Robert Mugabe v Gordon Brown - it's uncanny

Friday Night with Georgina Baillie, Russell Brand and Andrew Sachs

Recently, I was invited to appear on the BBC Radio Cambridge Breakfast Show to speak for only a moment or two on the fact that pubs have to become more innovative in order to survive.  The BBC was focusing on me because we recently installed a Nintendo Wii in the Tharp and use it to have tournaments or simply liven up a dull winter’s evening.

It didn’t take long, however, for me to join the ranks of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand and receive a complaint regarding my on-air performance.  True, mine didn’t involve me making lewd references to a sordid fling with Olga Kurylenko, nor did I repeatedly swear on air – we were live at 8:40 in the morning, after all, and not pre-recording a show to go out after 10pm like Ross and Brand were.

But still, a little old lady did get the wrong end of the stick and rang up to say that, although she understood pubs were struggling at the moment and that they needed to do new and more inventive things to get ahead, it really was out of order that they should resort to weeing competitions.

Admittedly it was only one call, rather than 40’000+, and it was only raised by somebody who’d misunderstood just what we were talking about rather than being brought to the attention of the masses by a tabloid newspaper eager to make a stir, but it did give everybody a laugh and the pub’s Wii has been used quite extensively since being brought in to the limelight.

Which just goes to show that there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The same, really, goes for Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and the two people at the centre of their tasteless joke.

Andrew Sachs, the man who played the amusing Manuel in the 1970’s sitcom Fawlty Towers, is somebody that most people born in the 1980s have probably never heard of, and he’d disappeared off the radar somewhat in later years.  Now, though, he’s apparently been approached by ITV for a role in Coronation Street, while his grand-daughter, a burlesque dancer who seemingly has an insatiable appetite for sex and wants to meet people who can sell her fake blood, was a complete unknown before the Brand/Ross fracas yet now gets invited to be the headline act at various nightclubs.

Neither Ross nor Brand will suffer too badly in the long run, either.  Certainly, Russell Brand had no choice but to resign or be sacked for his part in calling up Sachs and claiming to the man’s answering machine that he’d had sex with his grand-daughter, but the thirty-three year old walking toilet brush is unlikely to go short of work.

Having dashed straight off to America to hide from the tabloid press in the UK he is undoubtedly going to enjoy a lucrative film career with his next film, Disney’s Bedtime Stories, due out at Christmas.  A contract with Channel 4 also saw him back on TV shortly after the furore over his radio show broke.

Jonathan Ross is equally unlikely to suffer long-term for his part in the telephone scandal, during which he exclaimed to Andrew Sachs’s answering machine that Brand had “f***ed your grand-daughter!”

A three-month suspension and loss of pay rumoured to be around £1.5million is a harsh punishment, but the loveable Wossy has a strong history and loyal fans and the BBC were unlikely to punish him any more severely for fear that he would immediately be snapped up by a rival broadcaster.

Indeed, the whole scandal has done nothing but good for the four involved.  Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s names have been on everybody’s lips since it erupted, including Jeremy Clarkson who claims the reason their guest list on Top Gear has improved so dramatically this series is all down to Friday Night with Jonathan Ross being cancelled.

Georgina Baillie became the most searched name on Google and Sachs has been offered a new acting role.

In fact, the only way this could get better for any of them is if, on the return of Ross’s Friday night show, his guests in the Green Room were Georgina Baillie, Russell Brand and Andrew Sachs.

That, on its own, would be a ratings winner.

Alistair Darling Is Little More Than A High Street Hustler

If you watched Soccer AM on Saturday morning you will have seen Paul Daniels on there, making a couple of lewd jokes that made Helen Chamberlain blush, talking about bringing Wizbit back – and doing a card trick that is often done by short-con artists in city centres and outside sports stadiums.

The trick Paul did is commonly known as Find The Lady, otherwise known as the Three-Card Monte, in which the victim – the person on the receiving end of the con – is tricked in to trying to find a particular card.  Usually it’s the Queen, and in Paul’s demonstration, it was the Queen of Hearts between the Ten of Spades and the Ten of Clubs.

It’s a simple trick, really: the magician lets you guess correctly a few times at where the Queen is, building up your confidence, and then starts betting with you.  As soon as you put the money down on the table, every time you think you’ve picked the Queen, you’ll find it’s one of the other cards.  Paul demonstrated this very effectively, even bending the corner of the Queen to indicate which card it was – but later, when he turned over the ‘marked’ card, it was one of the tens.

Alistair Darling has pulled a similar trick on us today.  He’s been teasing us all weekend with little snippets that he was going to do something wonderful with VAT, essentially lowering it to ease the economy a bit.

