Still red hot – but the medium isn’t

Remember when the TV commercials were as interesting as the programmes, when you didn’t nip out to put the kettle on the moment the “natural break” began? British commercials were once a truly inventive art forms, and good business for the advertisers: when we laughed at Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, we remembered the name of the product.

Then came globalisation, not just of products and trade names but of advertising. Multinationals thought it too costly – and needlessly considerate to their customers – to commission commercials that viewers could identify with. Instead they developed, at least for the European market, a template commercial, featuring a nondescript city not in any identifiable country, in which cars drove on the right because (they concluded) that’s what most of them do. To render the finished product entirely banal, the soundtrack consisted of a silly song sung by a 12-year-old girl. Sales of cars, insurance and everything else being advertised  slumped.

Now along comes Richard Branson. He didn’t make his fortune by appealing to the lowest common denominator, or giving the viewing (and travelling) public the message that they didn’t matter. He remembered the days when commercials were designed to hit the public like a brick.

It’s years since I heard anyone spontaneously praising a commercial, but yesterday someone I work with did just that. He’d seen the one marking the 25th anniversary of Virgin Atlantic, and it had reminded him just how pathetic and insulting to the viewer most present-day television advertising is.

If you’ve seen it, you won’t forget it. And if you haven’t, log onto the Virgin website and watch it for yourself. Every shot counts, as the scene is set in a pallid 1984 as a smiling, authoritative pilot walks through an airport terminal surrounded by a bevy of beautiful hostesses clad in red, en route to Virgin’s inaugural flight, as the sound-track bashes out the riff from Relax. The terminal grinds to a halt as onlookers suffer a coup de foudre; one says: “I must change my job”, another “I must change my ticket.” Then cut to a Virgin plane in flight; there is a wink from the pin-up on the cockpit side, and after a triumphal and decidedly male “Oi!” the scene fades out. On comes the message: “25 years – and still red hot!” You bet they are.

I’ve flown on Virgin often enough to know that they’re excellent, thoroughly professional. They’re first and foremost a business, but they exude an ethos that makes you feel they’re different. Even having a Bloody Mary spilt onto my trousers as we took off from Sydney by a stewardess who hadn’t noticed my glass didn’t have a bottom, and a mix-up over double-booked seats, hasn’t dulled my admiration.  

So change your ticket to Virgin. And hopefully today’s big TV advertisers will change their agency.

The Unsworth factor

One Saturday last April, David Unsworth brought the Shoreham Street end to its feet with an injury-time goal against Hull City that put Sheffield United back in the Premiership after twelve frustrating years. This Sunday, that same David Unsworth scored the penalty at the opposite end of Bramall Lane that sent us down again.

I saw it coming. Back in February I had a vivid dream that Unsworth, who had just gone to Wigan on a free transfer, would score the goal in that final fixture that would relegate us … even though we were well clear of the drop zone at the time. But when Steve Kabba, let go at the same time, missed Watford’s game against us because of a clause written into his contract, I hope the same would apply to Unsworth. Sadly, it didn’t, apparently because we let him go on a free transfer so had no say in his deal with Wigan.

Letting Unsworth go to a potential relegation rival always seemed a risk. He had been the driving force behind United’s promotion campaign, and at times in the 2005-06 season seemed to be doing everything except collect the tickets at the turnstile. But he stopped figuring in the side after a few Premiership games amid rumours of a falling-out with Neil Warnock, and was let go.

The greatest irony of all is that when Warnock spoke of the individual blunders that has cost us eight or nine points, Unsworth was responsible for one of them, alongside Claud Davis’ bypassing of his own goalkeeper against Portsmouth and Paddy Kenny’s rugby tackle on an Everton forward, in each case when we were a goal up. For Unsworth was one of the two United players to have penalties saved by Blackburn’s Brad Friedel in that 0-0 draw at the start of the season.

Irony upon irony. If Warnock had sold Unsworth at the start of the season we might have two more points from the Blackburn game and his heroics for Wigan wouldn’t have mattered. Nor would they if we hadn’t conceded a pointless penalty with second remaining of the first half, for him to score from.

