This post is a comment on British situation comedy, broadcasting and how we as individuals have changed over the last generation. This was inspired by a blog post on BBC Writersroom by Michael Jacob, a leading comedy bod at the Beeb. In it he refers to a new sitcom called Big Top and says:

As is traditional with virtually every new BBC1 sitcom, Big Top has received a massive critical kicking, both in newspapers and on writers’ forums. I can never quite understand the snobbishness of aspiring comedy writers, who tend to unite in loathing any show which is popular with audiences. Two Pints and My Family spring immediately to mind.

Personally I cannot comment on this particular show as I haven’t seen it but I found what he said and the way he said it particulalrly interesting. I understand what Michael Jacob is getting at and I agree with him to a point but I think there is far more to this story than there is at first glance.

Yesterday I attended a one day workshop entitled Building the Employer Brand run by the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

I found the content very interesting particularly in light of the recent recruitment work I’ve been involved in. It was thought-provoking and gave rise to a number of questions and methods for building stronger internal colleague relationships while also making a business more attractive to customers and potential job applicants.

The programme looked at the following:

• What is branding?

This was an introduction to the concept of the customer and employer brand.

• Why is the employer brand important?

This considered the components of the employer brand, and how this relates to the customer brand. We were also asked to look at how our own employer brand was currently perceived, and whether it needs to change or develop.

• Developing the employer brand strategy

In this session we considered a number of the different aspects of employer branding e.g. organisational values and behaviours, reputation of the organisation, perception of the value of work, challenge & interest as well as individual staff achievement.

• Communicating the employer brand

To finish the day we covered the aspects of our employer brands which need to change and what information is needed to find these out. This enabled us to build a list of key points outlining the changes needed.

We were given a book called Brand from the Inside by Libby Sartain and Mark Schumann to take away which, from what I’ve read, looks to be an excellent guide and I look forward to reading more. I may even do on an ongoing review so I can cover the topic in more detail.

There are three dates currently in place for this course next year in April, August and December. These can be found along with the course overview on the CIM website.

THERE IS TABLE SET FOR A CANDLELIGHT DINNER WITH A SLOVENLY GUY (PAUL) SAT SLOUCHED IN ONE OF THE CHAIRS. ELEGANTLY DRESSED SHEILA APPROACHES WHISPERING AGGITATEDLY INTO A MOBILE PHONE. AS SHE REACHES THE TABLE SHE HANGS UP AND SMILES WEAKLY. SHE SITS AND TAKES A SIP FROM A GLASS OF WINE.

PAUL:
You took your time. Didn’t realise powdering your nose could take so long. Just how much have you snorted?

SHEILA NEARLY CHOKES.

SHEILA:
Not enough, clearly.

WE HEAR A RAISED VOICE IN THE BACKGROUND BUT CAN”T HEAR WHAT IS BEING SAID.

RACHEL:
(OUT OF BREATH) Sheila, I got here as fast as I could.

SHEILA:
Thank god! Paul? This is Rachel Tomms from Trading Standards. She’d like a word about the content of your Lonely Hearts advert.

Questions to consider when writing a newsletter are:

Why am I writing a newsletter?

• what do you want to achieve by having such a publication?
• what are the long-term goals?
• how often will it be published?
• how will you judge its success or failure?
• What format will it be? Will it be print only, email or PDF download?

Who is my readership?

• what type of person will be reading the newsletter?
• what is the appropriate style and tone of the publication?
• what impression do you want to make?
• do you want feedback and will this be managed?
• who else is writing for your market and how?

What should it look like?

• what the most suitable format if it is being printed? (paper stock, colours, layout etc)
• how many pages will it have?
• what type of imagery should be used?
• will anyone else be contributing content?

What is the schedule for production?

• when do your readers need to receive your newsletter?
• has adequate time been built in to cover production and printing?
• who are you relying on to produce content or deliver copies?
• have you allowed time for thorough proof reading and sign-off procedures?

I hope these brief checklists were useful to you. I shall return to this topic in due course to give a more detailed overview of the subject.

Alan Ball - Playing Extra Time

I got this book as part of a football book box set last Christmas and hadn’t quite got round to reading it but once I started, I couldn’t out it down. The ‘66 World Cup happened before I was born but as an England fan I always had great affection for the little man that ‘ran himself daft’ that day.