Indeed, 2.5% was duly cut off the rate of VAT duty, which effectively equates to 6p off a £3.00 pint of beer.  In reality, it was hardly a move that was ever going to help pubs and a few pennies off a pint of beer was unlikely to ever make a difference to whether Joe Bloggs and his family would come out and use the village local any more, but at least it was indicative of a government trying to help – or, at least, one thinking of having an election in the near future and looking to win a bit of confidence back.

Some pubs might not even have passed the rate cut on across all their products, preferring instead to give themselves a little relief in these difficult times.  And who could blame them, really?

But in a slight of hand that nobody saw coming, even with all the corners of the marked card turned up, Darling has taken our beloved industry and beaten it about the head with a sledgehammer once again.  An 8% rise on alcohol duty is punitive in the extreme, more than compensating for what the government will lose in VAT revenues and virtually guaranteeing further job losses and pub closures in the months to come.

I know Paul Daniels very well, seeing as he’s my dad’s brother, and he’s a great person to have a conversation with.  He’s articulate, intelligent, witty and brilliant fun to have at a party.  Naturally, he and Aunty Debs are welcome at my pub any time they are free to pop in.

Alistair Darling, on the other hand, is nothing more than a high street hustler, giving with one hand and taking away with the other.  When a campaign ran earlier this year to ban him from every pub in the land, I abstained, preferring to invite him in and let him see the types of environment his castigatory tax policies were putting in jeopardy.

Today, I whole-heartedly sign up to the campaign...

Paul Daniels on Soccer AM

For those who missed it, Paul Daniels was on Soccer AM on Saturday morning.

If you want to see it, the link to the video is here:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid958992159/bctid2908283001

Car of the Year 2008, as voted for by James Bond

Choosing your favourite car is a very personal thing.  Growing up as a boy my walls were littered with posters of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, evocative Italian supercars that, at the age of thirteen, featured heavily alongside Sam Fox in certain dreams I had.

Even at the age of thirty six, Ferraris still feature heavily in my dreams, although Page 3 girls are long gone.  But when it comes to choosing my favourite car the topic is ever more subjective.

Take, for example, this year’s Car Of The Year final.  Shown this weekend on Dave, the results had been narrowed down to six categories: Supermini, Family, 4x4, Sports, Luxury and Supercar.

The final contenders of five in each category had been chosen by a panel of four ‘experts’ who, with a plethora of automobiles launched between June 2007 and July 2008, had quite a difficult selection to make.  I’m no ‘industry expert’, but I can’t help but think that they might have got it all a little bit wrong.

In the Supermini category, it was whittled down to the Mazda2, the Subaru Justy, Seat Ibiza, the cheapest car in the category was the Hyundai i10, and finally the cutesy Fiat 500.  These were five great choices, and – for me – it was probably the hardest category to judge.  The only car I don’t really like here is the Seat Ibiza; the others all make huge sense when looking to buy in this market.

But, despite the difficulty, the Fiat 500 had to be the car to win the category.  It has just about everything going for it: great looks, fun to drive, and a cheap price.  It starts at a little over £8’000 and, even if you load it up with all the mad Abarth options and the SS engine that can produce 160bhp, it still works out thousands of pounds cheaper than BMW’s Mini which, thankfully, didn’t even make the short list.

Family cars never evoke much emotion, but the selection chosen for this year’s final was a random bunch clearly picked for no apparent reason.  Where was the excellent Ford Mondeo or the even more excellent new Citroen C5?  Both are far more family car sized than a Ford Focus and, in the absence of a saloon car category, would have fit better here than Ford’s hatch.  They would also have stood on much firmer ground than the other contenders, which comprised of the Mazda6, Audi A4, Subaru Legacy (diesel) and the Citroen Berlingo.

Logic would dictate, given that selection, that the Berlingo should have taken the title of Family Car Of The Year.  Out of all the cars on test it was the only one to move the tallest married couple in the country and all their paraphernalia successfully and, with a £10’995 price tag, it also represents good value.  But, much as I am a closet fan of Citroens, even I’ll be the first to admit that its front end has been styled on the face of a bottom feeder.

In the absence of anything else sensible, the only choice outside of the Citroen, therefore, would have to be Ford’s extremely good and well-priced Focus.  But, as this was being voted for by Dave viewers, they went for the Audi A4.  Clearly the most expensive car in this selection, with a price tag starting at £19’900 and rising to a whopping £32’000, Audi’s incredibly bland 3-series challenger won on brand and prestige rather than practicality and price; two factors that must surely rank highly when considering a family car.