As it is, we’re back in the Championship and £50 million worse off. I don’t blame Warnock himself – he’s never had the credit he deserved for producing a winning team, with a stable core despite the strikers he buys in strips of five like raffle tickets. My only criticism is that we made ourselves look more desperate than we were by fielding weakened teams in both Cup competitions. Rafa Benitez and Alex Ferguson may feel like reminding Warnock of that.

I was so sure Wigan would beat us that I even went down to the betting shop to put £50 on them to win …. that way I would have at least ended up with something to ease the pain. But each time I went there I found the door locked, so I took it as a sign from upstairs that I shouldn’t cash in on the Blades’ misfortune.

The night before the match, I was going through Piccadilly Circus on a bus and the neon light adverts caught my eye. There’s a huge one for Coca Cola listing all the Football League clubs … and the Blades were on it. Had they forgotten to update it, or were they anticipating events?

I suppose we’re bound to lose Phil Jagielka and maybe a couple of other good ‘uns. If so, thanks lads, you’ve done us proud. Hopefully we will bounce back, with or without Warnock, a true Blade who has never given less than his best. But having suffered years of pain after we went down in ‘76 and ‘94, I know it won’t be easy.

So thanks to Warnock and all the Blades for doing their best at the top level, and giving us some great memories. We thought we had done enough to stay up, particularly after that great draw at Charlton but the league table doesn’t lie (even if the management of West Ham did).

I only got two hours’ sleep last night, but I know the management and players will have had even less.

The fightback starts here. Next time we’ll get it right!

Reflections from the aisle

When I go to a supermarket, it is because I want to buy something … usually quite a lot of things. I know I am not alone from the top-heavy trolleys behind and in front of me at the checkout, but I have become more and more convinced that we are in a minority. Just as most of those venturing into Harrods don’t seem to have any intention of making a purchase, a large proportion of supermarket customers appear to be there for reasons other than shopping, and their main impact is to prevent anybody else doing it. They fall into several categories:

• Students of the fine arts. You can always spot one, standing two-thirds of the way back to the shelf opposite, head cocked upward, assessing the display for colour, perspective and composition and impervious of the melee trying to get past.
• The phoner-home. Stationary in the busiest and most congested part of the store, this person has come to Britain (and to the supermarket) in order to call their home country on their mobile, just like the legendary Irishman who came here to earn enough money for the fare home. It’s worse in Hong Kong; there one shopping precinct is permanently jammed by several hundred Filipino women jabbering into their mobiles in unison.
• The person who has come to die. I’m not talking about the very aged and inform, who have as much right to shop as the rest of us and need every encouragement, particularly as most have so little to live on. I’m thinking more of the disconnected types who simply switch off and stand around, apparently oblivious to where, and maybe who, they are.
• The meeter of friends. It’s marvellous to meet people you haven’t spoken to for ages and understandable if you try to catch up on the spot. But in most supermarkets you can find people, or even families, who are clearly resuming a conversation they had over the garden fence earlier in the day, positioning themselves nicely to most effective blockage.

There must be other categories you can think off. And the one thing I can guarantee is that at times I have done all these things. it’s just so maddening when other people do them!

A Happy Christmas to you all!

The Marie Celeste of Canary Wharf

I’ve often wondered what the Marie Celeste must have felt like, and today I came as close as I’m ever likely to … in the Canary Wharf offices of the Daily Telegraph which almost all the staff have now vacated for Victoria.

I go there every couple of weeks to write new obituaries of policitians or to update the existing stock, and have been doing since 1995. (My connection with the Telegraph actually goes back to 1967, but more of that later). Usually when I have taken up my terminal at the obituaries desk on the 12th floor, there have been up to 200 people working in the open-plan layout on the same level; only first thing in the morning has it ever been quiet.

But today it had the feeling of a campaign headquarters two days after the election. There were at most eight people at work on the 12th floor: three on obituaries, three in the cuttings library, a picture librarian and a sub-editor. One well-known business journalist did come in, only to find his office locked despite assurances that it wouldn’t be. He left in a cloud of expletives. Everyone else has already decamped to Victoria.

It was a strange atmosphere to work in. Bookcases stood empty. Papers for future use were packed away in orange crates. The editor’s and other executives’ offices stood empty. Photocopiers had disappeared. Scraps of paper, old photos and the odd file of cuttings littered row after row of empty desks, most still with their computer terminals. The odd phone rang, never to be answered. In the canteen, piles of food awaited staff who would now never come.

