Call centres

Ofcom’s plans to fine companies whose silent, automated calls annoy people are amusing for two reasons. Firstly, they’re all but unenforceable, and clearly just a PR job designed (successfully) to get Ofcom some headlines, and secondly, they call to mind one of the finest mp3s around. This was a far from silent experience for all concerned…

Of course, call centres annoy people, but we should spare a thought for the poor bastards who have to work there. Hopefully, listening to Peter B will help you achieve just that.

The poor boy only wants to speak to Mr or Mrs Carter, and the first question he hears is, “What the hell do you want?” Then Mr Carter (we assume) repeats his less than perfectly friendly query, and young Peter B (if that is his name) begins his spiel.

“We’re calling today to ensure you’re getting the best value and service. BT have got–”

Then, it gets worse. Or better, depending on how you look at it…

Mr Carter is not happy. Perhaps it’s that ‘ensure’. (A dead giveaway – living, breathing humans say ‘make sure’. Only scripts written in management-speak say ‘ensure’.) Perhaps it’s the stilted delivery of the young man he has already so utterly wrong-footed. He knows without a doubt, though, that an unfortunate in a call centre has disturbed him…

“Shove this fucking phone call up your pissing arse and get me off this. This is an ex-directory phone and that includes fucking British Telecom.”

The English were once a race noted for their reserve. Now, we are famed across the globe for being the rudest bastards imaginable – and here is the evidence. You can just hear the young man say ‘OK’. Mr Carter is not placated by this.

“We pay the fucking bills. Now get the fuck off my phone line. Do you understand?”

Peter manages “I understand, sir–”, but clearly feels he must persist, or risk disapproval from those above him. You can hear in his tone his intention to finish the script. This is not well received.

“WELL, MAKE SURE IT’S FUCKING WRITTEN DOWN, AND DON’T RING ME AGAIN, OTHERWISE I’LL COME AND WRING YOUR SCRAWNY FUCKING NECK, AND I MEAN PHYSICALLY. DO YOU COMPREHEND?”

Peter says he does. It seems unlikely, in the face of such elaborately explained hostility, that anyone would not. At this point, you or I might think that Peter has done enough, that he could legitimately end the call now and face no repercussions. If so, you or I have clearly not worked anywhere in which you have to ask permission to visit the toilet. So – in a moment that could serve as a dictionary definition of the word ‘hapless’ – he returns to his prepared statement. “All it takes, sir, is a couple of seconds–”

“I TOLD YOU TO GO AND FUCK OFF. DO YOU COMPREHEND?”

It didn’t seem possible that Mr Carter could shout louder than he did before. How wrong we were. Finally, poor Peter has suffered enough to feel able to end the call. “Yep, no problems.”

Mr Carter is not a man who goes in for placating much. “GOOD. DON’T EVER RING AGAIN.”

Now this is where Peter puts away childish things and becomes a man. A giant. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair: “Right. Thank you for your time then, sir. Thank you for using BT.”

Even after having a plainly unwell person bellowing obscenities at him for a full 40 seconds, he finishes the call with the phrase he’s been told to use. George Cross winners have been less heroic than this.

The call ends. There are four seconds of silence, in which our man takes what is probably the longest break in his day, before an audible ‘phew’, and then: “Jesus Christ. Diane, could you do me a favour and listen to that last call for me, please?”

And then he is gone. You may have the largest, newest pod on the market, with gigs and gigs of space, millions of songs and videos, but if you don’t have this, you are bereft.

Download Peter B. You know you want to.

Posh tosh

Aparrently, James Blunt’s mum is incensed at the harsh treatment he has received from critics for ‘his background’. (I’m amused that he changed the spelling of his (posh) name to avoid confusing the rest of us – hoi polloi, the great unwashed? Insert self-description of your choice here.)

