I hardly need explain why these are grim times for ITV (as they are for most advertising-funded media).
Back in the 1970s and 80s, though, the mood was very different.
Here are two short, and very different, clips which illustrate the point.
Lew Grade was the flamboyant impresario behind ATV – the company that ran regional commercial telly in the Midlands from 1968 to 1981.
Grade was a showman of the old school. “Entertainment” should have been his middle name. (It wasn’t. In fact, Grade wasn’t even his last name – he was born Lewis Winogradsky.)
ATV reflected his brash commercial instincts perfectly. Watch as the company even makes transmitter announcements fun!
TVS, meanwhile, were ITV franchise holders for the South region from 1982-1992.
This clip (date unknown) is from their induction video for new staff, and focuses on perks.
“The TVS plane flies daily between Maidstone and Southampton,” it announces brightly, “and may be used by anyone. Book through Maidstone reception.”
On May 23 1988 the BBC’s Six O’Clock News was invaded by activists protesting about the imminent introduction of Clause 28.
Sue Lawley’s cool, very British on-screen reaction (“we have rather been invaded by some people”) is now legendary. As is the fact, enshrined in his BBC biog, that Nicholas Witchell sat on one of the protesters to ensure the show would go on.
But via the magic of YouTube, we can now review what happened from three different perspectives, 21 years on.
Here’s what was happening in the gallery at the time.
Here’s how it looked on-screen (slightly edited).
And here’s ITN’s unique rendition of what happened – complete with some classic “court report” pastel drawings. This is probably the only time you’ll ever hear the phrase “senior television news executives rushed in with a hacksaw”.
Back in my magazine days, one of the most interesting people I interviewed was Richard Reed – co-founder of Innocent Drinks.
I wrote the piece in 2000 when the company was just starting out. Their mega-success was still a few years away – as was their eventual partial sale to Coke.
But there was one thing that was already firmly in place when I visited them: their schtick.
Richard and I talked on deckchairs outside their office/factory on an unglamorous industrial estate off Goldhawk Road – a building they’d cutely dubbed Fruit Towers.
Daisy the “cow van” – complete with udders, a tail and eyelashes on the headlights – was parked alongside us (cue perfect photo opportunity).
The company’s backstory was already finely honed for maximum “quirky entrepreneur” appeal.
And – last but definitely not least - the labels on the dozen smoothies which they kindly gave me to take home were dotted with little quips, puns and jokes.
Innocent’s labels were unique at the time (not just in the drinks business, but in the UK FMCG field as a whole). They were whimsical and irreverent. With a very light touch, they communicated something profound about the character of the brand.
And people loved them – so much so that the company eventually posted an archive of past classics here.
As Innocent’s success grew, the inevitable happened. Other brands tried to follow - making their own labels less formal. More “inclusive”. Chattier.
What those other brands had forgotten was this: writing that kind of stuff effectively is hard. Really bloody hard. But that wasn’t going to dissuade them from churning out their own cack-handed attempts.
Which brings us to the present day.
In the supermarket this weekend I lost count of the number of products attempting to pull off Innocent’s trick.
Pseudo-matey straplines on packets. Really, really strained jokes that wouldn’t have reached the wastepaper basket at Innocent, let alone the printers. Instructions full of slighly desperate, Jamie Oliver-style exhortations to “bung it in the oven at 220 degrees, then stick your feet up for half an hour”.
And – my absolute pet hate – “positioning statements” like:
We’re obsessed about yogurt. Some might say passionate. Hey – maybe even a bit obsessed. So sue us. Our chef was so excited when he made this blend, he phoned up all his mates and…
Gah!
It’s become an epidemic. And in my capacity as - if I may be so bold – a connoisseur of great writing in small, trivial, unlikely environments (like cornflake packets and bus tickets), it gets right on my nerves.
So this is part 1 of an ongoing series. In future the most gear-grinding, teeth-gnashing examples I spot will be flagged up here.
Together we can rid Britain’s shops of this scourge.
When big corporations try to pose as minnows, the results are rarely pretty.
