Hurt

We’re just back from a week in Portugal where the sun shone brightly, and now as the suntans fade and slide down the colour charts from the colour of teak to milky coffee, they seem to have settled on a shade which I can only describe as being like an unhealthy cat’s litter tray. Very attractive.

It was a hectic and busy week in the tropical heat what with having to oil myself up and get up and down from the sun lounger to pour cold drinks. Then there were restaurant buffets to be cleared, bars to be inspected, packets of Ibuprofen to be consumed in the name of the god Hangover, and it would have been rude not to do a tour of every shopping centre in the area. And people think my life is easy.

The holiday came at a good time for me as I had injured my back at the gym and needed a break somewhere other than my lower spine, and I’ve learned since returning from holiday that there are two things about having a back problem that are very annoying. The first is that it’s painful of course, but the second aspect hurts even more. It seems that back pain is a bit like Colonel Gaddafi. Everyone has an opinion on what you should do to get rid of it.

I have been advised to do yoga, Pilates and swimming. I have also been told to sit in a sauna, have a chiropractor visit the house, make friends with a physiotherapist, change my diet, have someone rub my back with tennis balls, stretch out more, buy new shoes, wear a back brace, get down the local DIY store, buy Easter eggs and have more sex. Hang on, now I’m getting carried away and reading from the “to do” list on my desk.

Silently and stealthily there has been an explosion of growth in the “fix it” side of keeping fit. We’ve all gone daft for the gym without us realising that this health kick is really a big swindle. We’re being conned in to doing fitness to bankroll physios and sports scientists who simply know the words to “Your Hip Bone’s Connected To Your Thigh Bone” a bit better than the rest of us.

If healthy living really IS healthy then why does it take two weeks to get an appointment with a physiotherapist? Why do most gyms have a masseur and masseuse wafting the smell of eucalyptus round the place all day as they count the cash coming through the doors of their consulting rooms?

I love the gym but I’m starting to feel that in future running machines and spinning bikes will only be seen by my great grandkids when they’re taken on school trips to see how people once lived. In a museum somewhere a gym will be reconstructed with an authentic sweat smell conjured from oils like that old Viking town at the Yorvik museum.

I can imagine the history books now. “You may find this hard to believe children but some ancient Brits not only used to prefer vegetables to a good pepper steak, they used to punish themselves by running and cycling without actually moving or going anywhere. Some even used to wave their arms around and wiggle their bottoms to a type of music known as Aerobics. Apparently some women didn’t like the fact this made them sweat and they invented something called Pilates so they could have a good sleep on the floor instead.”

My back still hurts but my ears hurt more from listening to everyone’s opinion on what I should do about it. Surprisingly, none of the health brigade has suggested I give up the gym. That would put them out of business in the future.

For the moment I face a choice – keep on going to the gym or give it up and save money which I can then spend on more chocolate. Put like that there’s no real choice to be made is there?

Word Up

As my chauffeur had the day off and the Aston Martin was having its gold wheel trims studded with fresh water pearls, I ended up waiting for a tube train on Wednesday at Vauxhall underground station when I started reading the posters on the wall across the tracks.

How on earth they get these big adverts up there is a mystery to me but secretly I’d love to believe there’s a wee man who runs across with his paste bucket between departures, desperately running to get the advert up before the next train squashes him.

Anyway, however it’s done it must be rushed. All the sheets are badly put together with overlaps that cause unintentional hilarity and I had a good laugh at the new giant advert for the local Virgin Active gym. The poster man had hastily overlapped the sheets, obscuring some letters. This didn’t matter till the final line which now reads “I love to swim at a gym with a big poo”. I’m almost sure the letter “L” has gone missing beneath the next sheet, but perhaps it’s some new swimming game launched by the environmental lobby.

Posters tell their own story and at Oxford Street station, on the escalators, you instantly get a snapshot of the recession. Apart from the empty poster boxes as you rise towards street level, there are still any number of adverts for Christmas sales and west end shows that closed a year ago. Perhaps I just imagined the advert announcing the sale of commemorative dinner plates for the upcoming royal wedding - of Victoria and Albert.

Advertising must be a rubbish business to be in. You spend all day thinking up a slogan like “go to work on an egg” and it’s used for decades but you don’t get a single penny extra, while whoever writes Cheryl Cole’s songs gets royalties for years, which presumably helps lessen their embarrassment.

