Parallel worlds

Philip Davies, the MP who responded cynically to Rona Fairhead’s satisfaction with the BBC’s objectivity is in trouble with Channel 4.

Jon and Krish

This piece in The Guardian is about a bizarre row that occurred when Philip Davies visited ITN and was sent packing by Jon Snow’s colleague Krishnan Guru-Murthy

“Davies visited ITN on Tuesday after quizzing new BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead about the future of the corporation, in his role as a member of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee.The MP for Shipley, who had numerous tetchy exchanges with Fairhead’s predecessor Lord Patten during culture committee hearings, asked the BBC Trust chair: “Have you gone native in record time?” Fairhead replied: “Absolutely not”.

 The below the line comments are from a parallel world where they believe the BBC is right wing and think Channel 4 is  “the only regular news programme that does not seem to cower under the scrutiny of those in power.”

In the sidebar, more media (anti UKIP) stories provide additional platforms for aerated Guardian readers and conspiracy theorists.

Mike Reed has decided to apologise for the calypso. To date there are 2225 comments below the line; it looks like (approximately) a 50/50 split between hatred of Mike Reed, and hatred of UKIP. Everything about this topic is a waste of brain activity including mine for writing this and yours, if you’re doing so, for reading it.

However, I’ve just had a look at the Times where Deborah Ross has wasted half a page of newsprint and a modest amount of brain activity on a rebuttal, calypso style. 

Strangely enough, people’s polarised view of, and outright dismissal  of UKIP as racist is as simplistic as it gets. (Not that I haven’t misgivings of my own, but they’re different misgivings.) Here’s part of a verse of Ross’s ‘Jewish’ calypso:

Ukip you live in a remembered Britain, that’s for sure/A sentimentalised golden age with the border a closed door/We were white, Christian and happy, with trusty phone boxes too/But my family have been here for hundreds of years and we are Jews!

So the argument from Ross and people like David Aaronovich seems to be that if you’re Jewish it’s hypocritical to be concerned about immigration, because you and your ancestors were once immigrants. ....and evidently Muslims are the new Jews(?)  

However, if Ukip are more concerned about temporary economic migrants from Europe than they are  about permanent  ‘cultural’ migrants from the third world, then that’s where I part company with Nige. By the way, I suspect many of the worries that are being expressed about Poles - using our scant resources and hospitals and so on - are a front for unacceptable, politically incorrect but sincerely held worries that are sneered at by ‘the left’ for being “Islamophobic” and ‘racist’.

During the BBC’s baffled response to the breaking news of the Canadian shootings (talking to mother of Muslim convert recently killed in war against IS) Gavin Esler on News 24 suddenly came out with:

 ”I have many Muslim friends so I know that Islam is genuinely peaceful.......”

Talking of parallel worlds, last night's The Apprentice (episode 3)  highlighted the irrational basis of the whole concept of this programme. First of all, the prize isn’t even supposed to be an apprenticeship. It’s supposed to be a business partnership. 

How sustainable would a business be if it was wholly dependent on ripping people off? Come to think of it, there are a lot of companies who seem to do okay on that principle, but    it’s a very sad state of affairs when the girl whose unremitting appetite for ‘the margin’ overrode the principle of creating a quality product, which if they hadn’t made a balls-up of their sales technique, might have won the task for the team. At least that product stood a chance of growing into a sustainable business.

The much anticipated sensation of one candidate suddenly coming to her senses was somehow disappointing.  The firing of Nurun, the girl with the massive Muslim headdress was executed in a tidily non Islamophobic manner, and her appearance with Dara on the You’re Fired programme showed her to be a thoroughly nice lady with a sense of humour and the very model of a modern moderate Muslim. They do exist, as Gavin Esler will gladly attest.

On the other hand Nick Hewer the lefty capitalist is looking more unsustainable with every episode.

I wonder if there’s a parallel universe out there as well as here on earth? Where’s Brian Cox when you need such answers, and the parallel Brian Cox? 

The Apprentice, episodes one and two.

The world is in turmoil, the Ebola crisis is worsening each day, Islamic State is going strong, Muslims are at war wherever you find ‘em, Jihadis’ plots are straining our security services to breaking point, the BBC is preoccupied with the so-called Freudian slip and the Madeley family’s trolling problem. 