It all seemed much more final and poignant, strangely, than on the two previous occasions the Telegraph has moved its headquarters during my time with the paper. Back in 1987 when we forsook the Fleet Street offices which now house a merchant bank to be among the first occupants of South Quay on the Isle of Dogs, I was working for the Telegraph at the House of Commons and really only went to Fleet Street at the weekend and for the occasional editorial conference … a practice, astonishingly, that had only been initiated by Max Hastings the previous year after decades in which the paper just “happened”. To me, the Fleet Street offices had always seemed rather squalid. After 20 years’ sporadic service with the paper, I was happy to let it go.

By the time the paper moved on from South Quay to Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was working for a rival chain. I was affected less by the move than the subsequent IRA bomb which did immense damage to the entire South Quay complex, and would have killed far more than two people had the Telegraph still been there. My lasting memory of that building, ironically, is of looking across to Canary Wharf and wondering how I, as an acute sufferer from vertigo, would ever be able to work there.

Now the Telegraph is on the move again, and the near-desolation of Canary Wharf today is something I shall long remember, whatever impression Victoria makes on me. It will be a peculiar sensation seeimg it for the first time as a newspaper office, as I used to visit the Victoria building wearing my reporter’s hat when it was the headquarters of Eurotunnel some 15 years ago. Eurotunnel, ironically, moved down to Canary Wharf before deciding they didn’t need a corporate HQ.

On reflection, something else has struck me. Until the 1980s, newspaper offices always contained the presses on which the paper was printed, and the roar of the presses was their lifeblood. When the Telegraph left Fleet Street, the two functions were separated, though initially only by 400 yards. Ever since, newspaper offices have struggled to retain the atmosphere that kept them apart from all other hives of clerical activity. I find it hard to imagine that the digital age will bring that atmosphere back.

Fifty years on

Half a century ago this autumn, the West stood helplessly by as Soviet troops put down the uprising in Hungary which had given that country hope of independence and democracy. Prime Minister Imre Nagy was lured out of the embassy where he had taken refuge and executed, and a new hard-line regime installed as thousands fled to the West. It was 33 years before Hungarians freely elected their government, and its first action was to give Nagy a state funeral.

How had the Kremlin managed to get away with such a grotesque infraction of a nation’s right to determine its own future?

The answer, as a frustrated President Eisenhower well understood, was that the West’s moral authority had been destroyed by the Anglo-French operation to recover the Suez Canal which had been nationalised by Egypt’s President Nasser … an operation based on those countries’ connivance with Israel in starting a Middle East war which could then be claimed to be threatening the Canal. Eisenhower’s anger was all the greater as he had been systematically lied to about Britain’s intentions by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who saw Nasser as a reincarnation of Hitler. Only later did it emerge that Eden’s poor health may have impaired his judgment.

In 1956, the Suez adventure denied America the traction it needed in the UN Security Council to bring maximum pressure on Moscow. Half a century later, that situation is being painfully repeated.

This time it is the US/British operation in Iraq, which I have to admit I supported at the outset, which has deprived the West of that same moral authority at a crucial moment. The continuing anarchy in Iraq as the options for an exit reduce has greatly increased the difficulty of securing strong and concerted action through the UN against Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programmes, culminating in the Pyonygyang regime’s staging of an underground nuclear test. In such matters the co-operation of Russia and China as premanent members of the Security Council is important. It is never easy to secure, as has become evident over Darfur; in current circumstances it is far, far harder.

With Russia the parallel to 1956 is even closer. Then it was Hungary; now it is Georgia, which President Putin is trying to steamroller into acceptance of Moscow’s hegemony, and oil companies like Shell, wooed by Russia when times were tough to find and pump hydrocarbons, and now cast aside from lucrative fields as the price of oil has soared.

The days when Bush and Putin seemed to share the same world-view are long since gone. But it is the poison injected into the international system by the post-intervention shambles in Iraq – created by the pig-headeness of the Pentagon – that has given Putin the chance to tighten his grip without the need to take seriously the views of the west.

Nikita S. Khruschev, supposedly a liberal after his posthumous denunciation of Stalin but nevertheless the Soviet leader who sent the Warsaw Pact forces into Hungary, must be smiling from his grave. Fifty years on, the West appears as dumb as ever, and the Kremlin reaps the benefit.