You're Fired!

Confirmation has come that America's biggest television commercial will finally be pulled from the airwaves, with NBC dropping the reality TV show 'The Apprentice'.









After falling ratings on the wrong side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump's televised job interviews have been axed after six series, three of which have been shown back here in Britain.

It's in contrast to the same show fronted by Sir Alan Sugar in the UK, which has been a massive ratings success, with last year's contest taking a 27% audience share but that's probably down to how much better the UK version is.

The problem with US shows is the gross overuse of product placement. Friends was notorious for it, the American idol judges sit at their desk with bright red Coca-Cola glasses and The Apprentice is also up there as one of the worst culprits in the book.
You only have to look at the not-in-the-slightest-subtle plugs for a host of multinational companies to realise that you are watching a one-hour collection of commercial breaks. Only iRobot and Casino Royale were more obvious.
The UK version is sometimes criticised on similar grounds, even though product placement is forbidden on UK television, but the instances are limited (even if you are able to read the web address on the side of Sir Alan's rented helicopter)

Part of the problem is blamed squarly at TiVo, that TV recording system that only the American's bought, for encouraging the product placement rise.
The one perk with TiVo in the US though is that it can remove the commercial breaks, giving the viewer an ad-free experience without the need to pause and re-start the VCR. That function in the UK wasn't offered. The commercial broadcasters, understandably, refused to support the system because of the already stringent advertising laws.
As a result we quickly realised that paying £300 and then £10 a month for TiVo was a stupid idea and within 3 years, TiVo left us alone to sign up to Sky+.

I've always been a supporter of the BBC and it's public funding. Anyone who isn't would be advised to compare the two shows and still maintain the same opinion. The American's do mke some good TV shows, Friends, Scrubs, The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy; the list goes on. They also make some decent TV commercials. Unfortunately, it's sometimes quite hard to tell the difference.

The Atlantic is not wide enough

After buying out the Salford Quays Buccaneers, the Birmingham Villans and the Liverpool Stealers, the American's are plotting their next move in the mission to takeover British Soccerball.




The Football League will meet to discuss the proposal of abolishing "draws" from the Football League.

Instead of having a 1-1 stalemate with the points being shared, the proposal is to hold a penalty shoot-out should the teams be deadlocked after 90 minutes. Both teams would still be guaranteed the point, just as they are now, but the winners of the penalty shoot-out will take home an extra point.

You don't need me to tell you which country this crackpot theory has come from.

The supporters of the idea claim that such a system would make games more open and exciting, which would be no bad thing, had this not been the most senseless way of going about it.

Take the current system. At the moment it's not uncommon for teams to play out for a point against better opposition. It's not nice to watch but it's a necessary evil of the modern game. Now take the new idea, which is essentially encouraging these same tactics by potentially doubling the points on offer to the side using negative tactics.

And it gets worse when you here noises that this scheme would involve the "American style" shoot-out. Under the Yank's arse-backwards system, the action doesn't take place with a single strike from the infamous 12-yard spot, but way back to the half-way line. Said player than has 10 seconds to dribble unopposed to the goalmouth and attempt to score. It's a stupid system and the man who invented it should locked away in a dark room in the interests of public safety.

Remember those Budweiser adverts that were doing the rounds a few years back....

..how much of a joke did you think they actually were?

Welcome to America

The United States of America: Land of democracy, choice and freedom of expression.








That is of course, provided that you aren't a homosexual democrat living in Alabama who isn't partial to Country & Western or Nascar, as proved by the BBC's brilliant Top Gear programme.



Now for a bit of partiality, Jeremy Clarkson is to Anglo-American relations what Margret Thatcher was to trade unions. The programme has told us time and time again that the Americans can't build cars. They can't go around corners, they have stupid buttons in stupid places and their interiors are made of of plastic thinner than tissue paper.
Add to that the multitude of jokes about fat people and gun-wielding manics, and you can see that Clarkson and Co are hardly the greatest diplomats.

So when they drive around the deep south with $1000 cars emblazoned with offensive slogans, they got exactly the reaction they wanted. They made the locals look like the inbred, small minded fools that so many movies portray them to be and the producers made a very good programme whilst doing it.

Sunday's episode was perhaps the funniest Top Gear ever broadcast. The programme is often criticsed from various quarters, those who complain they only show an interest in £120,000+ super cars, the tree huggers who dislike anything more technologically advanced than an Amish butter churner and those who claim the show is obsessed with speed, concerns that reared their head again after presenter Richard Hammonds miraculous escape from a 280mph crash in York.

For 50 minutes, the show was basically three lads mucking about with cars and having a good laugh, which is probably the main appeal of Top Gear. Yes it has a role as a consumer focused programme and does cover plenty of "normal" cars in it's programming, but it's that 'laddish' approach that makes the programme so original and is the very reason why 5-6m people watch it every week.