Of all the artificial constructs, in all the schedules of every channel in all the world, no wonder I was watching the most artificial construct of all; the Apprentice.

We do like our unreality reality programmes.  We know they’re slickly edited, tweaked, manipulated and moulded into a package for our goggle-eyed gratification.

The Apprentice is so ridiculous that I like it a lot, and I’m not alone. It’s uniquely voyeuristic and cringeworthy, but without the viciously cruel humiliation of the X Factor auditions. There’s still humiliation, but it’s more benign.

Of all the dumbed-down, ratings-driven, populist crap that make the BBC what it is today the Apprentice is the daddy. It’s so peculiar, what’s not to like? 

Like all the other unreality programmes, the Apprentice sticks to a rigid, obviously nonsensical format. Unachievable time-limits are imposed, designed to inject suspense into the action, despite viewers knowing full well that what they are seeing is not what has actually happened. 

The latest series of the Apprentice opened with a flourish. A treat! Episodes one and two on consecutive days, with extra candidates!

We’ve still got the translucent screen through which Lawd Sugar makes his dramatic entrance before making his way to the throne. You’d think by now, after several episodes - a decade, we’re told - someone might have put him right about his pet saying:  “What was you thinking”. Is everyone really terrified of Lordy, or is he deliberately modelling his TV persona on the Dick Van Dyke school of cockney grammar?

No-one who has ever watched the Apprentice would volunteer to be the first project manager. One assumes these candidates had watched it before, but someone had to do it, and Sarah Dales (33/1)and Felipe Alviar-Baquero (9/1)were the first foolhardy guinea pigs.

The girls chose a name that none of them knew the meaning of, ‘Decadence’. 

The project manager had ordered them to glam up for the hard sell, so decadence might have accidentally been quite a fitting team name. Unfortunately those instructions antagonised the team, who felt  their intelligence had been insulted, so all semblance of  ‘teamwork’ went down the pan from the get-go. The the girl who suggested Decadence thought it meant something to do with ‘decade’  (Ence of decade?)  There is a scent called Essence of Beckham, so...   

It was a shame that the first episode was so mundane. Selling job lots of unrelated merchandise, if possible, for profit, in the space of a working day, and back to the boardroom, ready or not, at 5 on the dot, the girls tottering frantically from inappropriate venue to inappropriate venue in killer heels, eventually offloading most of their wares at a small profit or a substantial loss.

The boys wasted so much time at an outlying organic suppliers, adding value to some sausages that they missed the lunch trade, forcing them to abandon a valuable stock of T shirts at the printers that had been briefed to decorate them with the ill-conceived slogan “Buy this T shirt”. Who would wear that?  Not so much adding value as subtracting it.

They too eventually offloaded most of their wares at a substantial loss or a small profit.

On episode two, they chose (nothing to do with municipal incontinence) “Tenacity”, the meaning of which someone allegedly understood. 

From the losing team (the boys) the one who made the decision to sell off the spuds instead of collecting the T shirts was fired. (Chile(s) 9/1)

Episode two.

In the second episode Nurun Ahmed (25/1) was railroaded into being project manager. The task was to design wearable technology as fashion.

She seemed to be wearing several headscarves at once, with a small red hanky kirby-gripped on top. Her headdress seemed to have its own superstructure, capacious enough to house a considerable amount of wearable technology. A transmitter that could have relayed instructions on how to project manage would have been useful. Obviously that was not the case, as she was hopelessly bullied into incorporating everyone’s ideas into a hideous jacket.

It had the ability to charge a phone and warm your front torso with the aid of solar panels. Unfortunately no-one discussed the solar panels with the technicians, and at the last minute they discovered that solar panels must be exposed to the sun, so had to be stuck on the shoulders of the jacket in the hope that they would be mistaken for striped shoulder pads, which they would not. 

One of the initial ideas for the design was that the lapels of the jacket would change colour according to any top worn underneath. This effect could have been achieved with multiple tiny lights, but the concept was lost in translation, and the final lapels were edged with one or two sparsely placed lights that twinkled like a sad christmas tree decoration. 

Unbelievably, they achieved some orders for this garment, which won them the task.

Nick Hewer has morphed into a TV personality. When he appears on HIGNFY he constantly makes socialist, anti-capitalist asides. Since he is fortunate enough to have created an apparent demand for his own TV appearances solely through a purportedly capitalist venture, this is disturbing.