The Car of the Year’s third category was the most controversial of all: 4x4s.  Personally, I love 4x4s – they fly in the face of everything we consider holy in the automotive world these days and are decried as gas-guzzling, beasts of Beelzebub that will surely kill the planet quicker than the Large Hadron Collider will.  I would have loved to see the Discovery 3 and the Range Rover Vogue in this category, but the only decent desert-eating monster in this year’s selection was the Toyota Land Cruiser V8.  Lined up as the token fat girl amongst slimmer, more sylphlike mud-pluggers such as Subaru’s Forester, the brilliant Ford Kuga or VW’s botoxed Tiguan, the Land Crusier was never going to stand a chance in today’s modern, ecotistical world.  In fact, the only car here that stood less chance than the Toyota was Seat’s unbelievably ugly Altea Freetrack, which couldn’t work out whether it was trying to look like the utterly dire Pontiac Aztek or Deborah Meaden.

Personally, I would have chosen the Land Cruiser to win this category.  It stands for everything a 4x4 should stand for and, when it comes to crossing the Sahara, I suspect the category’s eventual winner – Ford’s lovely new Kuga – would fail at the first dune.

The sports car category came next and, unless I’ve utterly misunderstood the term ‘sports car’, I was gobsmacked to see a Mitsubishi Evo X alongside a Fiat Punto in this section.  To me, the Mitsubishi doesn’t exactly fit the category, as it’s more of a rally car, and the Punto is little more than a chavved-up shopper’s hatchback.

Alongside contenders like the Porsche 911, Audi TT and VW’s new Scirocco, and even the Abarth version of the Punto, the Evo simply looked like putting Michael Clarke Duncan alongside New Kids On The Block.

As sports cars go, the Fiat Punto Abarth is most likely to fit in on the posh end of a council estate, while VW’s Scirocco – though touted by many as superb – is still a bit too Golfish for my tastes.  The Porsche 911 fits more in to the supercar category than sports car, which leaves the Audi TT as really the only true contender for the title of Sports Car Of The Year 2008.

But, for some inexplicable reason, Mitsubishi’s Evo X – complete with some sensible styling, at least – got the Dave viewer’s choice in this category.

The Luxury Car category was equally confusing.  You’d expect to see cars such as the Rolls Royce Phantom Coupe and the Bentley Continental GT Speed competing, and indeed you do.  So why, in the Luxury Car section, do you also find a Volkswagen Passat or, equally mad, the Audi RS6 Avant?

If you were going to pick a VW, surely the Phaeton would be better suited?  And where are BMW and Mercedes in this category?  More to the point, in this world of environmental friendliness and hybrid cars, where is the ultimate green luxury vehicle, the Lexus LS600h?

Luxury cars are all about opulence and style and, stuck for something decent to vote for in this category, the viewers ended up voting for Jaguar’s XF.  Brilliant it may be, and perhaps the car to bring class and respect back to the Jaguar brand, but for me it’s not luxurious enough – and it looks too much like the Ford Mondeo for my liking.

Dave’s final category for Car Of The Year 2008 is the Supercar category – and immediately we notice Ferrari are missing.  True, the gorgeous new California was launched too late to be included this year, but a Supercar category that doesn’t include Ferrari?  That’s like being a Formula One champion and not having a Pussycat Doll draped on your arm.

The closest we could get to a Ferrari was the superb Maserati GranTurismo, but lined up alongside competition such as the Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4, the Porsche 911 GT2, the Jaguar XKR-S and the Aston Martin DBS, it was a tough call.

For me, in the absence of a Ferrari, the prize had to go to the impressive Lamborghini – but the viewers went for the Aston Martin DBS.

And this is where the farce of Dave’s voting system came to light.  The overall Car Of The Year 2008, as voted for by car mad Dave viewers, was picked on percentages.  Whichever car in its category received the highest percentage of votes compared to the other categories would, ultimately, be Car Of The Year 2008.

This means that, hypothetically, if 12 people had voted for the Hyundai i10 in the Supermini category and only one person had voted for each of the other cars, the cheap i10’s percentage of votes would have been vastly higher than, say, the 250’000 people who might have voted for the Land Cruiser, versus 249’999 who voted for the other cars.  This would have made the i10 Car Of The Year.

But it didn’t, because the Aston Martin DBS received the highest percentage of votes for its category, and its percentage was higher than any other car received in any of the other categories.

Confused?  So was I – but, apparently, that’s how the Aston Martin DBS became Car Of The Year 2008.