Critics (worth reading) always hate that which is popular, but in the case of Blunt, it seems more than usually reasonable. Her implication that artistic work should be judged on merit, though, is entirely correct. So, let’s do that…

Blunt’s, er, masterwork, You’re Beautiful, covers similar ground to an old Divine Comedy track, Commuter Love (from 1998’s Fin De Siècle, the album which gave him his biggest hit, National Express). Both concern a young man using public transport who sees an attractive woman and fails to speak to her. Both are by men from well-off backgrounds. (Neil Hannon’s dad is senior clergy.) Neither man sings of anything so grubby as a bus (unlike Paul McCartney on A Day In The Life). Hannon’s protagonist is waiting for a train, while Blunt’s – presumably in a calculated attempt to appeal to American listeners – is on the subway, rather than the tube.

(Perhaps it’s their shared background which prevents them acting on their sudden passions. Contrast both songs with Hannon’s countrymen The Undertones. Blunt says he has a plan at first, but then admits: “I will never be with you”. Hannon refuses to “take any risks” by talking to the woman. Not for them the cocky certainty that they’ll soon be enjoying “teenage kicks right through the night”. What could Feargal and the boys have meant?)

We discover three things about the woman in Blunt’s song: that she is beautiful, that she smiles at him and that she is with a man. It is the biographical detail in Hannon’s song – and the fact that it tells us more about the narrator than the object of his affections – that gives the song its wit. (“She reads novels by French authors with loose morals / She can do no wrong” for example.)

To be fair, Hannon probably finds it easier to write like this. He has the luxury of knowing well his loyal if less than enormous fanbase. The vast majority of them are women like this, or men who fancy women like this. He can afford to be self-consciously clever.

Blunt, not knowing as he began his career who his fans might be, took fewer risks, and apparently ended up with a lot more fans. His lyrics, even if one tries to be scrupulously fair, are simplistic to the point of idiotic. “My life is brilliant. / My love is pure. / I saw an angel. / Of that I’m sure.” A number of obvious questions spring to mind. ‘If his life is brilliant, why is the song so regretful?’ is just the first. And as for, “My love is pure”… Please.

Some would say that lyrics are unimportant. The tune’s the thing, apparently. If You’re Beautiful was a dancefloor-filler, that might stand up, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone being inspired by this ‘tune’ to do more with their partner than just stand still.

Ultimately, this is about minority and majority tastes. Blunt’s work is bland. The Divine Comedy is (are?) accused of pretension. Neither song is a major work, but Hannon’s is complete and detailed – a vignette to Blunt’s rough sketch. One shouldn’t blame Blunt as much as the record company, which knew easy success when it saw it. What anyone planning a career in the arts can learn from You’re Beautiful is: if you make it average enough, people will buy it in their millions. (Long and successful careers have been built on this knowledge. Ask Madonna.)

If that is intellectual snobbery, so be it, but the point is not that we should all be listening, of an evening, to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time. (Look at that title. I really don’t recommend it, and I’m a BBC4 addict.) If you work for a living – or, god help you, look after small children – you want to relax in the evening. No, there’s no reason why you should sit through something by Harrison Birtwistle in your downtime, or watch a movie by Lars Von Trier. But we can do better than (for example) James Blunt or – god help us all – Matt Cardle.

Drama crime

If you like that police procedural hour from 9-10pm, you may be wondering this week whether CSI has jumped the shark. (You may, of course, believe that it did so long ago, that it is as nothing without Gil Grissom.) What is surely not in doubt is that Silent Witness has long since made that short journey across the back of the aquatic predator into the land of stupid.

Of course, it was never realistic. As forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton rather splendidly remarked in the Grauniad only the other day, the programme “bears about as much resemblance to reality as a badger does to a stealth bomber”. Home Office pathologists don’t roam the country solving crimes, we know that, but this week’s episode – while it might have worked as a thriller – was, without question, ridiculous. There was room for a small army of British actors with terrible eastern European accents to leap through the holes in this script.

