Tag: tv

Well that grabbed my attention!

I follow quite a few bloggers, and indeed there is no particular connection amongst these other than the posts they write amuse, entertain or educate me.

Occasionally they just confuse me! I am sure I too am guilty of the same on occasion of leading in one direction and sending to another.

Lost?

I know have quite an esoteric following in the world of dentists, veterinary staff, cooks, travel writers and a whole raft of people whose skills or interests have not been disclosed. I just hope at least some of what I write fills a void in their blog reading life.

So, back to the blogs I read. One I read at the beginning of the week was titled..How to get more Instagram followers without posting photographs. I was slightly puzzled by this as I thought Instagram was about where to show your photographs. I haven’t used Instagram for long but evidently I have been doing the wrong thing by actually publishing photos rather than creating brand ‘me’ and promoting me. This oversight explains why I have about 20 Instagram followers rather than 20,000!

The next day however I read a blog post simply titled ‘Finally a sofa’.

the story sofa…

That resonated far more with me, as like so many people, with more time on our hands we have been trying to put them to good use, but need the tools to do that.

Over the last weeks I could have done a blog called ‘Finally hedge clippers, deckchair covering, strimmer wire and printer toner’. All of these very First World requirements and never really the kind of items that would have pleased Robinson Crusoe too much if washed up on his desert island beach. But for me better than a lifeboat, outboard motor with fuel and a map that Robinson hoped for on each tide.

life is a beach?

On the subject of ‘how to….?’, in the UK we had a childrens TV programme in the 1970’s (..and I think it returned again in the early 2000’s) called How? It never did anything on how to big up your social media presence….and even if such things had been in existence today, they would not have gone there, but it was great in that it explained how things work and in many cases how to replicate them.

One of my favourites was how toothpaste comes out with stripes!

For the non experts in toothpaste manufacturing, it has dyes positioned in the tube neck that colours the outer edge of the paste just as it exits. The TV programme actually then gave you a toothpaste recipe and then showed you how to unseal a used tube of toothpaste, fill up with your own that would then squirt out stripey toothpaste.

How do they do that?

Happy Days

PS …told you this blog was liked by Dentists!!!!

As this is a blog, all comments welcome……..

Nothing on telly…

‘There’s nothing on telly’ was often the lament when I was a 1970’s teenager. TV back then in the UK was fairly limited…it had taken until 1967 for the UK to get to have have a 3rd TV channel (BBC2).

And not being a nation that rushes things, we had to wait 26 more years until 1993 for Channel 4 to arrive.

These days there really is everything on TV…reality TV has not only gone deep into the world of music with the X Factor and The Voice; Dancing has gone global and of course dating! Things taking quite a big leap from Blind Date to Love Island and even Naked Attraction.

If you don’t live in the UK you may not be familiar with all of these programmes, but they are mostly now fairly globalised!

But moving on, also now with every conceivable pastime from baking to sowing is having a competitive series making stars out of the boy or girl next door who can run up a dress or create a culinary masterpiece better than the pro’s.

Anyway, for anybody in the least bit concerned that the TV programme makers may have run out of ideas …fear not…. Tonight I saw a trailer for the latest reality show to hit our screens in the UK… Model Railways with teams vying with each other every week to create a railway layout with features such as dams, volcanos or mountains….or whatever the judges want the challenges to be!

Now no disrespect to people with such a hobby…but my limited experience of meeting such people is that they are unlikely to attract fame, adoration or even stalking from fans.

But we live in changing times…the ‘anorak’ might just be about to have its day!

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Undercover boss

A friend of mine recently had an unexpected TV appearance which reminded me of my own similar situation.

Some years ago I was employed as Operations Director for a company…Operations Director can mean many things but in my case I had responsibility for anything in the company that didn’t quite fit into the realm of my colleagues in Finance, Sales, Marketing etc. who had more specific portfolios. Anyway when our company was invited to take part in this TV programme I had to manage the logistics of it being undercover ie explaining away why we had a film crew in the building and also all the practicalities of filming and privacy.

Somewhat surprisingly the first major challenge given to me by the production company was ‘could I find a local company to deliver 20 bacon sandwiches at 7.00am on each morning we were filming?’

When we told our staff that filming was taking place (we just said it was a documentary about training and career opportunities in our industry) we of course gave people the opportunity to specifically opt out. Out of 100 or so staff we only had one formal and very, very definite opt out…and when given the details why this person wanted to remain incognito it made sense. It also actually made me realise that I had a sheltered life compared to this individual who really did not want to their location be known!

For the rest of the staff although there were protests of ‘ooh, don’t let the cameras near me’, the interesting thing was our normally very casually (but always presentable) team suddenly started paying a lot of attention to hair, make up and style…and that was just the guys!

My planned role in all of this though was strictly behind camera. But as fate would have it, one of our directors planned for the famous boardroom scene that you always get when the board express surprise and shock at the ceo’s decision to go undercover, went sick. So I was stand in and then for reasons of continuity was stuck in!

I didn’t quite get the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised us all but I did have a few sound bites that haunt me to this day!

That programme was shown about 8 years ago but somewhat bizarrely, I was in Holland some 5 years after the event working in a completely different industry and meeting with one of our customers who in the inimitable Dutch way very casually mentioned..oh by the way, I saw you on TV last night! …and then just carried on chatting … More coffee?

So perhaps Andy Warhol was right!

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