Fuck me sideways with a rolled up copy of OK magazine (complete with DVD cover mount of Katie Price’s Topless Pilates).
In a bid to keep my wife sweet, I have ostentatiously kept my new iPhone switched off since we arrived in Armagnac (not really any sort of sacrifice, if truth be told, seeing as without H on hand to help me I couldn’t work out how to turn it on) and have therefore been bereft of news from home.
However, I managed to get online for the first time in nearly three weeks this morning, while the Right Hon. Mrs O was down in the village bartering furiously for fresh baguette at the Hereux Acheteur, having finally swallowed my pride and bribed the Little Madam to show me how to operate the infuriating gizmo (at the cost of two tickets to Lady Gaga at the O2 in December).
And what do I find? The boys and girls back home are all a Twitter over the takeover of the channel formerly known as Five by Dirty Des and his henchmen (pictured above bidding a fond farewell to Five's erstwhile owners at RTL). There is even, miracle of miracles, a message from Dawn, apologising for missing my leaving do (for a rendezvous with her latest baby mother, no doubt) and offering to buy me lunch on her corporate Amex before the big Dick gets his sticky fingers on it.
From what I can tell, sitting pool side next to a six-foot inflatable plastic swan and squinting into a screen the size of a fag packet under the blazing southern French sun, the industry’s reaction to Dirty Des buying his way onto terrestrial top table is much the same as if he’d dropped his trousers and taken a dump onstage at the VLV’s autumn conference. But then the television industry has always been appallingly sniffy about being owned or managed by anyone who is a) good at making money b) has never produced a programme (preferably a long boring one about something ineffably dreary) and, c) didn’t work at LWT or the BBC in the 1970s or 1980s.
Now a certain level of squeamishness about the porn thingy is understandable, but I hate to remind those with short memories that it was the old rat mother himself, G. Reg Dyke, who suggested erotica to stiffen Five’s late night schedules in his successful bid for the licence back in the mid 1990s. G.Reg has gone on to be canonised (the patron saint of chippy bastards and BBC pensioners everywhere), while Des is derided as a filth peddler. I guess it’s all a question of presentation.
No doubt Long Acre’s dwindling band of brothers will even now be wavering over whether to put their pride and their principles before Mr Desmond’s chequebook or to clip on their clothes pegs and take the plunge to Lower Thames Street. However much she may bitch about it over lunch at The Ivy, Dawn is surely a candidate to head south given her professed love for all things fornicatory (professional rather than personal). And I guess The Woolfeman will follow slavishly in his mistress’s footsteps given his lack of shame (and given that he pretty much always does). But for the rest of them? Who knows? Many will be put off by Tom Bower’s tales of Desmond’s notorious bullying and proprietorial interference, but they should look on the bright side. At least they’ll be able to tell a good Nazi joke without facing the sack.
They should also thank their pitifully diminished expense accounts that they didn’t fall into the cool, dry and highly ambitious palms of the new hairstyle over at Channel 4. Even a pornographer is ultimately preferable to a P45.
For all the froth and blether, in the end, like everything else in telly, it will all come down to the lucre, whether filthy or otherwise. In the relatively unlikely event Desmond proves to be more than empty braggadocio and coughs up enough to turn Five into a proper commissioning broadcaster once more (instead of an extended experiment with AFP*) then I suspect staff and suppliers (Admirable Productions included) will hold their noses and knuckle down. If, as many predict, the commissioning pot stays empty and Five follows the Daily Express down the path to media absurdity then at least we can console ourselves with one thought.
It will not have had far to fall.
* Advertiser funded programming (or atrocious fucking poop)
In a bid to keep my wife sweet, I have ostentatiously kept my new iPhone switched off since we arrived in Armagnac (not really any sort of sacrifice, if truth be told, seeing as without H on hand to help me I couldn’t work out how to turn it on) and have therefore been bereft of news from home.
However, I managed to get online for the first time in nearly three weeks this morning, while the Right Hon. Mrs O was down in the village bartering furiously for fresh baguette at the Hereux Acheteur, having finally swallowed my pride and bribed the Little Madam to show me how to operate the infuriating gizmo (at the cost of two tickets to Lady Gaga at the O2 in December).
And what do I find? The boys and girls back home are all a Twitter over the takeover of the channel formerly known as Five by Dirty Des and his henchmen (pictured above bidding a fond farewell to Five's erstwhile owners at RTL). There is even, miracle of miracles, a message from Dawn, apologising for missing my leaving do (for a rendezvous with her latest baby mother, no doubt) and offering to buy me lunch on her corporate Amex before the big Dick gets his sticky fingers on it.
From what I can tell, sitting pool side next to a six-foot inflatable plastic swan and squinting into a screen the size of a fag packet under the blazing southern French sun, the industry’s reaction to Dirty Des buying his way onto terrestrial top table is much the same as if he’d dropped his trousers and taken a dump onstage at the VLV’s autumn conference. But then the television industry has always been appallingly sniffy about being owned or managed by anyone who is a) good at making money b) has never produced a programme (preferably a long boring one about something ineffably dreary) and, c) didn’t work at LWT or the BBC in the 1970s or 1980s.
Now a certain level of squeamishness about the porn thingy is understandable, but I hate to remind those with short memories that it was the old rat mother himself, G. Reg Dyke, who suggested erotica to stiffen Five’s late night schedules in his successful bid for the licence back in the mid 1990s. G.Reg has gone on to be canonised (the patron saint of chippy bastards and BBC pensioners everywhere), while Des is derided as a filth peddler. I guess it’s all a question of presentation.
No doubt Long Acre’s dwindling band of brothers will even now be wavering over whether to put their pride and their principles before Mr Desmond’s chequebook or to clip on their clothes pegs and take the plunge to Lower Thames Street. However much she may bitch about it over lunch at The Ivy, Dawn is surely a candidate to head south given her professed love for all things fornicatory (professional rather than personal). And I guess The Woolfeman will follow slavishly in his mistress’s footsteps given his lack of shame (and given that he pretty much always does). But for the rest of them? Who knows? Many will be put off by Tom Bower’s tales of Desmond’s notorious bullying and proprietorial interference, but they should look on the bright side. At least they’ll be able to tell a good Nazi joke without facing the sack.
They should also thank their pitifully diminished expense accounts that they didn’t fall into the cool, dry and highly ambitious palms of the new hairstyle over at Channel 4. Even a pornographer is ultimately preferable to a P45.
For all the froth and blether, in the end, like everything else in telly, it will all come down to the lucre, whether filthy or otherwise. In the relatively unlikely event Desmond proves to be more than empty braggadocio and coughs up enough to turn Five into a proper commissioning broadcaster once more (instead of an extended experiment with AFP*) then I suspect staff and suppliers (Admirable Productions included) will hold their noses and knuckle down. If, as many predict, the commissioning pot stays empty and Five follows the Daily Express down the path to media absurdity then at least we can console ourselves with one thought.
It will not have had far to fall.
* Advertiser funded programming (or atrocious fucking poop)
Just for the record, Desmond moved his publications out of Ludgate House in 2004. They are now housed in Lower Thames Street, near The Monument, so no crossing of the river will be necessary
ReplyDeleteIs this meant to be insightful? None of this came to pass, did it? How much time did you spend in broadcasting? Of course they were going to get fired.
ReplyDelete