This book got right into the detail of both the playing and managerial side of the game and the injustice of how heartless football clubs can operate. Obviously we only have Ball’s side of the story but such is the cynicism in the game I’m not entirely surprised to read about how it was, and is, being run.

I think what got me was the total lack of respect for someone, one of only 11 who have won football’s greatest prize, was treated at times. I was shaken to read that a 10 year old boy had spat him while he was manager at Stoke and how he was made to carry the can for the farce that was Manchester City in the late 90s.

On the family side there is the moving tributes to his wife, Lesley, who died of cancer and for his family and friends. I think what particularly hit home for me personally was that her death followed a not dissimilar pattern of my mother’s some five years later.

Alan Ball died two years after this book was written but reading it he seemed so alive that he must still be around somewhere. I remembering him playing for Southampton and always noted his managerial progress because of the England connection so when he died of a heart attack in 2007 I felt I’d lost a relative too. By a quirk of fate his funeral was two years to the day before my mother died.

I may have made this review a bit more personal to me but if you are a football fan then this is a must read. In a way, despite the problems he encounted along the way, he saw the golden age of football from the sixties until it began to eat itself with the money men of the Premier League.

The 1980s pop group, Frankie goes to Hollywood, are back in the public eye with a remix of their classic track, Relax, and a new Best of collection called Frankie Say Greatest.

The marketing for this has been interesting. It has come on the back of the Virgin TV advert and commemorates the 25th anniversary of the bands debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome. Singer Holly Johnson’s solo albums are now all available to download online for the first time with physical CD reissues planned for next year I understand.

A few weeks ago there was a teaser campaign with Frankie Say Coming posters across London and last month the Frankie Say T-Shirt was the focus of 25 years of British fashion design. Not only that, CD promos of 11 remixes of Relax have been circulating and unsurprisingly these tracks can now be found on the net. This was always likely but is it all a ploy by generate interest? If that was the case it has certainly worked.

Does the name Mark Wallington mean anything to you? No, I’m not talking about the former Leicester and Lincoln City goalkeeper but the author and TV screenwriter of the same name.

He’s probably best known for his book 500 mile walkies but there were a few others that made it to TV too including the Missing Postman with James Bolam and Happy Birthday Mr Shakespeare starring Neil Morrissey. The latter, coincidentally, that saw a relationship start between Morrissey and co-star Amanda Holden which reportedly lead to the break-up her marriage to Les Dennis.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I’ve recently been re-reading his book called The Day Job about his life a jobbing gardner in 1980. What will perhaps be interesting to people on here is that his ‘other’ job was as an aspiring comedy writer. It talks about meeting director John Lloyd and Dave Allen and finally getting two sketches on Not the Nine O’clock News. The news comes the day John Lennon was shot.

If you want to read a funny book and get a flavour of someone’s struggle to be recognised in the comedy world I would heartily recommend it. You can even read some of the book online.

Also of interest is that his writing partner at the time was Dick Fiddy, a TV historian who wrote Missing Presumed Wiped: Searching for the Lost Treasures of British Televison.

Update (05/10/2009): It seems it was a joke as the wikipedia page has been updated to remove the reference listed below.

This has to be a joke surely!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2028_Summer_Olympics

With plans already in place to build a 100′000 capacity sports stadium in Eastern England, championed and proposed under the Labour administration of Gordon Brown, either of these two Cities [Peterborough or Norwich] will be expected to bid as part of that process. However, with the 2012 games having been held in London only sixteen years earlier, the bid is expected to fall short. However, officials backing the bid have already cited the close gap between the games being held in the USA in 1984 and 1996-a gap of only twelve years. Norwich is the favourite at the present time, with additional facilities including a revamped Carrow Road, home of the football club, as well as those at the UEA. Water based events will be held at Pensthorpe, near Fakenham.

Just noticed that Fabio Capello has now managed for as many games as Steve McLaren. Here’s how their records compare:

McLAREN – ALL

P18 W9 D4 L5 F32 A12 – 1.78 goals a game

McLAREN – COMPETITIVE

P12 W7 D2 L3 F24 A7 – 2 goals a game

—————————————————-

CAPELLO – ALL

P18 W14 D2 L2 F50 A15 – 2.78 goals a game

CAPELLO – COMPETITIVE

P8 W8 D0 D0 F31 A5 – 3.88 goals a game

I can hear McLaren now spouting on how England had more competitive fixtures and a superior overall defensive record under his reign but I see little else in his favour apart from having the most convincing foreign accent of the two.