The panel called it the James Bond effect, with Dave’s finale coinciding slightly inconveniently with the release of Quantum Of Solace, but I find this just as confusing as the voting system.  After all, the DBS appears for just five minutes at the start of the new James Bond film, during which it is absolutely shot to pieces, and then Daniel Craig and his bevy of onscreen beauties proceed to jaunt around for the rest of the film in hydrogen powered Fords.

All of which slightly makes a mockery of the Car Of The Year award and, because of this, I’m going to vote sensibly and say that the Car Of The Year 2008 is the Citroen C5.

As voted for by me.

The Jennifer Aniston vs Greene King BDM Equation

"Greene King seem to have changed their Business Development Managers more often than Jennifer Aniston has changed lovers..."

After reading my latest article on The Publican website, in which I made a comparison to Jennifer Aniston's love life and Greene King's propensity for changing my Business Development Manager regularly, a good friend e-mailed me today with the following words:

"You could have talked about a number of things in the news this week:-

1. Obama’s victory and how this may effect the World.
2. The economy,and how the banks are not giving us back this week the money we gave them last week.
3. The swinging vicar and her drunken sex orgies fuelled by supermarket drink.
4. The dangers of drink driving. Or who tried to killed Bambi?
   

But Oh no! You have to take on the might of the 3rd biggest brewer in the UK, and your immediate employer and a Hollywood superstar.

Outspoken? Under estimation. Keep writing!!!"

I thought that was quite nice!

The original article can be found here: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=16&storycode=61834&c=2

A World Fixated With Prejudice?

Isn't it amazing that, at the end of a week that has seen such a prophetic change in the world, the world's media, sports and political pundits, seem to be fixated on the word 'black'?

As I watched in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, unable to sleep for worrying about whether I could pay my next VAT bill, Sky News announced the election of America's first black president.

I was pleased - but I hadn't wanted Barack Obama to win because of the colour of his skin, but because the other guy reminded me of oven chips.  And because Obama just makes so much more sense than the guy whose name sounds like a Bruce Willis character.

In contrast, as Lewis Hamilton thrilled crowds around the world with a last-gasp move in the closing stages of the Brazilian Grand Prix to become Formula One World Champion, I was disappointed.

Not because he is black, but because I simply hadn't wanted him to win it just yet.

Naturally, it is excellent for British sport to have an Englishman at the top once again, and Hamilton is certainly a superstar of the future, but as Timo Glock slid wide on a wet track to let the boy from Stevenage through, I couldn't help but think that Hamilton didn't deserve it.  Not just yet, anyway.

After all, since entering Formula One less than two years ago, he has been blessed with a car easily capable of winning.  Nine podium positions from his first nine races pays testament to that.  Other champions - Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen, for example - have had to work their way up from back-of-the-grid teams.

Yet all the world's media could do was focus on how Lewis is the sport's first black champion.

Brian Viner, writing in Thursday's Independent, summarised the views of many at the end of his article.  After comparing parental tactics with the president-elect, he concluded that if a black man can be elected President of the United States, anything can happen.

It's probably true, but the colour of neither man's skin bothers me.  It is their ability to do the job.

Obama, I am certain, will do a lot to restore the faith of the world in America and bring peace and financial stability back to the globe.  Not because he is black, but because he knows what he's talking about.

Hamilton, it is obvious, could well go on to be statistically more successful than Michael Schumacher.  Not because he is black, but because he is supremely talented behind the wheel.  And he has a good car.

Yet the prejudices of our civilisation - locally and internationally - seem to make us forget one very important fact that both men share: from mixed-race parentage, Barack Hussein Obama II and Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton are as much white as they are black.

We would do well not to focus on the colour of any man's skin, but on their ability to do their job.  Whatever role it might be.

Out With The Old, In With The New

At last, it’s over.  It’s the end of an era that we all remember with varying degrees of amusement, frustration, love and loathing.

I’m not talking about the eight-year car crash that was the Bush Administration or the campaigning of the candidates whose goal it was to take over from Dubya; I’m talking about the end of something that most people thought had finished years ago.

As Barack Obama convincingly swept to victory in yesterday’s polls, defeating John McCain with a convincing 51.3% of the votes at the time of writing, Microsoft announced that it was finally going to stop issuing licenses for their long-standing Operating System, Windows 3.x.

Many computer users will remember the Windows 3.11 system on early home computers.  Launched in 1990, it was just about the only Operating System you could have unless you wanted the complex Unix or the niche Mac systems and its simple, icon-driven user interface (which many recognised as having plagiarised the Apple operating interface anyway) made navigating to your applications and documents easy.

Clunky in comparison to today’s Windows Vista system, Windows 3.x was not the prettiest of interfaces, but its light payload meant that it only required an 8086 or 8088 processor operating at a speed of 10mhz and just 640k of RAM.  It only took up 7mb of hard disk space.