We all know the great advertising slogans like “A Mars A Day Helps You Work Rest And Play” or “It Does What It Says On The Tin” but I think the duff ones are more interesting. Nothing brings a dose of humility to an ad agency more than the smell of failure. For instance, a hotel in Plymouth that specialised in weekend breaks for pensioners wondered why their new agency’s slogan failed to bring in the punters five year ago. It concentrated on the relaxing sleep waiting for the oldies in their luxury beds but said “Stay with us for the rest of your life”.

Warsaw tourist bosses allowed a slogan in the Seventies which went “Poland, you’re welcome to it” and during the SARS epidemic, which claimed the lives of many in the Far East, I saw in Hong Kong a tourism slogan that described the city as the place that “Takes Your Breath Away”.

Clairol introduced a curling tong called The Mist Stick to Germany and literally translated the product name without realising the German for Mist is also a slang word for Manure. Funnily enough the “manure stick” bombed. Then the Coors beer slogan “Turn It Loose” appeared on posters in Latin America translated in to Spanish as “Suffer From Diahorrea”.

Perhaps then advertising isn’t a boring drudge of a career after all, so long as you have a sense of humour and can laugh at your mistakes. And when you get bored there’s always that great game to play using someone else’s successful slogan but putting it with some other product. For instance “If You Like A Lot Of Chocolate On Your Biscuit Join Our Club” worked well for Jacobs Biscuits but would work even better for Weight Watchers don’t you think?

How about ”Every Little Helps” for an enhancing bust cream, or maybe that liquid coffee slogan, “Camp, It’s Best”, being used by west end theatres. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the curry eating, beer drinking blokes you know should get to use “High Speed Gas”, or where you’d reuse Burger King’s “It Takes Two Hands To Hold A Whopper”.

But be careful. The Nike slogan “Just Do It” might be great for sport, but it wouldn’t be so good for The Samaritans, would it?

Somethin's Cooking In The Kitchen

Here’s an idea for a TV show. We get Bruce Forsyth to solve world poverty, Lady Gaga to work in Iran with NATO’s nuclear disarmament inspectors, and then Nicholas Cage and Kerry Katona can lend their expertise to the next World Economic Forum at Davos to tidy up Third World debt. Good idea, eh?

Well, no, of course not. It’s a ridiculous idea, stupid and childish. Put it forward as a TV programme format and you would be, rightly, laughed out of the commissioner’s office and forced to watch boxed sets of Benidorm as punishment.

Yet this week we have the pleasure of Channel Four’s Jamie Oliver setting up a school to see if unteachable kids can be controlled, interested in education, and ultimately taught to love learning. So, forget about all the years of academic research and millions of pounds of analysis by the Department of Education, social scientists and university doctors struggling with their theses on education failure.

All we ultimately needed for the answer was a television cook.

Now Jamie seems a lovely bloke and his autograph proudly graces my kids’ playroom wall but, how can I put it? I repeat - he’s a flippin’ cook for goodness sake. A chef. He can surely tell you how to drizzle vinaigrette artistically on your Cos lettuce, make fluffy cous cous or cook pasta al dente, but run a school? What’s he qualified to do? Bin the frogs from Biology and have the students dissect wild guinea fowl instead? Returf the five a side pitches in lemongrass? Have the woodwork class make sculptures from polenta?

Perhaps he’d be happy if I ask our local sixth form college headmaster to work for a few weeks as chef of his restaurant in Kingston. It’s the same principle. No doubt we’ll get a book – Jamie’s Ten Minute School Makeover – and a themed restaurant out of it where noisy diners are given lines.

Nice fella but hopelessly out of his depth and remit. Mind you, I wish I had his agent.
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My older daughter watched the Spy Kids movie and was fascinated by the idea of retinal scanners for security. These devices check your unique eye print to see if you are who you say you are. Now she’s decided she wants one of these for access to her bedroom, but she hasn’t quite heard the name properly. She asked me if she could get a “rectal scanner” for her birthday.

Bottom line is I’ve said no.

Meantime my other daughter has started freaking out over recycling. She was all in favour until she picked up the new pack of toilet tissue from the supermarket and saw the recycled logo on the wrapper. “Does this mean the toilet paper’s been used before?” she asked with a horrified look.

