Being Bob Holness
Posted: January 12, 2012 Filed under: TV 1 Comment »
Bob Holness died last week. I once showed him how to be Bob Holness. Let me explain.
I was working for a gameshow channel who were showing very old repeats of Bob’s popular series Blockbusters and I was asked to direct some promos for the show. I managed to track Bob down, and he came into Maidstone Studios to shoot some material.
After getting him to plough his way through a bunch of promotional scripts on autocue, I asked him if he would do what he used to do every week at the end of Blockbusters – a kind of friendly, saluting gesture directly into the camera lens.
“What do you mean?” he said. It had been ten years since Bob had presented the show, and I’d just been sitting in a darkened room for a week watching old episodes, so it’s hardly surprising that I knew exactly what I meant, but he didn’t.
“You know,” I said, “It was a sort of… static flat-palmed wave?”
“A static flat-palmed wave?”
“Yes.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you mean,” smiled Bob.
So I had to demonstrate to Bob Holness how to do his own signature gesture. He watched me carefully, and like the trained actor that he was, he copied it precisely.
The Office of the Future
Posted: January 6, 2012 Filed under: work | Tags: flourescent lights, instant coffee, office job Leave a comment »
Do you have a dull office job? Do you ever scan through the recruitment web sites, and look longingly at such exciting-sounding roles as Insight Analyst, Media Planner, or Online Strategy Consultant?
They sound thrilling, don’t they? Well, I can set your mind at rest. Because all of these people actually do exactly the same as you do. They sit at their desks all day, bored out of their skulls, in the Office of the Future.
In the Office of the Future people amble into work at precisely 9.34am to immediately discover that someone has either removed the chair from their desk or swapped it for a broken one. They switch on their PC and login as quickly as they can (to make it look as if they’ve been there for ages). Then they slouch off to the kitchen or the canteen and get a chipped mug of instant coffee.
They return to their desk, read a whole load of cc’d emails that are nothing to do with their own particular job, look at their Facebook page and Hotmail for a while, then they go and get another cup of coffee. Maybe a Danish. If they’re lucky enough to smoke, it’s then time to put on their coat and go and stand outside in the rain for ten minutes.
Then they sit down at their desk again and look at their watch, which now reads 9.56am. They check their emails again, discover that no further messages have come in, then look out of the window for twenty minutes. Then they go to the toilet.
Occasionally, a colleague they vaguely know walks past their desk, and they nod to each other, sharing for an instant a kind of universally shared dispair. There is very little conversation. Everything happens silently through the wonder of electronic communication. Because this is the Office of the Future.
Once or twice a day a select group of colleagues scurry into a meeting room lit by uncomfortable flourescent lights and sit talking about things they’re not very interested in, while their less senior colleagues huddle outside the room wishing that they were in the meeting too and wondering what’s going on inside.
In the Office of the Future lunch is taken sitting at your desk. A vacuum-packed sandwich from Tescos, a packet of crisps, and a can of coke. Less considerate staff bring smelly food into the office and fill the workplace with the pungent, lingering smells of fish and chips, tandoori chicken or Chinese takeaway. But no-one complains.
As a welcome lunchtime break from work, employees stare at their PC screens and read the newspapers online or visit any web site they can find that isn’t blocked. If they are really, really desperate, they read the company intranet.
In the Office of the Future it doesn’t matter what your job is because your day is the same as everyone else’s day. The world is filled with miserable people slumped at desks staring blankly at PC screens. Look at them closely. They are dead behind the eyes. Because human beings were not designed for this. We are supposed to be running around in our pants throwing spears at mammoths, not checking emails and staring blankly out of the window.
Before the Office of the Future was invented people still had boring jobs but offices were noisy, lively places. People talked to each other. Papers shuffled. Rubber stamps stamped. Phones rang. Typewriters clattered. Colleagues went to the cafe or the pub at lunchtime. A tea lady called Dolly came around with a cup of tea and a biscuit at 4 o’clock.
And this wasn’t actually very long ago at all. Less than a generation. The future is not as far away as you think it is.
If someone’s phone rings in the Office of the Future it’s usually their mobile. They quickly answer it and then, for some reason, walk as far away from their desk as they possibly can – cowering in a dark corner and whispering into the mouthpiece like a Cold War spy.
Unless that person is very important, of course. If they’re very important they answer their mobile and walk right to the centre of the office talking loudly into their phone at the very top of their voice so that everyone can hear their very important conversation and wish that they were very important as well.
In the Office of the Future many people work from home. Which means that there are often very few people there at all, leaving just a big room full of humming photocopiers and paper shredders. The Office of the Future has almost completely eliminated verbal communication and social interaction and soon it will eliminate people altogether. Which can only be a good thing.
I am writing this blog sitting in the Office of the Future. Someone at the other end of the room is quietly playing “KC and the Sunshine Band” at their desk. I don’t really want to listen to this and I don’t think anyone else wants to either. But no-one complains. Because this is the Office of the Future.
