.

ITV didn’t ask me if I could redesign the logos though, which is their loss, as by the looks of it I would have saved them a small fortune. ITV’s new identity, needless to say, is the result of a dreaded project, in this case one entitled Brand 2010 according to this press release. Rather than just employ me for half a day, the Brand 2010 “team” were augmented by M&C Saatchi, WPPMindShare and Red Bee (formally BBC Broadcast). I have no idea how many people must have been involved in this project, but it sounds like a lot. I also don’t know how long this project lasted, but I suspect it took a significant amount of time. The name Brand 2010 alone won’t have sprung up overnight, it will have been developed and debated over numerous jugs of coffee and plates of biscuits in a meeting room where “I think we can all knock off early today and resume tomorrow?” And as with most projects of this kind, rather than shamefully admit just how much time and money has been wasted on a largely trivial project, the order of the day is to boast of the same, to justify the hours worked on the whole pointless exercise, to detail the exact extent of their corporate faffing about; so we know from the press release that Brand 2010 was “a comprehensive and wide-reaching project” (rather than just involving me and some magic markers), involved “6000 viewers” and “company wide workshops with staff” (who I would imagine decided that the new logos are “alright, really, yeah”) thanks to which we now know the “personality” of each ITV channel (I confess, had I been given the job, I wouldn’t have thought about investigating each channel’s individual personality; which is probably why I wasn’t asked).

And what are these personalities? Well you probably didn’t know until now, but ITV1 “ captures a range of human emotions and viewers feel connected as a result”. The “ITV1 logo opens out at the start of each ident to encapsulate the emotion in each scene”, “this logo device is also taken through into the on-screen design elements for the channel in a bold and clear design that ensures that the programming shines as hero”. The programmer as hero, eh? In contrast, “ITV2 programming has an addictive quality to it – you just can’t help watching it!” (their exclamation mark!) Yes, “this channel is centred on fun, excess, and general over-the-topness – too much of everything. It’s a journey through a visually rich, vibrant and stylish ITV2 environment.” ITV3’s idents are a “visual links between an object and its environment from with the viewer can interpret their own story” while ITV4 “is based around ‘the collision of opposites’”. So if you thought ITV3 was just where thay repeated classic drama, and ITV2 was for shit chat shows and repeats of the soaps, you are a fool.

It would be unfair to single ITV out for this idiocy, every large organisation indulges in the same thing (although I find few press releases as unintentionally hilarious), and if it keeps some people gainfully employed and out of trouble while they strive to justify their existence and spin their projects out for all they’re worth then what do I care. I’d take one of these jobs if they were going, they sound like a right doss, and I can talk shite with the best of them, as this blog regularly proves. It is also only fair to draw a distinction between those behind the technical work involved in creating and producing the actual idents themselves (which are quite beautifully filmed and must be the result of genuine hard work by people far more intelligent and talented than myself) and those responsible for the pretentious and meaningless rubbish I have outlined above. Re-branding can work, of course – one instantly thinks of Levi’s, or Tango – and if Brand 2010 does increase ITV’s profits then all well and good; but if it fails that won’t put them off going through exactly the same rigmarole next time. Indeed if this particular re-branding does fail it will just bring forward the date of the next re-brand. Anyone free for Brand 2015?

I can see why the consultants and agencies directly involved in these projects act as they do, but why are the client companies’ complicit in this palaver? Think how much money they could save if the whole industry was organised on a piecework basis, if you got paid for the swiftness and volume of re-brands you did. It would involve a fraction of the time and expense currently incurred, but would there be any real loss of quality?

Meanwhile, in government, Gordon Brown is showing that he too can engage in total and utter bollocks. In his speech to the Fabian Society at the weekend (link via) discussing his ideas on “Britishness” he lamented the fact that “unlike America and many other countries, we have no constitutional statement or declaration enshrining our objectives as a country; no mission statement defining purpose; and no explicitly stated vision of our future.”

Perhaps it is just me, but on the occasions when I hear an American talking about how the United States is not only a nation but also a cause I am unable to stifle a world weary groan; the only thing that lightens my gloom is the fact that in Britain we tend to avoid going in for this guff. Now Brown wants to change all that. Ta.

And as for a “mission statement”, is there anyone who thinks they are anything other than a complete waste of time – other than those who commission them, and, it seems, our Prime Minister elect? It is often said that government should try to emulate the private sector, and there may well be a good case for such a policy; but must they always seek to ape its worst excesses, its Brand 2010 type toss, rather than implement those elements of business that serve a useful purpose and which we actually benefit from?

Funny really; there I was on Friday night, taking advantage of the newly relaxed licensing laws, and disagreeing with my mates over the way George Best’s death had been handled across the media and elsewhere. Sure, the coverage was a tad excessive, I thought, but not unexpectedly so considering the fame of the man, and if needs be it could be (and was) easily ignored. Unlike my mates I didn’t think the obituaries were overly celebratory, they seemed quite happy to talk about the seamier side of his character; they even omitted the painful “where did it all go wrong, George” anecdote, or at least I never came across that story in any of the reports I saw.

