Posts Tagged ‘simon cowell’

It’s great to see that the fairy godmother of Edinburgh publicity, Liz Smith, has won the Bank of Scotland Herald Archangel Award. It has taken more than three decades for her to get the pat on the back that she so richly deserves, given the amount of help she has given others for so many years; some justice for the old school, who tend to be overlooked in the internet age.

There’s a proliferation of websites emerging at the moment, offering emergency PR advice for Edinburgh, but what use are these with ten days of the Festival left to play with? A show or act needing to get reviews needs help from an experienced publicist. Of course people need to start somewhere, but recognition for Liz Smith will hopefully highlight the need for both beginner publicists and producers and acts to seek out the x factor brought by experience if they are going to make any of their incursions into digital or traditional media work and work well.

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As the true scale of the disaster brought about by the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history becomes clear, it’s good to see that the British tabloids are supporting the humanitarian aid relief by giving acres of coverage – to the aftermath of the first episode of X Factor. Good to know they have their priorities in such well-oiled working order and are so keenly supporting the disaster zone that is the early rounds of Simon Cowell’s show.

There’s a deal of speculation about how long Fabio Capello is to stay in the job as England’s manager – a statement was even put out before the decisive group match suggesting that his job was in jeopardy.

It seems likely that he will go, and soon, despite a few bullish headlines suggesting that we should blame the players rather than the manager. Capello’s struggles with English and his authoritarian regime will not stand him in good stead. And he is not an accessible man, which is utterly essential in a job like this.

Look at Simon Cowell, a man who is subjected to equally rigorous scrutiny. Despite employing the services of Max Clifford Read the rest of this entry »

It strikes me that all is not well in Britain’s Got Talent, that something is falling apart. This year, the show opened on 10.6 million viewers (a 44% share). By May it was on a 43%. After four weeks in, it is currently running down 5% on last year, which opened with 11 million viewers. The year before it opened on 10 million viewers (a 42% share). There is a sense that it may have peaked in the wake of Susan Boyle – bear in mind that the 2008 season final was watched by 14 million whilst in 2009 16 million tuned in for the live show and an astonishing 17.3 million watched the final results show.

It doesn’t help that this latest series has seen all the same clichés spilling out onto our screens once again. Too many of the same old freaks are attempting to ‘live the dream’. There’s Janey Cutler, who is clearly is in line to be the next attempted SuBo; there’s a comeback kid in the shape of the drummer who was awful last time but in the running again because everybody loves an underdog; there’s the same old ‘outrageous’ acts that Simon can make a pretence of being turned on by.
Read the rest of this entry »

I took part in the Cambridge Union debate last night, arguing for the proposition ‘This House Believes that Reality TV Represents Everything Wretched about Britain Today’. I underestimated the space, at how steeped in grandeur it is, and found myself more than a little nervous.

The debate was well attended; over two thirds full. Joining me to argue for the proposition were Max Clifford and the retiring Union president, Jonathan Laurence. Opposing the motion were Times journalist Hugo Rifkind, showbiz writer Zoe Griffin and James McQuillan, who appeared on The Apprentice.

The other speakers last night went for a comic interpretation of the motion. My technique was more serious-minded, more Old Testament – Quentin Tarantino fans might have deduced I was trying to mimic Samuel L Jackson’s famous biblical Pulp Fiction speech. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent a little of last night, as the festive season faded and a whole new year and the return to work hove into view, watching the latest iteration of Celebrity Big Brother wipe it’s arse across my TV screen. As the usual array of desperate people, half-arsed film heroes and one hit blips on the music radar began to settle into the Big Brother house, in much the same fashion as their predecessors had last year, I got to thinking – is 2010 going to be any different from 2009? Will we have ANYTHING new in the coming months, rather than just a retread of everything that’s gone before? As we seep into January, it seems not. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe McElderry has lost out to Rage Against the Machine – it seems that a significant proportion of the British record-buying public really have turned on Simon Cowell and given him a festive slap under the miseltoe.

It’s an upset, but its significance lies in what the power of the Internet might achieve next. Motivational balladry versus an old, shouty agit pop record should cause a few smiles and quite a few more spluttering grannies in front of Top of the Pops on Christmas morning, but it won’t change the world. But the methods to get said agit pop record to number one could just help change the world.

Any number of ad agencies and PR companies say the understand the Internet and all its uses. This is little more than posturing; if we’ve learned anything from the net, it’s to expect the unexpected and that no-one can truly predict what uses people will put it to and what they can achieve if they put their minds to the task in hand.

If the Internet can be harnessed in a similar manner behind a cause like cutting CO2, behind the Climate Conference in Copenhagen or whatever comes next, then there is a chance that real changes can be made in 2010 and beyond without people running up huge carbon footprints going on a protest holiday. Playing with the charts is all very well, but the real business that social networking-savvy people need to address is the process of using this small victory to springboard significant changes on the world and fight the welter of greenwashing, disinformation and distrust.