I came across an interesting example today. Apparently Starbucks – struggling to retain their once-dominant position in the coffee market – are trialling some lower-key, less corporate-looking outlets. A sensible strategy.
But there’s a cynicism in the way they’ve gone about it which can only – in my view – backfire against them.
15th Avenue Coffee & Tea in Seattle is the first of this new crop of stores. Its website is full of folksy homilies to the outlet’s local, earthy, “streetlevel” approach. It features a blog from manager Jenna, who enthuses:
it’s such a pretty store at night and hearing local talent do their thing in our store… it’s just rad [...] i am so excited to be part of this block!… great people, families, dogs, groups that meet and discuss, interest in the arts, politics, divesity, etc. thank you for welcoming us:)
Nowhere on the site is there any reference to Starbucks – in actual fact, every care is taken to make it look as handcranked and uncorporate as possible (down to the store’s Gmail address: 15thavecoffeeandtea@gmail.com).
You can’t help but imagine the high-level meetings held to decide exactly how many typos and punctuation errors on the site would denote true “authenticity”.
Now, there was already bad press brewing in the neighbourhood when other local coffee vendors reportedly spotted Starbucks staff loitering round their stores scribbling into files marked “Observations”.
It didn’t look great, either, when the decor of the new store apparently followed its indie rivals’ organic, weather-beaten look a little too slavishly.
But the real problem from where I’m sitting is that the store’s website tries to pretend none of that ever happened; that 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea is simply another local independent enterprise.
Never mind that the unit used to be a Starbucks before last month. Never mind that a simple whois search on streetlevelcoffee.com reveals the domain name was registered by Starbucks Corporation earlier this year. And never mind that the web is full of quotes from “presidents of global development” and “senior vice-presidents of global design” talking about the new plans.
You’d have thought Starbucks would have learned from fiascos like Wal-marting Across America, where a blogging couple claimed to be travelling the US, camping overnight in store carparks thanks to the largesse of Wal-mart (and telling happy tales of Wal-mart employees as they went). They were subsequently unmasked as being in the pay of PR company Edelman: one a freelance writer; the other a professional photographer for the Washington Post.
So why couldn’t the coffee giant have been straight-up on their site, discreetly making clear this was among a new set of formats they were trialling?
They’d still have taken some heat from those inherently opposed to corporate America.
But at least the web wouldn’t be full of bad buzz from many who think Jenna’s “rad” outpourings are a clunky way to effect corporate repositioning.
Here are two terrific films, both from the same year, created on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
They attempt the daftest of feats: predicting what domestic technology will be like in over two decades’ time.
The first is from Britain’s venerable GPO. (For younger readers – this organisation was a cross between BT Openworld and Dad’s Army.)
In a way the most remarkable thing about this film (apart from its radioactively-bad acting) is its prescience.
It’s eerily accurate in its depiction of what broadband – or “wide-band communications” – would bring to the home and the office.
Where it drops the ball is the look and feel (not to mention the size) of the hardware involved.
No brushed aluminium. No slimline plastic. Instead everything’s monster-sized, forged from cast iron and sprayed moss-green. Less Jonathan Ive; more HMS Dreadnought.
Oh, and that closed-circuit network that’s keeping the model streets connected (including a lamppost equipped with souped-up wi-fi, or as Mr GPO has it, “millimetric radio“)? Surely way ahead of anything BT has actually managed in the intervening 30 years…
The second film is from the US.
I actually want this bloke’s computer set-up. All he’s basically doing is home accounts, but his room is tricked out like the CCTV hub at a Las Vegas casino.
His wife has a good life too – she spends her days browsing boo.com on a microfiche reader.
“What the wife selects on her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console.”
It’s easy to take it for granted, but if you use a PC at work or home, one of your most frequent daily sonic experiences is the Windows startup music - that brief moment of ear candy as your machine boots up.
In production terms, you might think this music’s fairly trivial.
But over the last couple of decades, as version after version of Windows has hit the market, startup music has moved inexorably from software development afterthought, to major Hollywood-style throw-money-at-it extravaganza.
