The Obscurer

A few months ago I wrote about the “pull economy”, or more specifically about Lulu; a self-publishing website where you are able to upload your novel or whatever to their server, and if (perhaps a big “if”) someone wants to purchase a copy it can be printed off on demand and shipped out to your Mum, or whoever has actually stumped up the hard cash for the book.

Fine for self-publishing I thought, but I went on to wonder if

it could also show the way forward for more general book publishing in the future. For as long as people like me enjoy browsing in bookshops then I imagine there will always be a need for long print runs in order to fill up all those shelves in the stores; but on the face of it I can see no reason why a company like Amazon will in future need to hold any stock at all if technology is able to allow each book to be printed on demand as and when a customer orders it. In addition, theoretically no book need ever be out of print again, indeed the very term “out of print” could become an anachronism; just so long as they are held on file somewhere ready to be printed then all books, no matter how old or obscure, could be available whenever a potential customer wants to buy a copy.

Well, yesterday I read an article in The Economist concerning the future of Amazon.com. What do you know but towards the end of the article it states that

Amazon subsidiary, BookSurge, is busy courting publishers to have their works scanned into digital files. Modern printing techniques allow books to be printed relatively cheaply on demand, “whether it’s one copy or one thousand”, Greg Greeley, head of media products at Amazon, said when BookSurge was acquired last April.

On-demand printing is particularly suited to lower-volume books and those that would ordinarily be “out of print”. Amazon already sells print-on-demand books, although that is “invisible” to consumers, Mr Bezos (Amazon’s CEO) has said, because they look exactly like any other books.

That’ll be me then; speculating and dreaming of a bold and exiting future, while unwittingly already being way behind the curve. There’s clearly a reason why I’m not in business.

PostScript: Yes, I know, I know. I will try to stop writing posts concerning week old Economist articles; but if you ever wanted this blog to be innovative and topical then I’m sure you would have abandoned me long ago. I hope the fact that you’re still here means that you know what you’re getting.

So, are we all geared up for the stunning denouement to the latest series of Doctor Who tonight?
Yes, hide behind your sofa; the pulse is racing, heart pounding as we head towards the final episode and something we long feared comes to pass, a terrifying and frightening possibility – something we hoped would and could never happen – becomes a horrific reality, somehow crossing from another dimension into our own.

No, not the Daleks and the Cybermen joining forces – together at last – but the return of Mickey, AKA Noel Clarke once more hawking his questionable acting talents around national television; first witnessed in the later series of Auf Wiedesehen Pet (now there was proof of the law of diminishing returns) and now in far far too many episodes of the new Doctor Who.

To think I wasted good energy cheering when he was apparently stranded for eternity in a parallel universe a couple of episodes back. Never mind; let’s get on with it. Do your worst.

A relieved cheer went up over the Quinn household last night as Syed was finally fired from The Apprentice. A few weeks ago I said I expected Sharon and Tuan to be the next ones to be sacked and expressed the concern that Syed would win the thing; in the event I was spot on about the first two but by last week I had changed my mind about Syed. We never saw his redemption as predicted by Heat magazine’s Mark Frith, but up against Ruth and Tuan in last week’s boardroom I thought I could see the writing on the wall. Syed could survive against a nonentity like Taun, but head to head against someone of Ruth’s calibre and I couldn’t see him staying, and that is how events turned out.

Week by week Syed revealed himself to be an empty vessel. His main talent, as far as I could discern, was an incompetence verging on the illegal; by not collecting the right keys when letting a flat, to claiming a car would increase in value when selling to a customer, to forgetting to write the contestant’s names on the backs of raffle tickets he had sold and then considering not entering those tickets into the draw when he realised his mistake (or rather when Ruth pointed it out to him). The only thing that Syed could say in his favour was that he was a good salesman, but even there I found him unconvincing and amateurish; only his ludicrous self-confidence helped him out, forcing him to keep going well past the point where I would have thrown in the towel, and so enabling him to get sales more by persistence and the law of averages than by genuine ability. Such perseverance is valuable, but I think it can only get you so far.