Yesterday afternoon I made four Twitter posts which listed all the external organisations featured in each of the last four issues of the LINX magazine, HotLINX. Each one included a link to the respective PDF they featured in. The result of this communication went well thanks largely to users interested in Extreme Networks.

Extreme featured in HotLINX17 which was published back in February and one of my followers saw my Tweet and decided then to re-Tweet it for their followers. This in turn was re-Tweeted again by further users. In total it was posted nine times resulting in 50 additional downloads inside an hour. This has led to me gaining new followers and our magazine gaining a wider readership.

The message is clear – there are people out there who are interested in what we are saying in the LINX magazine but if they don’t know about it, they can’t do anything about that information. If they are given the choice they can at least decide how to react to it.

On a forum I frequent a Manchester United fan was claiming that recent signing, Michael Owen, was not good enough to play for them. It’s true he has only played 69 times in four years at Newcastle and seems to pick up a long-term injury just by scratching his nose but he’s still a proven goalscorer. His 30 goals in those four years still represnts a near one-in-two return.

Not bad, despite the age of that clips collection. I certainly think he’s worth the risk if he’s supported by a successful team and get a run in the side.

So it was true. Michael Jackson dies and no-one can quite believe it. Few will be surprised that he didn’t complete a full innings however but I don’t think there would be many that expected that this would be the moment that he would meet his maker…whoever that might be.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting about Mr Jackson and his 50 date residency at the O2 Arena and we were all agreed that we couldn’t see him completing all the dates – that would be hard enough for a young man let alone someone walking around with hardly any body part he started out with.

It’s testement to his back catalogue and reputation as a performer that he could sell out so many shows, and I hear there were options for more, but his fragile physical and mental state would make that number of dates too much to take surely. I could be doing him a disservice but as he didn’t even make the first concert it would be hard argue otherwise.

Hello everyone.

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site but there’s been a lot going on in my life recently most notably the death of my mother at the beginning of May. She’d been in three different hospitals most notably Papworth having been taken ill on Mothers’ Day and then having a heart attack a couple of days later.

Mum had had arthritis for around 45 years so she was in relatively poor health anyway but she managed to pull through and gradually fought her way back to some sense of normality. Personally I was even thinking that she was becoming well enough to come home but a second heart attack proved too much for her.

There’s a lot more I could say about the last two months both personally and professionally but I think too much time has passed. I was pleased at how this site had developed but it’s been on hold for too long so I want to get things moving again so look out for news, views and information in the coming days.

Earlier today I posted a couple of questions on a forum on the topics of sibling rivalry and the definition of success. As both overlapped in interesting ways I wanted to compile a few of the thoughts down as a way garnering further opinion. Basically I want you to define in a few words what you think success is and what it means to you personally.

Some people may attach the word success only with money or power. Others may define it as living in a free country or being able to sleep in till lunch time. Here are some of the responses received so far:

• I’m not bothered by status and money. I like looking after others and having others to look after me. If I had that all my life and felt relatively happy, I’d feel my life was a success.
• I think success is achieving your personal aims. I’ve achieved none of mine.
• Success: an event that accomplishes its intended purpose. So relating to human terms, surely it’s to procreate… leave something behind once we’re gone.
• For myself, leaving this world, and being remembered would be a great sucess. Not sure how I will be well known… but hopefully I will.
• Success is the satisfaction of a job done well done.
• If you’re enjoying life and so are your family who cares? I’m not very succesful at most things I do, but I enjoy life that’s good enough for me. Some people get lucky, some are smarter it’s not about what you have it’s about how much you appreciate it.

One person went into a little more detail on their thoughts and I felt this was a pretty good summing up of a subject of which there is no definitive answer. What is right for one person is plainly not right for another. Also, success has no end point because there always another level to aspire too.

It’s not that easy. You need to dig deep within yourself and question your values. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What different things are important to you? Success has multiple pinnacles and not one ultimate peak. One success builds on another. Setbacks and mistakes also help to build success. At different periods of your life, success is defined differently.

Now it’s your turn. Use the comment box below to add your thoughts on the subject and tell us what success means to you. Remember there are no right or wrong answers but whatever yousay will a valued contribution to the discussion.

http://alphainventions.com/

Is this the most disturbing sweet on sale? Just think about how children will get the candy.