The End of the Line
Posted: December 29, 2011 Filed under: anger, olympic games, transport | Tags: british tradition, disrespect, finsbury park, queue jumping, transport 1 Comment »
We’re famous for queuing in this country. We as a nation have stood proudly in queues for centuries. Our grandparents queued for rations during the Blitz, our fathers queued noisily outside football stadiums, and our mothers queued patiently to go to the toilet in Marks & Spencer. I, myself, am descended from a long line of queuers. However, this great British tradition is now on its last legs.
I often arrive at Finsbury Park Bus Station at the busiest time of day, usually to discover a long line of commuters waiting for the W3 bus. It’s not unusual for there to be 100 people or more politely waiting in line. And every night, when the bus arrives and opens its doors, at least six people walk up to the bus from the opposite direction to the queue, and calmly step onto the bus ahead of everyone else. Indeed, many passengers actually step out of the way in order to make room for them.
No-one says anything. No-one bats an eyelid. There is never a hint of confrontation. And this, of course, is because there is now such a sinister, underlying atmosphere of intimidation and violence on the streets of the capital, that normal law-abiding passengers would now consider it to be a dangerous, even life-threatening act, to stand in the way of a queue jumper. In London it’s safest to assume that most people are carrying knives, and the rest are packing unlicensed handguns. Tell someone to get to the back of the queue in Finsbury Park and you could quite literally end up dead.
Many queue jumpers are what you might expect: Young, arrogant, quietly insolent and wearing a hoodie pulled up over their heads. But there is now a new breed of queue jumper. Respectable, middle-aged, sometimes even elderly. An insidious new underclass of weather-beaten, bitter Londoners who have suddenly realised that they can cynically take advantage of the lack of confrontation at the head of queues, and effortlessly save themselves the trouble of going to the back of the line. These wrinkly renegades seem to have adopted the good old-fashioned attitude of “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
So, why don’t Transport for London do something about this? Signs at bus stops? Posters on the tube? Official sounding Tannoy announcements?
“Queue jumping can lead to confrontation! Please respect your fellow passengers!”
Even better, why don’t bus drivers simply switch off their engines until queue jumpers get off the bus? Like they do if someone tries to get on without paying. The reason is simple. It’s because Transport for London staff don’t respect their passengers either. If they did, they wouldn’t have gone on strike on Boxing Day.
The words “respect” and “disrespect” are frequently banded about nowadays. The problem is that many people no longer have any idea what these words mean. The utter contempt shown to fellow travelers by serial queue jumpers on London Transport is proof of this.
Whether you call it butting, barging, skipping, ditching, or pushing in, like throwing litter, or allowing your dog to foul the pavement, queue jumping should be made a criminal offence in the United Kingdom – punishable by a fine of at least £1000. Because queue jumping is as ugly a form of personal intimidation as threatening behavior or abusive language.
And London Mayor Boris Johnson’s contribution to this problem? He has re-introduced a bus with an open platform on the back, which will make it even easier to jump the queue ahead of your fellow passengers. Nice one Boris. Perhaps he’s contemplating turning queue jumping into an Olympic sport?
The Bit Between Christmas and New Year
Posted: December 28, 2011 Filed under: anger, boredom, neighbours Leave a comment »
What the hell are you supposed to do with the Bit Between Christmas and the New Year? You’re too tired and hungover to carry on with whatever it was you were doing before the festivities, and at the same time you’re too grumpy and cynical to start anything resembling a new project. Added to that, you have the usual gothic dread of New Years Eve.
If you haven’t been invited to a New Years Eve party you feel suicidally isolated and paranoid. If you have been invited to a New Years Eve party, chances are, you probably don’t really want to go anyway. This is because last year you made an total tit of yourself and threw up into the kous kous. Then you spent half of New Years Day sitting in a hospital queue waiting for an impromptu chlamydia test or a free dose of emergency day after contraception.
Worst case scenario is that your next door neighbours will have a party and not invite you. So you’ll once again have to sit watching Jools Holland and listening through wafer thin walls to them and about two hundred of their friends screaming at the top of their stupid voices as they guzzle Tesco’s Finest Cava and let off indoor fireworks.
For years, scientists have been trying to find the perfect vacuum. I’ve just found it. It’s called the Bit Between Christmas and New Year.
They drink, it’s all over…
Posted: December 26, 2011 Filed under: alcohol, olympic games, theatre | Tags: anger, booze, boredom, dwarves, olympic games, pantomime Leave a comment »
OK, Christmas is finally out of the way, and at last we’re gearing up for Olympic Year in London. Luckily almost everyone I know gave me booze for Christmas, so my deep dread of this event will at least be dulled for a few weeks.
In addition to recording the usual weekly podcast with Georgina, I’ve decided to write a regular blog of my own. However, before I start in earnest, I must first go and watch a local production of Cinerella. An acquaintance has booked tickets at the very back of the theatre, because she says she is alarmed by dwarves. Ricky Gervais, as always, has a lot to answer for.
Happy New Year to everyone except the people who live upstairs from me. We’ll speak again very soon.