But enough about Syed; I imagine that, beyond a brief stint on the Z-list celebrity circuit we have seen the last of him and we can allow him to get down to honing his “genius”, as he intoned straight faced on last nights “The Apprentice: You’re Fired”. Two weeks left to go on The Apprentice then, and if there is any justice it will be Paul and Ruth in the final. Michelle seems like a little girl, out of her depth and lucky to be there largely by dint of having ended up on the winning side a good few times. Ansell is a bit of a wild card; he quietly gets on with things and doesn’t do much wrong so it depends upon how he does in his interview, but for me the Tulip and the Badger are the standout candidates.

When I first wrote about The Apprentice I was pretty scathing about the lot of them, damning them all and tarring each contestant with the same “business idiot” brush. Now, however, I have a lot more time and respect for Ansell, Ruth and Paul and I would be happy if any of them won, although by rights I think it should be Ruth. So The Apprentice has also been a valuable lesson for me in looking beneath the obvious, beyond my own prejudices and in judging each person as an individual. It has also boosted my readership considerably (although I doubt it will last), thanks to this link and to the numerous people searching Google for “syed apprentice” who have come this way. This post should keep that hit counter ticking along nicely thank you very much; sorry to anyone who feels I have wasted their time.

I don’t, if I’m being honest, usually if ever watch BBC1’s offering New Tricks of a Monday night, but readjusting to British Summer Time following a weekend away in New York it was the perfect brainless nonsense to ignore while I tried to work out what time it was in the Big Apple and therefore if I was justified in feeling as tired as I did.

It wasn’t great, but it was at least an improvement on what I’d seen of American telly (24 hour news whingeing about gas prices for 24 hours) and the unwatchable BBC America (can you believe four hours of back to back Cash In The Attic interspersed with adverts for Footballers Wive$ on Saturday evening as we were getting ready to go out?).

Yes, New Tricks seemed the perfect sort of rubbish to switch your brain off to, only I couldn’t relax because I was transfixed by Dennis Waterman’s lower face. Even when he wasn’t on screen all I could think of was the way he seemed to be struggling around his mouth furniture, as he had apparently transmogrified in front of my eyes into the vicar from Dick Emery.

In fact, with this in mind, perhaps New Teeth would be a more apt title for this series?

PostScript: You will be as disappointed as me to learn that, according to the New Tricks website

The theme tune, sung by Dennis Waterman, is not commercially available, and there are no plans for it to be released.

This is upsetting. If Dennis Waterman is still so deluded, post Little Britain, that he has talents as a singer, then the least he can do is to release the song as a single and test himself in the marketplace. Perhaps he fears the customer is a little more discerning in 2006 compared with his glory days of the ‘Eighties.

PostPostScript: My foreign jaunt explains in part my failure to cover the continuing tale of Charles Clarke, but only so far, as there seems little point in me engaging in a bit of belated “me too” blogging when I have nothing to add except the obvious and many others have said all that needs to be said on the matter(s). No, this is the place for irrelevant twaddle about actors’ false teeth. Next week, when Tony Blair is arrested for a public order offence and put on an ASBO I will probably be talking about Jonathan Ross’s haircut. Stay tuned.

Jimmy McGovern was interviewed in last weekend’s Knowledge section of The Times, where he discussed his forthcoming drama series The Street which starts this Thursday.

The idea for The Street has been percolating inside McGovern’s head for years, loosely based on the street where he grew up in Kensington, Liverpool. He was the fifth of nine children of a betting shop manager and did not speak properly until he was 8, and then with a stutter.

All the writers are Scousers but McGovern did not want the dramas to be filmed in Liverpool, so tired is he of Liverpudlians complaining that they are portrayed in a bad light, so it was made in Manchester. McGovern believes it’s a “f***ing shame” that people here are so sensitive. “I’m sick of it. Every Cracker I’ve done has been based in Manchester. I’ve filled Manchester full of psychopaths, but no one there complains.”

Which I suppose could suggest a couple of things. Perhaps it is evidence that there is something in the claim that many Liverpudlians exhibit a chippy siege mentality, a persecution complex of the sort that Boris Johnson (or was it Simon Heffer?) was referring to in that infamous Spectator editorial that followed Ken Bigley’s murder.

Alternatively, it could show that Mancunians are a more dour and depressive lot, that they are just more grimly accepting of the fact that theirs is a city riddled with sickos and psychos and that they simply get on with it.

Or it could illustrate a combinations of both of these points, or none of the above, or something else entirely. I dunno.