The Obscurer

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?