Of course, the whole thing might indeed be a Marxist plot, because any real business founded on the unsustainable principle of unabashed rip-offness wouldn’t last ten minutes. But still, surely Lord Sugar must be aware of the need to keep the customer happy? 

  

The boys’ team fared even worse. Their creation was a drab grey sweatshirt with a tiny camera in the front. None of them addressed the concept with the obvious question: “What was we thinking?” 

It was secret filming, but not secret because of the words “On Air”, which were written in fairy lights across the front to warn people when the jumper was filming. 

No-one knew where such a sweatshirt would come in handy, even in the unlikely event that anyone would take a fancy to the style of it.

When the idea of a sweatshirt sporting an illuminated ”On Air”  was first mooted, one imagined twinkly LEDs rather than the surface-mounted trail of wires with old-fashioned fairy lights that was greeted with dismay when it arrived at the crack of dawn at the house next morning. 

We all expected cutting edge technology, but what we got was wind-the handle, penny-in-the-slot, sticking plaster and glue, make do and mend-ology.  Another disappointment. 

No sales were generated. The girls won by default. Two people from the boys team were fired, including the one tipped to win the series, six foot seven Robert (high-end) Goodwin (Goodwin?) (6/1) and the Scottish Scott McCulloch (10/1).  The winning team was duly rewarded.

Nurun the PM was last seen hovering above London on a jetpack in the arms of a man in a wetsuit, in a most unIslamic fashion, if I may say so. 

Next week there will be some other contrived, faked set-up, artfully engineered to appeal to the attention-deficit-flibbertigjibbets that the BBC assumes we are. Cheers!

Meanwhile the BBC news and current affairs department is still wondering if Lord Freud should step down and agonising over Richard Madeley’s trolling problem or Ed Miliband’s polling problem.

S'ralan and the "middle class BBC mockery that denigrates sales and business"

Iain Martin has a somewhat tongue-in-cheek post about The Apprentice at the Telegraph, 'Is the Apprentice a Marxist plot designed to discredit capitalism?', which, for all its humour, makes some reasonable points, I think, about the BBC's business coverage:

In the last decade the BBC has done much to improve its coverage of business. It has hired a string of respected figures and good journalists – Jeff Randall, Robert Peston and now Kamal Ahmed – as business editor and has strength and depth in its reporting team. This has produced a dramatic change in the tenor of the Beeb's coverage. Whereas in my youth the Corporation only tended to cover business with relish when a leading business person committed a criminal offence, discredited Thatcherism or fell off a yacht, there is now much more serious attention paid to the part of the economy which creates jobs and employs many millions of Britons.

Despite these positive developments, there is clearly still a Marxist sleeper cell, intent on discrediting capitalism, operating at the heart of the BBC. How else can one explain the existence of the Apprentice?...

...The entire thing is horrible. It is not just that the contestants are portrayed as being generally awful; that the squabbling men go to meet potential customers without shaving first; and that the women appear to be at odds with each other from the moment they are introduced. It is much, much worse than that.

The cumulative impression created – because of the way the programme is structured, edited and marketed – is unflattering. The message is that business is unreliable, selfish, cut-throat and inherently flashy in an embarrassingly tasteless way.

This is not the fault of most of the contestants. As Steve Moore noted on Twitter last night, the show isn't really about entrepreneurialism or innovation. It is about sales and some of those chosen to take part clearly have skills that are useful in any economy. The market trading ethos is salesmanship in the raw and is needed in all manner of big companies. But caricature it by setting up daft challenges, magnify it with close-up shots, add that stupid modern music that they use on television to suggest tension, and what you get is middle class BBC mockery that denigrates sales and business. And let's face it, this country needs to sell a lot more, particularly to the outside world.

Now, some of you might take issue with Iain's characterisation of the improvement in the BBC's tone towards business in recent years (and his praise for Robert Peston), but I too remember how bad it really used to be. His description of the BBC's earlier dismissive, often hostile attitude towards business (before the Blair years) rings very true to me, and the BBC's many regular business spots and star-name business reporters nowadays are something different, something better. #discuss (as they say on Twitter).

Still, The Apprentice does seem to show, as he suggests, that something of that old spirit lingers, albeit a much shallower incarnation of it.