The Apprentice Series 4

Candidate for Fool of the Series: upper-crust Raef. "The spoken word is my tool" he says. Here's the spoken word Raef, you're a tool.

Click Here to Read More..

Last Night's TV

Advert:

The Sun - We Love It

The Sun's new ad campaign is a just indication of the collective inanity that drags the paper down. The Sun can be clever, incisive, witty even. It has fewer typos than the Guardian. Its headline-writers are the best in the business. But this ad campaign: dear oh dear. It depicts glamorous ladies in skin-tight black catsuits (cleavage abound), flying helicopters across the globe, which drag enormous nets full of black-and-white footballs, dropping them on the unsuspecting public. Builders and truckers grin wildly, and do keepy-uppies in the street.
The balls rain down, filling roads and pathways. Women cowering under newspapers dodge them like their life depends on it.

Right then; not only is it suspiciously close to Carling's "Love Football" campaign (shown during the last World Cup), it also posits women as uptight killjoys who would run through a brick wall to get away from a football. And all this during the Women's World Cup. England are doing well, playing well, and have flashes of inspiration from the boot of Kelly Smith.

The Sun is not only ignoring women's football, it is punching it in the uterus and calling it names.
If they want to look like witless, brainless morons, they have succeeded.

Click Here to Read More..

Spotted on ITV last night: Apostrophe Catastrophe! Whilst fighting my girlfriend for the remote (she wants Sex and the City, I want Die Hard), ITV's credits denote the film part of their "Action Hero's" season.

Now I don't want to sound like a militant lunatic, but i hope someone got sacked for that mistake. It's bad enough when people text me, and the language sounds like it's written by a 7-year old girl. But when ITV can't even get their f***ing apostrophes right........violent retribution must ensue.

NB: If you can't spot the mistake, ITV meant "Heroes" as plural of Hero. "Hero's" requires a noun after it, as the apostrophe signifies the possessive, or a contraction. "Action Hero's Dirty White T-Shirt Gets Ripped And Stained With Blood In Predictably Violent Hollywood Film" could be one way of writing it right.

Click Here to Read More..

Award for least effective advert of the week: the Hyundai Tuscon. It "features" an amorphous black blob of a 4x4, wafting through countryside to the strains of American soft-rock wank. Various Lands-End catalogue models grin and look into the distance. A flower falls apart and floats onto the ground. By the time the advert had finished I'd forgotten the name of the car. Lizzie leaned across and said, "that, thing, really doesn't make me want to buy it." Nuff said.

Click Here to Read More..

Watching The Million Pound Footballers Giveaway last night felt like a missed opportunity. Dr Noreena Hertz, an intelligent, articulate and extraordinarily capable thinker attempted to persuade the nation to focus on nurses, by arranging for every Premiership player to donate the equivalent of a day's wages, £1.5m in all, to help stop nurses from considering strike action.
The nation's nurses get a shitty wage doing shitty long hours, which, one west London nurse explained to a less-than-interested Jermain Defoe, "involves nurses working longer hours for the money, and so their level of care that they're able to provide for their patients deteriorates".
The nurses, incensed with the a measly 2.5% pay rise - as the programme points out, is less than inflation, so technically a pay cut - were moving to strike. But, as the good doctor explained, one day's pay from all 556 top-flight players would provide a relief fund for nurses, and the good press they richly deserve, which could bypass this drastic step.

In trying to expose the plight of nurses, Dr Hertz seemed to be base her campaign on the fact that everyone knows that footballers earn a laughable amount of money.
Adrian Chiles felt Noreena was underestimating players: "The chances of becoming a Premiership footballer are practically zero. They work extraordinarily hard, and most of them are humble peolple, they know they've done well." Effectively, for the 90 minutes that he plays on a Saturday, the highest-paid Premiership player receives around £20,000. Over the same amount of time, a nurse could expect to earn around £16. The disparity is shocking.

But that's the underlying problem. In a perfect world the people who help other people the most (social workers, teachers, nurses, carers) would be paid handsomely, for their rich and varied contribution to improving people's lives. But it's not a perfect world, and he is worth that amount of money - in economic terms - to his club.
For the best (ie Premiership) players' performances may raise the national and global profile of their team, netting them more money, along with lucrative sponsorship and advertising deals. Good results, more profile and increasing business wealth equals more incentives for the players; and so more teams chase worldwide status, and the players that get them there will be rewarded.

Dr Noreena also violated the one basic rule of business. To retain any credibility when pitching yourself and your cause, do your research! What this woman knew about football you could have written on a grain of rice. It was embarrassing. It showed a disrespect for her audience, when trying to get players on board, that you can get their names wrong, not know that Ryan Giggs was Welsh and not English, an extremely contentious point in the past.
At times, there was an uncomfortable feeling that her cause was hard done by, by her epic, overwrought "we can all change the world" presentation style, to a room of bored footballers.
We saw contestants Tre Azam and Katie Hopkins getting roasted alive on this week's The Apprentice, when avid and direct confrontation towards their complete lack of preparation left them squirming and sweating, like a fat man in tight leather trousers. It shouldn't be any different pitching to footballers. (Good on Simon, by the way. I think I want to adopt him, he's like a naughty little puppy, irrepressible and sweet, just aching for a mentor like siralun).

Dr Noreena Hertz clearly achieved a huge amount. But a noble cause does not (necessarily) a good campaign make. (I love that completely ungrammatical phrase. Anyone care to tell me from where it derives?)

Click Here to Read More..