Posts Tagged ‘jedward’

The Media Buying world is clearly in need of some PR help to drag it out of the 1980s. I found myself reading, jaw dropping to the table, this Media Week article by MediaCom’s Claudine Collins. It’s as if it had been ghosted by Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris and Helen Fielding – it reads like an unholy alliance between Bridget Jones’s Diary and Nathan Barley.

Snippets like “Later, the Telegraph’s party goes to dinner at the Goring Hotel in Victoria, where I sit next to Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 – it is a real-life James Bond moment” and “Back in the gym for 5.45am where my personal trainer Gary nearly kills me – but luckily he is gorgeous to look at so I don’t mind” really set the tone, if a tone can be found in amongst the slew of names of the successful, rich and famous. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you overdosed on the X Factor? Are the opinions of the judges getting you down? Have you felt like venting your feelings about the loss of your favourite contestant? Did Danyl’s departure in the semi-finals really get your goat? Did Lucie losing out to Jedward rile you to the point of despair? Or are you simply sick of the whole ‘poptastic’ shebang?

If the answer to any of these questions is “YES”, Borkowski has a couple of tasty slices of satirical goodness to ease your rage, two fine diversions from a toxic weekend of TV carnage. In a burst of pre-Christmas generosity, we present The Exterminating Factor, a neat-but-twisted X rated game that allows the player an opportunity to vent their destructive feelings. All within the bounds of legality and common sense, of course – we are in no way suggesting that the game’s scenario should be re-enacted in real life.

You see, this twisted little game allows the player to shoot virtual nails into the disembodied heads of Simon Cowell, Danni Minogue, Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh – and what would there be on TV worth being ranted and fulminated about if The Exterminator Factor were taken too seriously and acted upon in real life?

Better just to play the game and feel that shiver of nervous satisfaction as the first virtual nail strikes and two smaller judges’ heads burst from Simon Cowell’s smiling face. Or gasp as the dimpled smile of a tiny Cheryl Cole disappears forever in a hail of virtual nails.

Based on the gaming classic Asteroids, The Exterminating Factor is the perfect way of letting loose all your pent up frustrations at the 21st Century’s premier talent contest cum soap opera. Click on the picture to access the game.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Borkowski also presents a sharp, satirical poem for all the pacifists and non-gamers out there who are tired of celebrity for the sake of celebrity; of popularity contests masquerading as talent contests; who cannot bear to see the world and its wife doing everything in its power to be famous.

The Sleb’s Prayer, by the remarkable poet Adam Horovitz, features music based on a sample by great 60s garage rock band, The Groupies. The track has been wrapped up in Mel Rodiq’s stunning video in the style of magazines like Heat and OK. You can see it below.

Jedward may finally be gone from the X Factor, but that’s no reason to expect that they have automatically dipped straight off the fame radar. For all of you wondering why and how they lasted so long on the X Factor, I contributed to a couple of articles in the Independent and the Telegraph looking into the phenomenon, the manipulation and the plundering of the Jedward brand.

To read the Independent article, click here. To read the Telegraph article, click here.

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.

I received an interesting call yesterday, in the wake of the surprising X Factor showdown between Miss Frank and Danyl Johnson on Sunday, from a mysterious man with a social networking plan and a dream to undo Simon Cowell. He wanted to meet me to discuss his plans for guerilla tactics to destabilise the X Factor format, by pushing the Irish duo John and Edward – those twinned Frankenstein’s PR monsters who are basically John Sergeant’s better looking Irish cousins, phenomenon-wise (they may be able to dance, but they cannot sing) – into winning the show at the expense of actual singers, and how my social media knowledge could help him achieve this.

Now, I’ve taken calls from all sorts of mavericks and loons with endless harebrained schemes over the years, wanting to do crazy things: someone keen to promote a troupe of performing pit bulls not long after a spate of dangerous dog stories; a man who wanted to jump the Thames in a Routemaster bus; an Australian promoter who wanted to tour the UK with a cannibal tribe demonstrating various rituals including a simulated human feast; a man who claimed he received messages from God and claimed he had the solution to drug peddlers; various musicals including one on the life of Ted Bundy and one about Ed Gein, not to mention CIA: The Musical; Ladies on Call a musical about a famous Hollywood brothel; an exhibition of naked pictures of various Hollywood names before they were famous; a woman who wanted to promote Pagan Christmas; live trepanning on stage; a website protesting against fluoridisation called braindeadbutwhatgreatteeth.com; a new Christian group that wanted to reach students called Slouching Toward Bethlehem and a slew of weird science groups.

I’ll admit that I was intrigued by this latest maverick, despite being a little sceptical of his plans. He kept things strictly enigmatic – he wanted to meet in a dingy and anonymous Shoreditch pub for the discussion. I declined the meeting – if I were younger and crazier, I might have considered meeting up with him and possibly taking his plans on, but the commercial operation of business need to come first in these recessionary times

It’s worth noting that there are certainly activists out there who are skilled at co-opting television for publicity and image-making purposes in a way that most moguls in the Simon Cowell mold just don’t understand. Also, bear in mind that, this morning, The Sun reported that “some viewers complained their votes for other acts were accidentally allocated to John and Edward when they called the voting lines” in their article about John and Edward’s triumph in the X Factor weekend phone polls. Suddenly there is reasonable cause to doubt my initial feeling that I was being scammed.

So it would seem, thanks to certain details let slip in the course of our conversation and the report in this morning’s Sun, that the maintenance of the Jedward vote is due to my mystery man. If his destabilisation gains traction, there are interesting times ahead for the X Factor and a number of talented performers who may yet be steamrollered by the tone-deaf twins. As to who this guerrilla is: I’m still young and crazy enough to not want to reveal his name. I don’t want to spoil his fun. It’ll be interesting to see if he or Simon Cowell gets to be master of the X Factor universe…