Kids constantly make you laugh and then remember how innocent those years, long ago, really were. When I was a kid someone told me that a certain type of garden pebble had coins inside and I used to waste days trying to wear them away by rubbing them on the garden wall. I also believed I’d become a millionaire if I left home at six or seven but was back in my bedroom after five minutes because I didn’t know how where the bus stop was.

Life was simpler in those days as there were no retinal scanners or recycling ideas around then. But I guess nothing really changes. Perhaps technology is just today’s old stones with sixpences hidden inside.

Give A Little Bit

As we know ladies it’s impossible to buy a present for the man who has everything. If he has you what else could he possibly need? But you girls still have to go through the motions of buying Valentine’s gifts, birthday presents, Christmas boxes and all manner of stuff that we guys just don’t need.

As a male let me lay one myth to rest right away and tell you that we don’t go in for those pint glasses stamped “World’s Best Drinker”, T shirts with “My Other Belly Is A Six Pack” or the bottle openers and corkscrews inside a nice tin that Marks And Spencers put together at Christmas time, nor are we fans of the Stig alarm clock, the Top Gear bath oil, or the comic odour eaters impregnated with the smell of chicken vindaloo. And while we’re at it the Ant and Dec board game is a waste of cardboard, as is the Doctor Who sonic screwdriver that doubles as a pen and will probably have our workmates pelting us with rotten fruit.

Boxed desktop game packs with tiny darts, mini snooker and a miniscule roulette wheel will go straight back to Debenhams on Boxing Day, pin striped coffee mugs proclaiming “I’m a stupid banker” are no use to guys who think the Stock Exchange is where women swap soup recipes, and boxer shorts with Homer Simpson on just aren’t funny, despite what the shop assistant tells you. And don’t get me started on comic socks or ties.

I think that guys’ presents are best bought by guys themselves which is why I always read a magazine called Stuff. It’s full of gadgets we don’t need, widgets we can’t afford and gizmos which will be outdated by half past six, but that’s what we want isn’t it? Boys toys.

This magazine reviews the latest TVs, Blu Ray players, spaceships , time travelling machines, nuclear powered lawnmowers, robots that run on real ale, laser guided football boots and limited edition watches that are rarer than an assistant in Primark with a smile on her face. And it was here I spotted an advert this month that made me stop in my adolescent, Peter Pan, tracks.

The magazine is supposed to be full of stuff that’s indispensable to men so I guess there must be a market for what was advertised, though ladies I advise you that buying them for your man may lead to divorce. They may be practical but they have the danger/advantage that the guy you give them to will leave home insulted and never come home again; a gift so expressive and message laden that any unwanted admirer you may have will certainly leave you alone if you buy them for him. If that’s the type of present you want for your man then look no further than Shreddies, a new high, or low, in underwear.

They’re advertised in my magazine as “filtering underwear” and further investigation showed that these are boxer shorts impregnated in the bottom with something that, well, filters smells. In other words they’re odour eaters for your sitting area.

I know you think I’m making this up so check for yourself at www.myshreddies.com, you untrusting soul. There, on the home page, you can see someone tell of how they’ve revolutionised their life. “Plane trips scare the life out of me,”it says, “not because I’m afraid of flying but because I’m scared I let one go”.

I guess the point I’m making here ladies is that it’s OK for guys to buy these for themselves but not for our other halves to buy them for us. They may be essential but not something you want given wrapped in a bow. It would be like us buying you a pack of moustache wax, useful but ill advised.

In this age of TV shows like Channel Four’s Embarrassing Bodies, where people queue up to show their three boobs, miniscule manhoods and the mermaid’s tail growing out of their bottoms, I guess we ought not to be surprised about Shreddies being advertised alongside headphones and TVs, but I thank God my wife never reads my “comic” as she calls it. I’d never have a surprise present ever again.

I’m tempted to say though that the advert blew me away. But I won’t.

The Voice

We all hate the sound of our own voices don’t we? Well, that is unless you’re Piers Morgan or that bloke at my gym who ruins every quiet read of the paper I have after my workout. But when you are making money out of voiceovers, hearing your own squeaky efforts played back is a professional, and embarrassing, inevitability.

This week I was voicing some documentaries about how eighteenth century travel had opened up journalism (stay awake now) and influenced the writing of fiction. I know it sounds a bit worthy and academic and about as much fun as running naked through a Taliban family barbecue shouting “I’m a serial adulterer”, but it was really interesting. Honestly.