Dr Harry Cunningham, square-jawed though he may be, is not Jason Bourne. Tonight, though, he’s planning to come back from the dead. This isn’t a spoiler. It’s cynicism. Did you see any faces after the shot where Harry looks into the gun barrel? Trust me, Harry got the gun. (If all else fails, search online for a summary of next week’s episode. “Harry and Nikki investigate a shooting…”)

Of course, one could always not watch. (Thank god for box sets of Weeds and Dexter.) But, when someone – a l-o-o-o-o-ng time ago now – has done the character work, you can’t help investing in the characters. When someone’s gone to the trouble to make them believable, you can’t help going back, hoping, for example, that Dr Nikki Alexander might do something more interesting than swish her hair about or widen her eyes at Harry.

Comparisons with CSI are perhaps unfair. Being set in Vegas surely helps when the show is looking for increasingly outlandish ways in which a person can depart this life. Perhaps CSI didn’t jump the shark last week, because death by shark in a hotel pool seems quite reasonable in that town. The law of diminishing returns still applies, though. In Grissom’s day, he was by far the most interesting character of the three CSI show leads.

As a child, he simply decided one day to start dissecting the dead animals he found near his home. (Serial killers are apparently often cruel and violent to animals in childhood, graduating to humans when they come of age.) Grissom is fascinated by what brought about the end of these animals, and by death itself. He also races cockroaches, is friends with S&M specialist Lady Heather, knows sign language and quotes Edgar Allen Poe (when he isn’t alluding to Shakespeare – or even the Bible, remarkably, given that science is his god). When the show franchised, the character traits became off-the-shelf. (Caine was driven to become a police officer because his mother was murdered when he was a child. Mac’s wife died in the World Trade Centre.)

Dr Ray isn’t as well-developed a character as Grissom, of course, but he is played by Laurence Fishburne. Even Gary Sinise can’t compete. (And as for David Caruso… A sexagenarian of my acquaintance remarks that ‘hands-on-hips-Horatio is on’ when CSI: Miami starts up.)

And Silent Witness? Get Harry and Nikki together and/or bump them all off. It would be a mercy…

Let’s get to business

My first instinct was to despise Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but I read to the end of the article, and realised her work was more nuanced than I initially thought. Still, it’s a useful insight. Not into parenting, but into today’s subject, the corporate world. (This particular sideways look at culture isn’t on books or films, but about an aspect of wider human culture.)

I was line-managed for a time by a Chinese-Malaysian woman, and if she was brought up in something like this way, it explains why she had all the management skills and natural human warmth of a storm trooper. Amy Chua – having the intelligence to become a law professor – is, eventually, sensible enough to know that perfection is not attainable. My former colleague did not have the capacity to grasp this. What she did have was the drive to aim high. Some do, and some don’t.

I used to work in banking. (I used to work in the tobacco industry, too, but these days, that causes nowhere near as many sharp intakes of breath as the previous sentence.) I was in communications, though. I never got near a six-figure bonus; I just met the kind of people who did. The big subject of the week – in the UK at least (some people are rather more concerned with their homes being washed away) – is the fact that these people are going to keep on getting vast bonuses, just as they did before.

Arrogant bankers, eh? Cut off from the real world in their chauffeur-driven limos, and blissfully ignorant of people’s real anger about this? Well, yes and no. I’ve met a few senior bank executives, and they were, to a man, well… men, for a start, but also pretty damn sure of themselves. You don’t get to be a captain of industry without a frankly unhealthy level of self-belief. These are people who hear the phrase ‘Masters of the Universe’ and, rather than thinking it damning, decide they quite like the sound of it. It’s said that Roman emperors who’d enjoyed a great victory would parade through the streets receiving the people’s cheers and salutes, but would also employ a slave to whisper in their ear, “Remember you are human”. These guys don’t have that – so, straight away, you can argue that they have a shakier grip on reality than Caligula.

They don’t have slaves, of course. They have wage slaves. Last time I was in the job centre, they suggested I might like to apply for a post as a cashier at HBOS. At £13,567, it wouldn’t even cover the inevitable childcare costs. HBOS is part of the Lloyds Banking Group now, and their chief executive Eric Daniels is apparently set to receive a £2 million golden handshake when he steps down in March plus another £2m in shares. (One assumes that the £74,000 non-executive directorship of BT was pocket money.) When anyone at the bank I worked at voiced concerns about executive pay, our head of department liked to tell us just how few people there were in the world who could run a company of this size. True enough, and no-one believes they shouldn’t earn more than us grunts – it’s the size of the gap that troubles us.