Perhaps this is all a romantic dream – but if Rage Against the Machine’s trite but pleasing net-powered chart victory can be translated into actual societal change through like-minded people working together in the coming years, then it will have been worth it.

If PR firms, ad agencies and people eager to make a difference don’t get it together and work on making this happen, then the military industrial complexes will – they are, without doubt as I write this, working on ways of utilising the net for their own ends.

Trivial as the chart battle of Christmas 2009 may be, its knock on effect could be real, organised changes made via the power of the Internet. That’s my hope for 2010…

It’s been interesting to be following pre-Christmas sales on the internet for the last three or four days, for two reasons. One reason is personal – my book, The Fame Formula, has leapt up the Amazon sales chart by several thousand places in the last three days. The other reason is that I’ve been watching Rage Against the Machine’s 17 year old track, Killing in the Name Of, consistently outselling the X Factor winner’s song – an instantly forgettable motivational ballad from the Hannah Montana movie – thanks to the Facebook campaign set up by a couple bored with the ubiquity of Simon Cowell’s vision of music.

I have a theory that the two are connected, intellectually at the least. The Fame Formula is, under the surface, an antidote to fame, a prick in the bubble of modern celebrity. I am certain that the same sort of people who are downloading Killing in the Name Of are buying The Fame Formula simply because they are tired of prefabrication and relentless hype on a foundation of sand.

The Fame Formula examines the degredation of fame carefully and uses examples from history to expose the weak foundations that modern celebrity has been built on, where talent has been hoovered out leaving only a husk of toxic fame. The book celebrates the icons of the past who built, with the assistance of canny publicists, a lasting fame propogated by extraordinary talent; it also offers a view on how to achieve that today. It does not say the past is better – the aim of the book is (as it is with the Rage Against the Machine campaign) to offer alternatives for the future, using great moments from the past as a basis, a springboard.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people wanting to overturn the Cowell vision of pop were buying the book to stock up on ideas. At last there seems to be a consensus of opinion agreeing with George Santayana, who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There seems to be a hunger for using the past to positively influence the future, at least in popular culture. If this is the case – and I hope it is – I’d say (with a little bias, admittedly) that The Fame Formula is a good place to start looking for ideas to adapt from.

If Rage Against the Machine’s refrain, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”, is the sound of Christmas this year, I hope people take courage from it and use social media and networking in ever more creative cultural (and social and political) interventions in the coming years. And if my book can help it happen, all the better.

The suppression of information takes many guises, I’m beginning to realise. Many guises, but at the heart, the old ways of doing things still rule. Someone pulls strings and the neck of the bag tightens.

Take, for a start, Hillary’s Secret War, a book detailing the ways in which a rightwing think-tank’s output on the internet was allegedly suppressed by Hillary Clinton during the Clinton regime, which has just been brought to my attention. According to the author, a Richard Poe, Clinton protected her husband’s regime rigorously. “Hillary’s attack machine bullied,” he writes, “blackmailed, terrorized, and intimidated every serious investigator, from journalists to federal prosecutors and independent counsel, until they simply gave up. In many cases, Hillary’s operatives carried out these attacks openly and in full sight of major media. No one blew the whistle. No one cried foul. No one stopped her.”

Poe describes himself as part of ‘the New Underground’: “By the New Underground, I mean the growing network of dissident journalists on cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet. In the course of our labors, we stumble, now and then, upon what Patrick Henry might have called ‘painful truths’.”

The book came out in 2004, but – whether or not you subscribe to Poe’s political leanings – his description of the ways in which information is suppressed rings true enough. There are many ways of suppressing – and getting out – a story. Only this morning I was reading Guido Fawkes’ Twitter feed, which suggested that the MOD were attempting to suppress footage of troops in Afghanistan refusing to shake the hand of Gordon Brown – shortly afterwards, he wrote that a source had confirmed the existence of footage and he was trying to acquire it. This is the New Underground in action – although Poe ascribes it to a rightwing think-tank, it is much more a bipartisan group of journalists and bloggers who won’t let anything lie in the face of suppression.

What, then, of Copenhagen? The internet is fascinated with the ongoing situation around the Climate Change Conference and is awash with information and misinformation. The net coverage is an ongoing fight between painful truths and distractions. The leaking of the East Anglian stats has given all concerned a personal wire service to the onslaught of information in all its variant states of truthfulness.

What many fail to understand is that the format is usually the winner. However many gatekeepers Hillary Clinton is alleged to have set up for the web, however often the MOD try and hide the fact that the troops don’t like an unpopular leader, however much obfuscation, argument and endless counter-argument surrounds Climate Change, the internet – that most flexible of formats – will always win through.

You just have to look at the X Factor for proof. It’s not Joe McElderry who’s won the X Factor, it’s the format. It’s Simon Cowell, who owns the format. The only difference between the X Factor and the internet is that the TV talent show is the sort of Mogadon for the Nation that allows people to suppress news from Copenhagen, merely because you can bury anything on page 20 or in an article on the internet if you have enough articles about tearful contestants – who’ve been slugging it out in a glitterball for the past three months – surrounding the story.

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.