Electric Train(er)

BBC and the royal scoop that wasn't

The BBC has described this week's royal row as regrettable "human error". The interesting question is which human made the error.

It looks like the mistake may have been compounded by the fact that the offending clips of the Queen definitely not stomping away from a photo shoot where compiled by the company that's making the documentary, and not the BBC itself.

Much has been made in the press of the BBC needing to put its house in order. This may be the BBC's responsibility, but it becomes much more difficult when production is outsourced.

I meet many freelances working in independent production who have to flit from job to job and know that they are only as good as their last position. There is no security and very little concept of training and development.

It doesn't make you a bad person, but the pressures to stay ahead of the pack are enormous. Central tennets of public service broadcasting are often not uppermost in the mind.

Contrast that with the rigour with which the BBC trains its journalists and the tonnage of bricks that would come down on any staffer who mislead the viewers in such a high profile way.

But the juggernaut of outsourcing rumbles on. In such a competitive media world I suspect this week's human error won't be the last.

Princess Diana, Channel 4, and user-generated content

This week's fascinating documentary about the role (or lack of it) of the paparazzi in Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's deaths may have been painful for their families, but it didn't deserve some of the more hysterical reactions in the press.

More interesting was the fact that it seems to have split the TV industry down the middle. 53% of respondents in a Broadcast magazine poll say they thought that Channel 4 was wrong to show the programme without cuts.

I'm at a bit of a loss to know where the cuts could have been made, given how carefully the programme was treading. Presumably the poll was used as a protest vote against a channel that seems to be fast running out of friends.

Meanwhile did you notice how none of the 'ordinary' passers-by in that Paris tunnel didn't just whip out their camera-phones? Oh, hang on. Perhaps that's because they weren't invented then.

It makes you wonder what the reaction of the French police would have been if the professional paps had been joined by some citizen journalists. Would they have been rounded up too? Possibly. Would videos of the crash have been on YouTube within an instant? Certainly.

The Power of Three

A friend of mine is always reminding people of the power of the three-word tag as part of business branding. In fact he's positively evangelical about it. He says we're all pre-wired  to remember things in threes. Any business that doesn't use a three-word slogan is - in his view - missing a trick.

A quick look up and down the high street - or at least the out-of-town retail park - shows he may have a point. Test your friends with these:

• every little helps
• have a break
• Beanz Meanz Heinz (a giveaway that one)
• never knowingly undersold

They don't even have to be in English - Vorsprung durch Technik anyone?

Sainsburys has the rebellious 'try something new today', and therefore (according to my friend) deserves everything it has coming to it. Though it redeems itself slightly by having a premium line called 'taste the difference'.

I read in today's Media Guardian that ads are having to get cleverer. It's something to do with the audiences getting more sophisticated, completely contradicting the argument for dumbing down.

I wonder where this leaves the power of the three-word tag or slogan. My suspicion is that it will never go away. Threesomes are so powerful they have been used for centuries, so I can't see them disappearing just because Asda decides to spot patting its bum.

Winston Churchill used the power of three all the time in his speeches. Even when he didn't that's the way we remember him. Blood, sweat and tears was actually 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'.

The earliest example I can think of is Julius Ceasar's 'Veni. Vidi. Vici.' (I came. I saw. I conquered.) After all, he could just as easily have said 'I came. I conquered'.  Just 'I conquered' would have conveyed the meaning, especially to the poor sods he'd just slaughtered.

And he was a man who understood the importance of branding.