From Techno Phone To Smart Phone

A common question in the light hearted, celebrity sort of interview is of the "What was the first record you bought/car you owned? Given  the ubiquity of the mobile phone these days (94% of adults in the UK own one), I am surprised not yet to have heard an interviewer asks a guest, "What was the first mobile phone you owned?" Certainly the answer to the question would tell you a good deal about the person; their age group (assuming you weren't otherwise aware), perhaps their social status, whether or not they are an early adopter of technology, maybe their propensity to follow fashion or be a trendsetter.

What would the first mobile phone that I owned tell you about me? It was a Techno Phone purchased from the Mobile Phone Centre in Romford for the princely sum of £1 but obviously attached to a contract that, if memory serves me correctly, cost me £15 a month. And this was in 1994; when you look at mobile phone contracts today it shows you that £15 was quite a substantial sum then, especially when you consider that all that covered was calls as the phone did not have texting capability. Mind you even if my phone had been capable there would have been no point in me sending a text message to the only other person I knew who owned a mobile phone, Val, as her phone did not even have a screen! Had I wanted to send a text, or make a call for that matter, the chances are the battery would have been dead For all the fact that it weighed about the same as a house brick, the battery life was about eleven hours and inevitably every time I took the phone out and wanted to use it the battery would either be flat or about to expire. The size and weight of the Techno Phone meant that carrying it in one's pocket was a non-starter, so I had it strapped to my belt, where its weight caused me to walk with a pronounced list to the right.

The brick like Techno Phone...

 

...Val's Sony had a flip-down microphone but no screen.

Things improved when I upgraded to the Ericsson GA 628. For starters it weighed just 160g (by comparison, the Apple iPhone 4 weighs 155g) and had an advertised battery stand-by time of 83 hours, although in my experience the advertised stand-by time and the reality are normally poles apart. Although the Ericsson had the capability to send and receive texts, it was not until I upgraded again that I actually sent one. This was when Virgin Mobile changed the face of mobile phone ownership in the UK; instead of an expensive monthly contract you could opt to pay just for your calls. OK, the phone (I bought a Siemens S25) cost £79, but instead of £15 per month I was paying £2 or less and since I kept the phone for a number of years, it ended up saving me money. This was in the days when phone manufacturers were gradually introducing more technology and the Siemens S25 had an infra-red port, an Organizer, selectable ringtones, three games and colour graphics!

The Ericcson GA628: Small and light but not much functionality.

The Siemens S25.

When the Siemens gave up the ghost I bought a Nokia 6100 that I liked a lot; it had the most easily navigable menu tree of any phone I have owned prior to the smartphone era, the battery lasted for days, it was light and it was small. Eventually it wore out and I replaced it with a BenQ-Siemens E61, the first phone that I owned that had a camera and an MP3 player. I never quite got to grips with this phone and moved on to the BlackBerry Curve. Now the BlackBerry has recently fallen away in popularity  in the private smartphone market, but remain very highly regarded in the business community and there is no doubt that their email client is peerless; it was because I had a BlackBerry for work that I bought one for my private use. It was to be the last Virgin Mobile phone that I owned as it became apparent that as smartphone technology improved, as the functionality increased, Virgin lagged behind in their range of phones. Although now they do supply the iPhone, at the time my contract came up for renewal they did not and increasingly it became apparent that the phone I really wanted was an iPhone. Although I feigned indifference, I looked at the all singing, all dancing, touch screen superstar that Apple were producing and realised that actually I would quite like one. So I jumped ship, went over to 3 and got myself an iPhone 4.

 

The Nokia 6100: A really great little phone.

The BenQ Siemens E61

Now I have to say that I was more than happy with the iPhone. I know that Apple have their detractors; I know that some people are fans of other smartphones and believe that the iPhone is over-rated, but I really cannot fault them. If I had any quibbles they would be that with the 8gb iPhone the memory soon gets clogged up (to the extent that when Apple introduced iOS7 I had insufficient memory on my phone to update the operating system) and it may be that by comparison with newer phones coming on the market the screen size is a bit on the skimpy side, but overall I am a fan. When it was upgrade time, however I decided I was due a change (for novelty's sake more than anything) and went for the Samsung Galaxy S4.  At present I am undecided as to whether that was a good move or not. The Samsung is sufficiently similar to the iPhone that there isn't a culture shock in changing and I suppose it is really just perception, but the look and feel of the Galaxy is partly superior and partly inferior to the iPhone. I also think that the S4 is a bit of an odd size; it doesn't sit as comfortably in the palm of one's hand as the iPhone does although there are bigger handsets out there, the HTC One Max for one.