Compare that to the Home Basic version of today’s Windows Vista, which needs a 32-bit processor running at a speed of at least 1ghz, 512mb of RAM and 20gb of hard-disk space, along with a graphics card with at least 32mb of RAM all to itself, and it’s easy to see why 3.x was still an operating system in use today.

True, it is no longer powerful enough to launch the Space Shuttle, but this tiny operating system can still be found aboard the computer systems of long-haul jet aircraft and is embedded in many Point of Sale machines, including retail tills.

Most people today are still using Microsoft’s Windows XP package, fearful that Vista is still not reliable enough to run their day-to-day applications, but as applications become ever more powerful and nefarious hackers around the world become increasingly nastier, Windows 3.x is no longer powerful enough to either run the packages people need in their computer-driven lives nor protect itself from the viruses and security-compromising worms that are about today.

So, as George W. Bush prepares to hand over the keys of the White House to Barack Obama, we say goodbye to Microsoft’s favoured son after almost nineteen long and loyal years.

Lewis Hamilton - Formula One World Champion 2008

Who would have thought that watching Formula One in a pub could be so exciting?  Yet, as a small crowd of people gathered in my Public Bar yesterday to watch the final race of the season – and the closing stages of a championship battle that has had its fair share of ups and downs – the atmosphere was electric.

Formula One has not been an overly popular sport with the average television viewer for some time now.  The intricacies of its politics and bureaucracies – mixed with sex scandals, race scandals and the general perception that all you are watching is a bunch of cars driving round and round in circles – have lead to many people thinking, justifiably in some cases, that F1 is a dull spectator sport.

Indeed, in 2007 it seemed the most exciting thing was that Fernando Alonso threw his toys out of the pram because Ron Dennis wouldn’t let him beat Lewis Hamilton, and in 2008 it got saucier with Max Mosley getting excited by prostitutes who checked his hair for lice.

In amongst all that you’d got results being altered long after the race had finished, draconian penalties meted out for minor offences and minor punishments for major offences, much of which lead to one website carrying a picture intimating that all the sport’s stewards drove around in bright red Ferraris.

It’s no wonder that you’ve got to be a die-hard F1 fan to understand what’s actually happening, and because of that it doesn’t make a great sport for trying to get people in to the pub to watch it.

But yesterday afternoon, as darkness and rain fell across Britain, people gathered in my pub to see if Lewis Hamilton could – after crashes, smashes, skirmishes and court appearances – finally become the first British Formula One World Champion since Damon Hill in 1996.  Everyone held their breath as the cars teetered around the first, damp couple of corners, scared that some nefarious skulduggery might be about to take place, a mistimed tap that would just spin England’s hero out of contention and let Felipe Massa, at his home Grand Prix, win the championship instead.

And then David Coulthard got nudged, taking him out of his final ever Formula One race with barely half a lap completed, and forcing the safety car out.  From then on, it was simply a case for Lewis Hamilton to cling on to fifth place at least to guarantee the title but, as rain fell in the final few laps of the race, the title contenders had to pit for wet tyres.  As they emerged back on the track it seemed that it had all gone wrong for Hamilton – Timo Glock, the German driver racing for Toyota, hadn’t come in for wet tyres and seemed to still be able to put in good lap times.  And that meant Hamilton was sixth – one place outside of the championship zone.

Massa crossed the line first to much cheering from his home crowd and the Ferrari pit lane and you could have heard the sound of a pin dropping in the pub as we watched, aghast at the thought that – once again – it had all gone wrong for the young Brit.

Until Glock slid wide on the penultimate corner, his dry tyres no longer able to keep the car on the track as the rain fell heavier, and as Massa’s family wept with joy Hamilton snuck past the German’s car and claimed the fifth place he needed to become the thirtieth, and youngest ever, Formula One Driver’s World Champion.

With first and third places, Ferrari secured the Constructor’s Trophy for the season, but as Hamilton raced in to the record books the cheer from the pub could be heard by houses across the road.  It was almost as if England had won the World Cup.  Almost, but not quite.

But, with Sky and Setanta having managed to wrap up all the football matches with a pricing policy too restrictive for many small pubs these days, it might be time to start looking at other sports broadcast on terrestrial TV to attract the punters in.

With the BBC taking over the broadcasting of F1 next season, slick tyres making a return in 2009, alongside smaller rear wings, a British World Champion and the prospect of Ross Brawn finally giving Jenson Button a car worthy of his talents, Formula One could well be one of those sports we need to promote next season.

Well done to Ferrari for winning the Constructor’s Championship; but a big cheer for Lewis Hamilton.