We also argued over the minute’s silence. Why should every football match honour the man, they said, particularly such occasions as the City-Liverpool game where there was little chance the silence would be observed? Personally, however, while I am not a fan of such things most of the time, a brief moment to mark the life of such an influential figure in the game doesn’t seem undeserving; and if requesting some numskulls to shut up for a minute means we are giving them enough rope, then so be it.

I woke up on Saturday morning, nursing a hangover, cursing the state for not ordering me home at eleven o’clock the night before. I switched on the telly and did my eyes deceive me? Was the whole of the BBC1 schedule bumped to make way for live coverage of George Best’s funeral? Yes it was. I remembered the previous evening’s conversation when I defended the media’s handling of the story, and I started to feel a bit foolish. In the event Cbeebies soon filled our television screen (there was a particularly fine episode of Barnaby Bear at Loch Ness) and so I missed the sad occasion.

Seeking the hair of the dog the family Quinn made its way down Cheadle High Street in the afternoon for a spot of lunch. We popped into our favourite café bar for the first time since it had been refurbished, and discovered they had recently installed two new impressive flat screen TVs. They were showing News 24, which was beamed live from Stormont, covering the aftermath of Best’s funeral. Operation Overkill was in full swing as an endless parade of mourners was interviewed. I was confused; not that the funeral was considered newsworthy, but that it was being treated as an epoch making event.

“I suppose it will be like this when Beckham dies”, said my wife, and I nodded as I knocked back my first Stella, imagining what the coverage would be like a few decades hence.

But then I thought again; did my wife mean there would be a similar level of coverage if Beckham died now? What would happen if he died soon, like in the next week or so? If the coverage of George Best’s death was over the top, imagine that with the extra-added tragedy of a “brilliant” footballing career cut short? If Beckham does die imminently then he could even rival Diana for blanket media attention; and if Posh Spice survives the plane crash (I’ve decided it will be a plane crash), can you imagine her playing the grieving widow across print and screen? I don’t even want to think about it.

I wish David Beckham a long and prosperous life.

My thanks to Steve for pointing me in the direction of YouTube, a sort of Flikr/Yahoo! Photos for your videos. Now I can effortlessly inflict my short films on you, and all for free.
If you have 4 minutes 24 seconds to spare, then you can check out my video of the Northampton Balloon Festival of 2004, complete with a cameo of my wife and son near the start of the vid. The quality isn’t 100%, although that is as much the fault of my cheap video camera as the compressing of the video file. If you make it to the end, then “Another Trial & Error Production” very much refers to my method of making films.

Now, I don’t like Gordon Ramsey at the best of times; not particularly. If he thinks that the best way to motivate his staff is to bully, intimidate and verbally abuse them then that is a matter for him; but I don’t personally find it entertaining, amusing or admirable. The thing is, on the occasions when I have watched Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares I have seen moments where he has shown a genuine skill for inspiring respect and building confidence in others; but I suppose such scenes don’t feature in the trailers for the show because they don’t make good telly. Certainly, that positive aspect of his personality doesn’t seem to get a mention when I hear his fans discuss him; it is the effing and jeffing side of Ramsey that people seem to like, which Ramsey himself seems proud of, and which I just don’t understand. I suppose Ramsey would say that his job is a very stressful one; but so is mine, and at my work we simply couldn’t get the job done if my colleagues and I showed such disrespect towards each other. Anyone can lose their temper in the heat of the moment, including me, but afterwards I would hope to apologise, rather than revel in my rudeness. I suppose it comes down to the paradox where some people reckon that you need to bollock people occasionally to get things done…but no one says they appreciate a good bollocking to get themselves going.

Anyway, there is another side to Ramsey that I am not keen on and that is his amazing hypocrisy. It centres on his disdain for “celebrity chefs” such as Anthony Worrall Thompson. Fair enough, you may think, but this is pretty rich coming from someone who has appeared in Ramsey’s Boiling Point, Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen, and has enjoyed numerous appearances on Jonathan Ross, The Friday Night Project, various “Top 100 whatever” programmes and who even had his own calendar out last year. His appearances on other people’s shows are especially weird, as away from the kitchen he shows himself to be a real dullard. On his first appearance on Jonathan Ross he revealed he had nothing remotely interesting to say; when he was a guest the following series he tried to be more engaging by playing to type and swearing a lot for no good reason, and to little effect.