But if I have one real problem with my new phone it has to be the battery. Yes, I had become used to charging my iPhone every other day, but the Galaxy seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to how long the battery will last. One evening I charged it to 100%, went to bed and in the morning it was down to 17%; another day I used it moderately and discharged only 50% of the battery power in twelve hours. Generally I now have to charge my phone daily, something I have not been used to doing since 1994 when I owned the power hungry Techno Phone and this despite the advertised 370 hours stand-by time. Where do the manufacturers get these stand-by times from? Does anyone ever get the number of hours they claim?

Over the years as phones became smaller, battery life increased but as the functionality and size have increased, battery life has reduced again (despite the maker's optimistic claims). It is almost worth investing in a cheap, basic, pay as you go phone with a seven day battery life to make and receive calls and keep the smartphone for surfing the 'net, playing games and listening to music, so if you will excuse me I think I will go and hunt out that old Alcatel phone that is in a drawer somewhere, I think it might just come in handy.

Clichés? I Avoid Them Like The Plague.

In a piece[1] that I wrote last June (http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/a-question-of-grammar.html) I expressed some of my frustrations with regard to grammar; my foibles and bête noire's[2].  I wrote at the time that while " I hope that I have a reasonable command of English, I accept that I am by no means perfect" and this week I have been more than somewhat chastened, having read John Rentoul's book, "The Banned List: A Manifesto Against Jargon and Cliché" and learned that where my writing is concerned I am far from perfect; very far indeed.

I read John Rentoul's book because I followed a link on Twitter, which took me to a website called Buzzsaw (http://www.prbuzzsaw.com/), which has a tool which enables you to identify and then excise buzzwords from text that you paste into it[3]. There is also a link to Amazon's website, specifically to The Banned List, which I bought, read and immediately realised that no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I strive to avoid the hackneyed and the clichéd, the buzzwords and the jargon, whole rafts of it slip through. Sometimes they don't merely slip through, quite often they are there because I have consciously chosen to include them; oh, the shame!

John Rentoul

At the core of the book is a list of clichés, words, phrases, expressions and jargon which the author opines[4] we should avoid like the plague[5]. To my chagrin this list includes a great many words and phrases that are faithful companions of mine; as comfortable and cosy as a pair of well worn slippers. But, and this may be an important but, is John Rentoul right? A great many of the items in the list are, it has to be said glib and have become meaningless through overuse (or misuse) or are commonly used out of context or incorrectly, however there are many that the author objects to with which I can find little fault (or suitable alternative). Obviously John Rentoul, a journalist with The Independent and a published author, has superior writing credentials to me, but I would suggest that as with clothes and as with restaurants, so words and phrases slip in and out of fashion and that a newspaper like The Independent will have its own in house style which will influence what is deemed acceptable and what is beyond the pale. A writer for the Daily Mirror or the Daily Mail might well have come up with a very different list.

"Moving the goalposts." (Daily Telegraph).

I actually agree with the inclusion of a great many of the words or phrases on the list, but there are some for which I don't actually feel there are superior alternatives. And that is one difficulty that I have; the author himself says (in a different context) that proactive is a word " used to suggest vigour without troubling anyone with choices that might have been made" and it is easy enough to say that a particular phrase is a cliché, that a certain expression should not be used, but it is much more helpful to be proactive and suggest an alternative.

Having babbled on this far I suppose I need to justify what I have said with some examples, so here goes. I agree with (among others):

·         Draw a line under. It is not so much the expression as the circumstances under which it is frequently used. Most often it is employed by a politician or other public figure whose greed or lies or hypocrisy or infidelity or whatever has been exposed and who wishes to "move on" purely to avoid any further embarrassment, even though more debate may be in the public interest.

·         A big ask. In the same spirit as "a tough call", and probably better replaced with tough task or difficult challenge.

·         At the end of the day. Or you could say, when all is said and done, but ultimately you mean,  er ,ultimately (probably).

·         Any journey not describing travel from A to B. Much beloved by contestants on talent shows, this is sometimes synonymous with growth or improvement, but mostly it is nonsense.

·         Going forward. Presumably as opposed to going backwards, except it normally means in the future, so there is no alternative to going forward (as far as we know).

