Is it just me, but should Sir Alan take a look at himself before having a pop at others’ shortcomings (granted it makes for good telly and they’re all incompetent tits who need shouting at anyway!) — certainly as far as his grammatical ability is concerned anyway.
What I’m talking about — as Sam Wollaston also lampooned in last week’s Guardian — is Sir Alan’s apparent lack of command of the English Language. In the intro segment of each show we hear Sir Alan say “Second prize…don’t exist” which is blatent poor grammar from our favourite multi-millionaire; mixing up singular and plural. But it doesn’t stop there with this grammatical misdemeanour — in episode two he incorrectly refers to a CV as a Résumé, but then arduously mispronounces it with the stress on the sum syllable — rèSUMè. If you insist on using the American term, at least say it correctly!
Further embracement comes in episode 3 when he gives the teams a challenge to design fitness equipment, whereupon he instructs “the most amount of orders, wins”. Surely that’s not right, Sir Alan — ‘amount’ is a quantified given; it cannot be ‘most amount’. I think what he meant was ‘most orders’ or ‘largest amount’ at a push.
Considering Sir Alan ‘don’t talk’ much talking during the show, he commits a grammatical faux pas every time he opens his mouth.
Later on in the boardroom segment, when he is reprimanding the teams, he yet again instructs them to go away and discuss ‘amongst yourself’. Now, I can understand that he may have been trying to refer to the group as a single entity, but I hardly feel that appropriate given the context. FAIL.
My gripes with the show extend to the way in which it’s narrated. In episode 3, the teams are creating the POS (point of sale) material for their products, during which the narrator refers to them as ‘marketing posters’. That is so factually and technically incorrect it’s visible from space — that’s a pretty detailed poster they must have! You see, this is just another example of the average TV-viewing public considering ‘Promotion’ to be the same as ‘Marketing’. The more informed among us know this couldn’t be further from the truth, and that the posters in question were simply single items of Promotion, only a fraction of overall efforts; I’m not doing a Masters degree in posters…or promotion for that matter.
In Sir Alan’s own words “Expressing yourself amongst people is part of business”, so why can’t he get it right? As we know he left school at 16, but you’d have thought in order to become as successful as he is, he’d need to have developed competent grasp of authoritative discourse and the English Language.

Gimme a job Al’ me’ ol’ mate.

I’m always up for an argument with regard to defending the BBC – possibly the greatest public service of the 20th centrury. I was invited to join an anti-TV Licence group on Facebook by someone who is clearly miguided and thinks everyone should be as hysterical as them. I was recently annoyed with the iPlayer’s content in a recent post, but that’s just tough love for the BBC.
I decided to educate the other group members of their idiocy:

“You people really seem to be very misguided and hysterical. You’ve clearly been reading mornic news publications.
Your premise appears to be that if you don’t use the BBC, why should you pay? That’s ridiculous, considering that there are upwards of 400,000 members of this group – and not one of them uses the BBC? Rubbish!

I bet all of them rely (even enjoy?) the services of the BBC on a daily basis; I know I do and I think the TV License is one of the last remaining bargains ever!

Just think of all the content the BBC deliver, essentially for a very low price! All the radio stations covering all possible topics and music genres, new product development and innovation (iPlayer), their huge information repository that is their web site, the TV stations (with some gems such as David Attenborough, Top Gear, iconic comedy shows, News 24 etc), podcasts and lots more I’ve left out.
You’re all just being hysterical like the rest of the Daily Mail-reading middle England.
Appreciate what the BBC has done for broadcasting and the media reputation of this country and for your life!
The BBC are even shortly going to be pioneering High Def on-demand streaming with the iPlayer – and I bet most of the 400,000 members will be looking at that, while still moaning about the low price charged for it.
Get it into perspective!!”

Needless to say my posting was met with passionate opposition from them with stories of the BBC’s bullish, draconican fee collection methods, but it was worth a shout to show them the voice of reason.

The module’s now over. It culminated in ANOTHER (argg!) group exercise in which me and my two colleagues (hello Trang and Sherry) had to present our chosen subject – Product packaging. It was done in the form of a literature review and was very difficult to come up with using slides to talk about authors.

Anyway, they liked it in the end and I think we have agood mark if our feedback was anything to go by – they really liked it.  If only we’d used some pictures! We dressed up and everything, and I wore my Serif Technical Support tie (it’s just my favourite tie and holds sentimental value) which I hoped would afford me confidence;  there’s literally not a day goes by I don’t think about that place, like a girlfriend you never get over.

The Presentation Groups

I’m often moaning about lack of participation in group work and unequal effort by certain parties, and I was glad on this occasion to be handed the opportunity to ‘fight back’ and show up such incompetence. One of the groups was presenting similar material to what I covered in some depth but the person ‘discussing’ it blatently did not do the work and was just reading off the slide. Well, I was not having this, given all my hard work in understanding the concept — I was not prepared to let this guy go unquestioned, so I did just that. I asked him for what purpose consumers use Extrinsic and Intrinsic product signals and what are they. The answer I was looking for (and he should have known) was evaluation, but he babbled some unintelligable nonsense.

It was a small, quiet victory for me, but I hope I illustrated my point to the tutors marking.

Afterwards a bunch of us went for a (genuine) Chinese buffet which included but not limited to chips and swiss roll. The nerve-wracking day turned into a memorable experience during which interesting conversation proliferated, thanks in part to a certain french colleague’s extreme views on the New World Order.

What the hell’s going on with the formally-great iPlayer recently? I have recently been very dissapointed with the BBC’s output. It’s the only television I consume and I’m now confined to watching the occasional episode of BBC Click, for lack of any other quality programming from this institution in recent months…which we pay for!! Surely the BBC shouldn’t be effected by the credit crunch and resort to cheap programming.

All the Beeb’s best programmes have ceased — Top Gear, Mock the Week, Buzzocks, HIGNFY, Charlie Brooker and anything else of comedy or intellectual value (with the possible exception of QI). I can see that they are likely going to resume the former quality in the spring or summer, but why do they insist on having half a year of crappy programming?

Sort it out…I’m sure I’m not alone in my frustration.

Maybe I should get a TV in here.