But despite the jokes and pranks, the drive through a completely destroyed New Orleans, fully 12 months after Katrina had blown though, saw the shows serious side and it was a fitting touch to give their cars away to the less fortunate.

Yes, the show has it's critics. The presenters might prefer to test drive an Aston Martin rather than a Hyundai Accent, yes they might not like speed cameras but it's still a thoroughly enjoyable programme and long may it continue.

It's Football, but not as we know it

You don't need me to tell you that David Beckham's move to Los Angeles Galaxy is the biggest sports story of the week.








After being left out of the England squad and finding himself on the fringes of the Real Madrid first team, Golden Balls has decided to bend it in America for the next five years.

Today's newspapers have picked up on the small matter that the former England captain will become the best paid sportsman in the world, with a selection focusing on the fact that he snubbed numerous offers from English and European clubs who, in all honesty, could get nowhere near the financial package that the LA Galaxy and MLS have put together.

In truth, it shows how different sport is in the US compared to elsewhere. In Europe, we're just getting to grips with the fact that sport is now a commodity, sports clubs are businesses with a desire to make profit and that clubs no longer had the social responsibility that we once perceived they had.
It used to be that the owner of the local football club was a sheep-skin wearing, cigar chain smoking local factory owner on an ego trip. Today football clubs are run by a consortium of wealthy businessmen looking to sell tickets to other wealthy businessmen - and we hate it. We hate the fact that a season ticket can cost the equivalent of six months rent, we hate travelling across the country at some unearthly hour because a game has been moved for television coverage and we hate sticking a dish on the side of our house and paying some Australian bloke £50 a month to watch football on TV.

In the America though, it's a whole different ball game. Sport stateside has always been about the dollar. Fans in the UK were in uproar when Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes, proclaiming the death of lower league football and dubbing the new MK Dons "Franchise FC". Stateside, it's common practice. Club, sorry, franchise owners have commonly moved teams across the country looking for the next captive market. Once they've bled that market dry, they'll move to the next town where the mayor is willing to build a state-of-the-art 80,000 all seater stadium.
Even college gridiron is huge. It's unthinkable to think in this country that a clash between Leeds Metropolitan and Preston Polytechnic would attract crowds surpassing those for Manchester United vs Chelsea, but in the US they'd be calling a crisis meeting if that weren't the case.

And that's why Beck's is going to the US. What he'll actually draw from Galaxy for kicking a pig's bladder around a field will be small fry (in a sporting sense anyway). The difference will be made up from exploiting 'Brand Beckham'.
Image rights for a man like Beckham are huge regardless of where you are. Take that image to a nation that lives for celebrity and you've got a massive earning potential. The Beckham's have known that for years. The various pre-season tours to US, the MTV Awards apperance and the Soccer academy have all been efforts to raise his stock in the land of opportunity and LA Galaxy's season ticket sales less than 24 hours after the announcement are testament to that.

There is no denying that the critics will pounce on Beckham for this move. To make the move from one of Real Madrid's 'Galácticos' to a Galaxian in a sport which registers into insignifcance in it's respective country smacks of putting cash before credibility.
But Beckham has realised that his days at the top are numbered. He is making a move to a place where he will be adore just as equally as he was in his days in Manchester and Madrid.

Yes, it may well be a marketing move by the MLS and LA, but that probably says more about the attitude to sport in the US than it does about Beckham.

Don't Have Fun This Christmas or You'll Make us Mad

As millions of Britons hit the high street this December in the run-up to Christmas, Her Majesty's Customs Officers can't help but step in and spoil the party.



Whilst most of us will head to the local City Centre or clog up the Ring Roads queuing for the car park to gargantuan out-of-town shopping centres, thousands of others will leave Blightly alltogether and head to the States.

Not only will they take advantage to the favourable tax rates (as low as 5% in New York against 17.5% in the UK), but they are now encouraged by the fact that a £1 coin will get you almost $2 ($1.98 to be precise). That gives us Brits massive spending power on the other side of the Atlantic.

But the Customs officers aren't happy. Not content impounding cars from cross-channel ferry "booze-cruises" and in some cases, selling the vehicle without the owners knowledge to pay for an alcohol and tobacco duty bill that has already been legally paid within the European Union, they now take great enjoyment in pointing out that we aren't allowed to stock our suitcases with cut-price iPods, laptops and designer jeans from across the pond.

The legalities of it are that any item with a value in excess of £145 (although there is no definition whether that 'value' is retail or trade value) is subject to tax when you land at the UK airport.
There are obviously ways around this. For instance, a laptop computer, camcorder or iPod can easily be disguised as something you took with you in the first place, provided that the customs officer doesn't stumble across the packaging in another suitcase but it's hardly practical to go opening Christmas presents you bought for your granddaughter or teenage son.

Most of us would hope that common sense would prevail and that customs officers at Heathrow will realise that a 58-year old woman with an iPod and pair of Levi's for her grandson isn't a major threat to the economic stability of the nation but then again, perhaps we have too much faith in them.