And yet… Who said these guys could carry on as before? Er, we did. When governments across the world bailed the banks out last year, they were acting on public opinion. No-one wanted financial meltdown, because we naturally feared for our savings and pensions. We’re angry that they were put in jeopardy by reckless men wanting another Ferrari in which to drive to the lap-dancing club, but we wanted to safeguard the system that made their excesses possible. We didn’t want things to change; to have to live on what we earn rather than on credit. We didn’t want to restrain our consumption, or have fewer holidays, or think about food miles. We didn’t want to live more rationally, on less, buying locally. We wanted the global economy to stay global. We wanted things to go on as they had before. Well, that’s what we got.

Creature comforts

Only connect, said E. M. Forster. A teacher at school told me this. He didn’t tell me that, once drummed into me, this philosophy would have such odd results. On seeing the latest Butlin’s advert (child meets dinosaur, child and dinosaur play together, child buggers off leaving dinosaur bereft until new child arrives, proving itself as fickle as child), I was taken back more than 15 years, to another ad in which human and fantasy creature interact. While the Butlin’s commercial is perfectly tolerable (largely due to the song used), this was one of those rare creations that makes you realise not all advertising is the work of those who would sell their soul to Satan if only they possessed such a thing to begin with.

Some advertisers, it is true, nick ideas from others and use them without permission. (Artist Gillian Wearing, for example, had people holding up signs to show how our thoughts differ dramatically from what our appearances suggest – such as a police officer bearing a card with the legend ‘Help’. The agency that stole the idea just wanted to sell us cars. We might also complain that they interrupt gripping drama at crucial moments to sell us crap – except, of course, those plot points are created by the writer especially because of the ad break, to make us either not flick or flick back.)

But… there are those who are clearly capable of making the Ridley Scott leap they all so obviously crave. Sometimes, there is real subtlety in the acting, actual originality in the idea. And sometimes, just sometimes, there’s something so outlandish, so disturbing, you wonder how this ever got onto television at all.

I organised a comedy benefit for the charity Mencap once, and got a call from a now defunct agency, Cowan Kemsley Taylor, asking us if we were interested in having an amusing character from one of their new, as yet unseen, adverts at the event, maybe handing out product (alcohol), interacting with the audience in the foyer in an entertaining fashion, that kind of thing. There’d be money in it for us. We leapt at the idea, hungrily. So, they sent us a video (this was the 1990s) of the new campaign to give us an idea…

In a suburban semi, a middle-aged man is taking breakfast upstairs on a tray. There is a red rose in a vase, and Everything I Own is playing on the soundtrack. We cut to a bedroom, and there, on one side of a double bed, his partner lifts an eye-mask. And you crap yourself (from hilarity or terror. The choice is entirely yours.) It’s the troll from Don’t Look Now. (A little reflection tells you that, actually, it’s not. That was a small woman in a red duffle coat with a benevolent look on her face and an unusually large knife in her pocket. No, this is how you remember the troll from the end of Don’t Look Now – black and white make-up, wrinkled and grotesque. It’s fucking terrifying. I digress.) The story unfolds. They clearly live together, sleep in the same bed (and why not? It was OK for Morecambe and Wise) and occasionally go to the pretty little village pub together – he on motorbike, er… it in sidecar – to enjoy the occasional bottle of Drum cider.

I was assured that the character in these adverts was endearing. I believe the words ‘sweet’ and ‘funny’ may have been used. I found the advert funny. Certainly, I did. Took the video tape home, and have it still. Brilliant, hilarious. But I’m afraid we didn’t get back to take them up on their offer.