Because Brits had started to go abroad more often with better transport, overseas wars, the slave trade and the like, travel journalism was born three hundred years ago. Now you may think this is up there in the history stakes alongside the evolution of garden gnomes, but I enjoyed it and started to make the mistake of feeling clever, as if the words I was reading were actually my own. However I was brought down to earth by the engineer when we finished. He told me he’d squeezed me in between sessions for two big projects that bring his studio regular money. My extremely erudite and insightful academic prose had just followed a voice session for the new series of Thomas The Tank Engine, and was to be immediately followed by a recording for Peppa Pig. Serves me right.

Voiceovers are a weird and wonderful way to earn a living. You are left sitting behind glass panelling for hours while people next door discuss how you are doing. You sit and watch their faces for signs of whether they like your efforts, but they turn off the intercom so you don’t hear their chat. Various heads will come together, they’ll look sad and let down, various swear words can be lip read, and then they’ll switch on again and ask with a big smile, “could you do it again, this time with a bit less Scottish but more north of the border”, or “a bit faster but sounding as if you are slower”, or as I had on one occasion, “could you try a flatter delivery but with more contoured enthusiasm”.

The best paid voiceover I ever did was for the least successful advertising campaign in British TV history. John Cleese did the visuals, appearing in supermarkets as the very loud Basil Fawlty, and I had to come in saying “Sainsburys, it’s value to shout about”. It ran for several months before we were all put out of our misery, tho’ the cheque helped a bit.

I did a voiceover years ago which is heard over and over again in documentaries and archive stuff, yet I don’t get a penny for it. When I opened Channel Four they made me record the first words in case I made a mistake or went off script. I’m not sure why they didn’t trust me, I mean what were they expecting? “Welcome to Channel Four, and by the way I’m selling my car, call me on 07768 3....”?

For a year I was the voice of a satellite TV station owned by Disney called ABC1. I spent two days each month recording the intros and outros to the shows, the “coming up next” sort of stuff. It’s then put in a computer and sounds, on the night, as if you’re actually sitting there introducing the shows. Problem is that when you record these things you only get to see the end credits which you voice over. To this day I can sing every word of the theme from Scrubs but I have never, ever seen an episode.

But for all of my own efforts over the years, my most prized voiceover is actually one my dad engineered for me years ago. It was preserved on a reel to reel tape in his loft until he recently put it on CD for me. My brother and I were pretending to be Thunderbird pilots and blasting my mum’s hairdryer in to dad’s tape recorder microphone to sound like a spacecraft taking off.

We couldn’t get the hang of the words he had scripted for us so eventually a harassed dad can be heard on tape shouting impatiently “Stand by for bloody blast off”. At five years of age we both repeated it word for word and I’m proud to have it preserved for posterity. It’s the best voiceover I’ve ever done.

Every One's A Winner

After last week’s blog about football, my thanks to the many of you who sent me emails with actual quotes from soccer players showing they can be unintentionally funny, or thick, for short.

They ranged from the silly, like David Beckham saying “my parents have always been there for me, ever since I was seven”, to the stupid with Neville Southall’s "If you don't believe you can win, there is no point in getting out of bed at the end of the day."

Beckham made another appearance with "Alex Ferguson is the best manager I've ever had at this level. Well, he's the only manager I've actually had at this level. But he's the best manager I've ever had."

Footballers are not, of course, renowned for being academic but we might have expected better arithmetic from Paul Gascoigne than to tell a reporter "I've had 14 bookings this season - 8 of which were my fault, but 7 of which were disputable." And Geography wasn’t high on Mark Draper’s school report when he said "I'd like to play for an Italian club, like Barcelona ".

The problem with abroad, of course, is that it’s, well, abroad. Former Liverpool star Ian Rush memorable came out with "I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country."

Worryingly, former England player Stuart Pierce is now in charge of the junior national side, even after he said "I can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel”.

But the best one sent was something said by Barry Venison when he was asked about pre match rituals. At Liverpool, for instance, they all touch the “This Is Anfield” sign in the tunnel before a game. Venison’s ritual makes me wonder how he ever played a game. He said "I always used to put my right boot on first, and then obviously my right sock."

Thanks to everyone who emailed me.
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I thought I’d share the best wine critique of this week.

It came from my daughter Annalie who saw a wine taster on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen and decided she may want to do that as a career. For her first tryout we gave her a glass of Asti Spumante with her dinner last weekend.