Think I’m exaggerating? I’ve just stumbled across this video, which gives an insight into the production process for Vista’s theme music. In case you need reminding, this “theme” is a flimsy four notes (not especially hooky ones, at that) over a wispy chord. Pleasant enough – probably an afternoon’s work.
Except that to create this theme, Microsoft brought legendary guitarist and ambient music guru Robert Fripp over to Redmond to lay down a day’s worth of “soundscapes” which would then be edited down into (as far as I can tell) a single chord underpinning the tune.
Or to quote Microsoft themselves:
This single session resulted in over six hours of multi-channel raw tracks including hundreds of melodies, textures, soundscapes, and orchestrations. After this session, it took another three months of orchestration, iteration, remixing and refinement to select the final four seconds that became the final Windows Vista startup sound: a “glassy” Fripp melody, a harmony by Steve Ball, and a “Win-dows Vis-ta” rhythm contributed by composer, Tucker Martine. This all on top of a brief Fripp Soundscape that fades out as the user lands on the Windows Vista log-on screen.
Nice work if you can get it.
But let’s step back for a moment, and see how we got to this point. Here’s a compilation of Windows themes from version 3.1 to the present day. I guarantee you’ll find it more evocative than you expect.
Underneath: my “professional” opinion on each one. I’d love to hear your take on them too.
Windows 3.1
Look in the dictionary under “rudimentary”. You’ll find this.
Windows 95
The music which launched the “superstar muso” trend within Microsoft – created, as it was, by everyone’s favourite egghead (well, mine anyway) Brian Eno. In Eno’s words:
The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem – solve it.”
The thing from the agency said: “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Windows NT Workstation 4.0
Rather evocative of this 1980s “digitised thistle” ident for Scottish Television. What d’you mean I carry too much musical trivia in my head?
Windows 98
This one is most notable for its use of stereo. About halfway through, the theme suddenly spreads super-wide in a frankly gratuitous way (like a character in a 3D movie sticking their hand ostentatiously out of the screen). But no matter – it does sound gorgeous.
Windows 2000
I have a major soft spot for the Windows 2000 music, largely because it feels – out of all the themes – the closest to an old-school TV ident. Like this beauty:
Windows ME
Like the operating system itself – barely worth acknowledging.
Windows XP
Can’t help but be disappointed by this one. Neither hooky nor atmospheric, it falls frustratingly between several stools.
Vista (Beta version)
Now this one I do like -it’s classy, reassuring and substantial. I can’t quite understand why it was dropped in favour of the eventual Vista sound package, other than (my best guesses):
This package was thought to be “not airy and translucent enough” for Vista’s brand values;
Someone at Microsoft thought getting Robert Fripp in would make for better press.
Either way, I’d like to shake the hand of whoever composed this one. Now, where are those settings? Control Panel… Hardware and Sound… Change System Sound…
The first and most obvious component: Flickr measures the interactions – commenting, emailing, tagging, linking – that occur around a photo. Second, they map all these actions to see which users turn out to be hubs of activity. These people are presumed to be influencers and their actions are given extra weight because the Flickr community must trust them – a logic not unlike that used by Google’s PageRank. Third, Flickr performs a reverse social analysis: If Bob and Sally are emailing and commenting on each others’ photos all the time, the system presumes they are relatives or friends; they have a social relationship built on familiarity. But if out of nowhere, Bob interacts with Jim’s picture, the system then presumes that their relationship is based on the photo, not on life. The interestingness algorithm devalues Bob and Sally’s social relationship and gives greater value to Bob and Jim’s interaction around a photo.
Like all the best ideas, the last part of this equation is blindingly obvious – but only once somebody else has thought of it.
You can judge the effectiveness of Flickr’s calculations here.
Daisy the “cow van” – complete with udders, a tail and eyelashes on the headlights – was parked alongside us (cue perfect photo opportunity).
Innocent’s labels were unique at the time (not just in the drinks business, but in the UK 