Well the hypocrisy has really been cranked up with his new series The F Word (F for food), which I saw a repeat of yesterday on More4 (incidentally the best new TV channel we have seen for some time, and probably the best we will see for a while; I’m not placing much faith in Sky3 or ITV4). His new programme begins with credits showing him looking mean and moody, the theme tune bashing out a pounding and dramatic beat, the screen is filled with a close up of his scar ridden face; then we see him stripping off his “civvy clothes” as he strides purposefully down a corridor. A long shot reveals his topless frame before the camera is focussed close in again on his fixed, firm expression (did you forget how serious and mean he is?) and then we watch as he changes into his chef’s gear before storming through the doors at the end of the corridor. Cut to a swish restaurant full of eager diners, a long spiral staircase with Ramsey at the summit; the crowd goes wild, cheering and applauding the arrival of their hero. Ramsey skips down the stairs, basking in glory, milking the applause. And this is a man who hates celebrity chefs?

To be honest, that was enough for me and I had to switch over; and I’m glad I did. Over on BBC2 Bill Oddie’s Autumnwatch was in full swing and it featured the most amazing sight of starlings flocking in huge numbers; it really had to be seen to be believed. If it’s ever on again then watch it; a sky almost black with birds that swirl in unison, looking like a school of sardines that go squeezing and twirling into all manner of bizarre shapes in the sky before tumbling down like the steady flow of a waterfall onto a reed bed. Amazing.

But when that finished I flicked through the channels and there didn’t appear much else on so I gave The F Word another go, and it wasn’t too bad actually. Giles Coren’s look at how donner kebabs were made in a factory was quite interesting, and while it proved what a fatty and unhealthy product it is, at least the meat used looked to be of a decent quality, free of lips, lugs and spinal cord. It was also amusing when Ramsey challenged comedian Al Murray to see who could make the best bread and butter pudding. Ramsey was tedious, referring to Murray’s dish as a stale egg sandwich; not once but about 18 times as he clearly didn’t have the imagination to think of another insult. But then, when it came to a blind taste test, the judges’ unanimous verdict was that Murray’s pud was better than Ramsey’s soggy effort. Ha ha.

I don’t think I will bother watching The F Word again. Like Ramsey I don’t have an interest in celebrity, which is why I was puzzled when he was seen schmoozing with guests Martine McCutcheon and Sun columnist Jane Moore (Martine wasn’t too keen on the bread and butter pudding, she said, because she doesn’t like raisons; although when she later revealed that she doesn’t eat dairy or bread it became clear the dish was probably her idea of hell). His campaign to get women cooking again seemed a weak attempt to hang onto Jamie Oliver’s coat tails by being a cook with a cause, and there was a ludicrous part of the show where he picked the people for the blind tasting panel. Each guest was blindfolded and had to taste a variety of foods; those who correctly judged which food was which were considered the people with the finest palettes and joined the panel. The problem lay with the foods the guests were tested on; if you have never eaten salmon caviar before, or mozzarella with basil, then you are unlikely to be able to tell what they taste like; it doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion or cannot tell good food from bad. This is another thing that gets on my tits about Ramsey, that he likes to portray himself as a no nonsense, down to earth man of the people; yet all the while he can be as snobbish and pretentious about food as anybody and charges prices at his restaurants that only a small sector of the population can routinely afford.

In all, though, for me The F Word suffers by comparison with Full On Food, of which it seems a poor imitation. Full On Food was a cracking programme which, like The F Word, was a cookery magazine show with a studio audience; it had some fascinating and informative items from the resident presenters (I particularly remember a moving film from a vegetarian food critic trying meat for the first time in ten years) and even featured a minor celebrity cooking a dish in the studio each week. If you haven’t heard of Full On Food then it may be because unlike The F Word it didn’t also feature a minor celebrity audience, minor celebrity presenter and minor celebrity chef; something you would think that Gordon Ramsey himself would approve of.

The other day I watched a programme on ITV2 as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations. This one listed the best 20 adverts in the history of ITV, and it was okay. In common with all “list” programmes it had its fault, and in particular this programme shared similar flaws with a Channel 4 programme from a few years back called The Hundred Best Adverts Ever, Ever, Ever, or something similar.

I don’t just mean that they picked adverts I don’t like – that is bound to happen with a subjective list – but that they restricted each product to one advert only. So, Guinness, which has always had brilliant adverts, gets represented solely by that “horses and surfers, tick-followed-tock” one; a fine advert to be sure, but is seems a shame that other commercials in their canon never seem to get considered.

Tango is another brand that has a fine history in producing quality adverts, but again suffers because only the original “orange bloke slapping someone on the chops” advert seems to be included on these programmes. In fact, the greatest advert of all time is for Tango; but it isn’t for orange flavour, or even apple flavour. No, the best television commercial ever was when Tango advertised their blackcurrant flavour, for the one and only time.

I know there are more important things going on in the world, but I think it is an injustice that this genius of an advert has been consistently overlooked; but no longer. Inspired by the ITV programme I typed something along the lines of “blackcurrant tango advert” into Google and came up with this gem of a site where you can watch this little masterpiece again and again in all its glory; and a load of other adverts while you’re are at it.

Watch it, and just see if I’m not right.