Annalie tasted it, ran it around her mouth and then pronounced in all seriousness, “Yes, it’s light and fruity, with the after taste of dwarves feet.” I don’t know whether to worry more about my daughter becoming a lush or the fact she knows what dwarves feet taste like.
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With the movies’ awards season in full swing I was delighted to have dinner this week with Oscar winner David Puttnam, or Lord Puttnam to give him his business card title. What a fascinating bloke he is. As a former winner he gets to vote in the Oscars each year so I asked him which film he’s backed for Best Film. He has voted for The King’s Speech.

One winner on the night was Gerald Parkes, a man who had put in fifty years of service to British cinema and now owns his own multi screen cinema as well as a few others. He told the story of how he makes movies accessible to all incomes, even if it means he runs at a loss.

Gerald runs specially priced screenings for old age pensioners and a few weeks ago, as he thanked them for coming, he jokingly said that any OAP bringing their grandmother the next week would get in free.

Seven days later a woman turned up with an urn full of ashes.

He's Football Crazy, Football Mad

Football’s a funny old game, and I don’t just mean the way that my team plays, although it does seem very strange at times. Until I watched Birmingham’s game plan of constantly passing backwards I had never seen two teams on a pitch both playing in the same direction at the same time.

But my team aside, when I say football’s funny I don’t mean funny strange, I mean literally, funny. A post match interview I heard this week is beyond parody and went “The boys done well, as I said, and the season’s not over, but whoever scores the most will win, as I said. The big lad’s settling in nicely, and the opposition literally lost their heads, as I said.” A professional footballer being interviewed is about as grown up as a Jason Statham movie but thankfully shorter.

For real, laugh out loud football moments you have to go and sit at a match. The banter over the balti chicken pies is wonderful although, and I may be inviting hate emails here, it seems to me the least funny is in London where it just sounds all bile and aggression.

The funniest chant I heard was at a Celtic- v- Rangers game the week after the Rangers goalkeeper, Andy Goram, had been all over the papers blaming his gambling debts on the fact he was schizophrenic. As he picked up the ball, Celtic supporters chanted, “Two Andy Gorams, there’s only two Andy Gorams.”

On Wednesday I went to the Midlands to watch Birmingham play Manchester City and, as well as enjoying the game, I laughed a lot, but decency dictates that I can’t share most of the chants. The milder funny ones included, after a linesman upset fans with a bad call, choruses of “where’s a woman when you need her”, a vindication I hope that sexism is outdated in sport. I sat beside two women and noticed also that one of the stewards at pitchside was a woman, but another form of discrimination is thriving. It looks like you can’t get in to a football game as a female unless you’re blonde. Stewards, spectators, pie sellers, the lot. All blonde. No wonder Fernando Torres has gone back to his natural hair colour.

Each time the millionaires of Manchester missed the net this week the stadium echoed to “all that money and you’ve won f*** all” which even the Manc supporters enjoyed, but the best bit was when the stadium announcer said “ ladies and gentlemen we kindly ask that you remain seated for the whole game.” That was the cue for both sets of supporters to rise to their feet as one and sing “we’ll do what we effin’ well want.”

One advert pitchside this week caught my eye. It was for the Co-op and advertised their “football funerals”. Visiting their web site I find they are, and I quote, “the official provider of funeral service options to Birmingham City and their fans.” They must be rubbing their hands in anticipation every time a bad tackle slides in.

If you’re thinking of popping your Nike clogs soon then purchasing their bronze option means having your coffin lining done in club colours, hiring the club flag to drape over your box, and a memorial brick placed at the stadium. For an extra ninety nine pounds you get the gold service which includes a wreath in club colours and your ashes scattered at the ground, though I suggest you have them placed in the opposition goal area so you’re never disturbed. If you fancy the wide open, empty spaces then go for the trophy room.

Meanwhile, a company called Natural Endings (http://www.naturalendings.co.uk/football-funerals.asp) specialises in football farewells and goes even further with their service. Their web site shows photos of a coffin for sale shaped like a football boot, with a Nike swoosh on the side and six huge studs on top, as well as two other, normal style coffins, covered in photos of your favourite team. Whether they can influence the transfer talk in the herafter over which team you will play for, Pearly Gates United or Eternal Damnation FC, they don’t say.

Meantime I notice that a couple of the big name players who moved clubs this week have received death threats. They should be checking out the web site just in case.

It’s a funny old game.