…and from the same company…

I’ve never known another time in my life when an air of depression seems to permeate every waking moment. Don’t get me wrong I’m contemplating anything untoward but it’s ever more difficult to shake off the gloom and despondency that attaches itself to what we do on a day-to-day basis.

The economic downturn is affecting most of us in one way or another and looks like being around for some considerable time yet. How do we get ourselves out of a rut wether financial, professional or even spiritual? Well, that may depend on your character and how much you want to but many are avoiding the real issues in their lives by looking for quick fixes and escapes which have no real benefit in the long term.

An obvious distractor is this computer. It is an amazing piece of kit but is it just facilitating time-wasting and procrastination from the stuff that really needs dealing with? Maybe you need it for your business but beyond that is it affecting your relationship with your family? Many I know spend their eveninings in separate rooms with their heads in front of screen and not talking to each other. With laptops and the Internet with online forums and social networking such as Facebook and Twitter, fewer and fewer people are engaging in real communication even if they may ’speak’ with more people than ever before.

At the end of the film Love Actually it has a scene where lots people meet up and hug with loved ones at Heathrow Airport in London. The backing track is by The Beach Boys and is called ‘God only knows (what I’d be without you)’.

Fast forward this clip to 2:50. Makes me well up every time…

Love Actually – God Only Knows

This made me think about where I’d be if I hadn’t met my wife when I did because my life could’ve turned out very different. In early 1998 I had the chance to go round the world for a year but I bottled it but within a few weeks I met my now wife through the newspaper, moved in, got engaged and in July we were expecting our first child. If I’d gone none of these would’ve happened.

Subway - one of the attractions we visited in Grantham

I guess many will have seen the Crap Towns books but I wondered if anyone wanted to make their own nominations.

This was inspired by a trip I took on Saturday…

On Friday we took the kids to Stamford in Lincolnshire. This is a beautiful stone town and the place of my birth. We went because the fair was in town and it’s a great setting to see the rides right in the centre of town and on the meadows. They had a great time but I spent an absolute fortune! Anyway, I’d promised to take them on a train on Saturday and under normal circumstances I’d have suggested Stamford as it was quite close but I didn’t want another day shelling out for candy floss, plastic rubbish and two seconds of mild amusement.

So, to keep costs down, I suggested some other nearby towns. They didn’t want Huntingdon which left March, Ely, Spalding, Grantham and couple of others. They went for Grantham.

I tried to talk them out of it, really I did but Grantham it had to be so £18 later and bag full unhealthy ‘picnic’ snacks later we arrived. My God, that place looks dreadful these days. We were only there an hour and it rained. The market was on but it just looked so grim and depressing. The kids were well cheesed off but they got half a sub from Subway and book from ‘The Works’ for their troubles. A thoroughly miserable experience.

For that reason my nomination for crap town is Grantham. What’s yours?

I’m from an era when doing the League and FA Cup double was considered virtually impossible. Spurs did it for the first time in 70 years in 1961 and Arsenal did it again in 1971. By the time Liverpool did it in 1986 I was 17 and hardly anyone had won more than two trophies (if you count Europe) for a century. Unfortunately we have phrases like ‘double double’ and ‘treble double’ now so ‘treble treble’ is on the cards.

Liverpool ended 2001 with five trophies if you include the Community Shield and European Super Cup but even if Manchester United don’t win anything else you’d have to say this was best season ever by an English club. They have three in the bag, another all but sown up plus eminently winnable quarter-final and semi-final ties to come.

I can actually see them doing it now as they are well ahead in the league and as I’ve said have relatively easy paths to the finals of the Champions League and FA Cup but there are a few scenarios for non-Mancs to cling to.

I overheard a weird conversation on the bus yesterday. There were two lads of a school leaving age talking about school and education generally. One said he was going to go to university and the other couldn’t understand why.

“C’mon man! I can’t believe you wanna do that! I’ve done years at primary school and years a secondary school. I’ve had enough – doing anymore would be just wasting my time.”

OK, so there’s some part of that I can maybe understand but his argument for dropping learning floundered by what came next…

“I actually want to get into business and accounting.”

So let’s get this straight. You are a school leaver and you want to do accounting which, and I am no expert on such matters, requires years of study to qualify for or else you have not a hope in hell of making a career out of it. Business on the other hand is a little different because entreprenneurs have earned millions without a qualification to their name but even so…