Posts Tagged ‘cannon fodder’

The collapse of Lord Triesman – and potentially the British 2018 World Cup bid he was in charge of – after a fit of sexual hubris and some seriously careless talk about bribery, brought on by the less-than-sincere attentions of a younger woman, is a sorry story, but a familiar one.

This is a story that highlights the lack of investment in PR at the highest level. There’s an awful lot of bollocks talked about stories that are ‘so important’ that you can do trades with the papers on them, with shadowy publicists portrayed as Fagin types hand-rubbing and smirking in the background. This is mostly absurd – an exercise in scapegoat making.

A good publicist is counsellor and conscience – a Hollywood hybrid of shrink and media hound – and should protect their client. They have always been looking to the long game rather than the easy buck; the reinvention of the client to keep them in the limelight for years rather than to just take a cut from one hefty payment and then move on. Read the rest of this entry »

I appeared on GMTV this morning to defend Simon Cowell – not the obvious popular choice since he let the public vote decide who was to stay in the X Factor instead of condemning Jedward to the slag heap of pop ephemera history, but it really needed doing in a week of froth and fulmination.

The martyrdom of Lucie Jones to the cult of Jedward was a masterstroke on the part of Cowell; he knows that the Irish twins are box office dynamite and knows that, even if the viewing figures dip a little as a consequence of public ire, this will not prevent the X Factor from keeping its position as the highest rated entertainment show of the moment. And anyway, if it dips, it won’t stay dipped for long. Too many people will want to know who will be next to fall victim to the capricious nature of TV popularity.

The ghost of Barnum has taken full possession of Simon Cowell. “Every crowd has a silver lining,” said Barnum, and Cowell has ensured that crowds and crowds of people are talking about the X Factor, either in anger or amusement. There’s no escaping the fact that the contestants are, and always have been, cannon fodder in the hard-bitten business of making sure that Cowell keeps on winning the X Factor every year and that his coffers keep on chinking more tunefully than Jedward ever will.