A-Team, The

It was so bad it was good, wasn’t it? No, you patronising bastard, it wasn’t. It was enjoyable, unsophisticated, boys’ own, early evening adventure-telly. Like The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky & Hutch and Chips before it, it fulfilled its job description. You may argue, if you wish, that each generation has its show of this kind, and that each one should eventually grow out of it and begin to like proper drama. A teenager in the 1980s, for example, might discover the work of Dennis Potter, or Edge of Darkness. You may put forward the view that serious drama is a waste of time, and that once you grow weary of The A-Team, you would prefer it if someone could just bring on the action movies and dancing girls. I care not. I wish to celebrate the work of Stephen J Cannell for what it was – writer-led prime-time TV¹.

One reason people liked The A-Team enough for someone (with considerably less imagination than Stephen J Cannell) to make it into an ill-considered movie was that someone else² had done the character work. There wasn’t a world-weary cop in the show, with a messy divorce behind him and a drink problem. There wasn’t a superannuated mystery writer and amateur detective. There wasn’t – god help us all – a doctor who solves crimes with the help of his son, a homicide detective (played by a real life father and son)³. This bunch – which included the now obvious tough guy with a fear of flying – was led by a former Lieutenant-Colonel⁴ who got occasional acting work which required him to dress up as a tree.

The real reason for the show’s popularity, though⁵, was its unpretentiousness, its lack of irony. It didn’t dick with the audience. Every so often, Cannell said, in his valedictory GQ interview, writers would come to him and suggest “a black and white episode, or a flashback where it’s a Western. I’d say, ‘You guys are bored. Your audience sees this show for one hour a week on Tuesday night. You do it fifty hours a week. You’re fucking bored. You owe the audience the integrity of doing something fresh within its form.’” That’s why he’s a hero.

And yet… Consider the denouement of one episode, scripted by Cannell himself⁶. Picture this: our heroes are trapped on a movie set⁷. It’s that portion of the show in which – every week! – they alchemise weapons and wherewithal from base materials. In this programme, unable to fashion a tank from a fridge freezer and a couple of old tyres, they save their bacon using only the accoutrements of the action movie. They bury squibs in the earth – some small to represent bullets, some large for grenades. When finally threatened – just after they’ve finished their preparations! – they pretend to fire prop guns, and set off the succession of tiny explosions in the soil under their foes’ feet. The baddies freeze in terror. The goodies throw down their guns and overpower them with a virtuoso – one might almost say choreographed – display of good, old-fashioned fisticuffs⁸.

Suddenly, this episode showed us, onscreen, what went on behind the scenes of every episode. There were always guns about, and, every week, the bad men would fall over at the right moment, but they would always be led away later, unbloodied but bowed. This time, you knew they were prop guns; you didn’t have to suspend your disbelief (quite so much as usual).

No, they weren’t the height of sophistication, but for one night only, folks, Mr T and post-modernism came together, and there was an A-Team script not just with its tongue in its cheek, but with layers.

1. At one point, Cannell was directly employing 2,500 people – “This building was all writer-producers” – and turning over $150 million a year. Joel Surnow, Ann Donahue and Carol Mendelsohn worked for him, which suggests that without The A-Team, there might have been no 24 or CSI.
2. That would be Stephen J Cannell.
3. I challenge anyone to find more cinematically amusing legs than those of Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s still wondrous Me Ol’ Bamboo sequence, but the plots of Diagnosis Murder and the passage of 25 years give them little chance to shine.
4. Or Colonel, in either the 101st Airborne division or the 1st Air Cavalry division, depending on which season you’re watching.
5. Apart from the fact that the first episode aired directly after the Superbowl, which must be something of a leg-up in the ready-made audience stakes.
6. Season 4, episode 3: ‘Where is the monster when you need him?’ (Thanks to the A-Team Guide blog for that…) In this one, Hannibal has a job which involves him playing an aquatic monster, Gatorella. Thankfully, that detail is irrelevant to our discussion.
7. Or possibly a TV show set. It was 25 years ago.
8. On primetime, especially in the US, you can use guns, but no-one ever gets shot. (One might almost suggest that a whole society was in denial about the actual effects of the right to bear arms. Put away such silly thoughts.)