And if I may offer a personal bugbear[6] of mine, it would be That's the way I roll. In other words, that is the way I do thing. It conveys a smug superiority even when associated with the most mundane of tasks and every time I hear it I shudder.

But then there are the additions to the list with which I have issues[7].

·         Move the goalposts. Yes it is a cliché because it is so commonly used, but it is widely and easily understood. Alternatively one could say "change the rules after the game has started" except we probably aren't talking about a game anyway. If it ain't broke, don't let us bother trying to fix it.[8]

·         Not fit for purpose. It possibly depends on what industry one has worked in, but this sort of expression was very common where I worked; it may be a cliché but trying to find an alternative makes the user sound pretentious and doesn't aid understanding

·         Back office. Same goes for this one. If you work in a location like a bank branch that has a foyer, a counter and an area behind the counter then the correct name for that area is back office. To try and find an alternative is illogical, after all we wouldn't try to find an alternative to calling the cooking area of a restaurant a kitchen, now would we? Unless of course we are using "back-office" as a verb (but who does that?).

·         By virtue of the fact that. There is probably no justification for using this phrase and I include it as one I would defend the use of simply because I happen to use it (a lot).

·         Don't hold your breath. Like "well good luck with that" this phrase has a simple elegance despite its very sarcastic nature. I have no rational reason for arguing against it being on the list, I just like it.

Rentoul makes a valid point about jargon, that it is important in bureaucracies but that it can end up being used inappropriately in conversation with outsiders. That is the point about jargon, it is a sort of technical language understood by insiders, often because in a particular industry it makes perfect sense to use it, but too often it falls into disrepute when it escapes the confines of its specialty and wanders off into the world at large where it is used, abused and misused by the general public (and journalists).

On the whole I find in favour of John Rentoul's list. I suppose that many of the objections I have to some of the words on it are based on the fact that I use and have a fondness for some of them. I would recommend The Banned List to everyone who indulges in even the most modest of writing (like me), or to anyone who reads anything for that matter, because at the end of the day, this book does what it says on the tin.

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[1] "Piece" is a word from the Banned List. There are a number of other banned words and phrases in this blog. Some I have included through sheer devilment; others are there because I don't know any better.

[2] Foreign words and phrases are verboten, says Rentoul quoting George Orwell. If you can think of an everyday English alternative, use it. Of course, he didn't say verboten, or bête noire.

[3] I copied this blog into Buzzword and it received a 3% Buzz factor rating and contains 13 buzzwords, which is actually quite low considering the content.

[4] Opine is another word from the Banned List.

[5] Surprisingly, this expression does not feature in the list.

[6] Cliché alert!

[7] Or perhaps I should say problems.

[8] Rentoul suggests that we should refrain from using sporting expressions in general and American sporting metaphors in particular. Interestingly, he cites "rookie" as an example of such an Americanism, yet the first use of that word appears to come in a Kipling poem of 1892 and was in common use in the British Army in the early 20th century.

B Is For...

...B Teams, Bad Ideas and the Backlash.

I have previously  said that change is inevitable; that resistance to change is futile and that such resistance is often a knee-jerk reaction driven by fear of the unknown rather than any rational objection. Then along comes the Football Association's proposal to introduce B teams into English football to which I have to say that change is not inevitable, that resistance is not futile and that far from the opposition being a knee-jerk reaction, it is the proposal itself that is, if not a knee-jerk reaction, then certainly a very wrong headed one.

Almost immediately the announcement had been made in Greg Dyke's press conference  then social media was awash with comment, criticism and bafflement. We saw the power of Twitter in harnessing and mobilising opinion with the hashtag #SayNoToLeague3 appearing immediately; with the "Say no to B Teams" petition (http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/football-association-say-no-to-b-teams) taking shape that afternoon and the website Against League 3 (http://www.againstleague3.co.uk/) up and running within hours. Opposition came from all quarters;  from league administrators, from clubs and from fans. In fact it was nigh on impossible to find anyone who wasn't opposed to the proposal, apart from FA Chairman Greg Dyke and his commission colleagues.

Greg Dyke: Laudable aims but lamentable solution.

The commission's proposals go far beyond the widely publicised idea of creating a new league to include B teams of Premier League (PL) clubs together with existing Conference sides; indeed some of the main objectives of the commission are laudable enough. Increasing the playing opportunities for 18-20 year old elite English players at the top clubs; regulating the player market to create a balance between British, EU and non-EU players; improving coaching at grassroots level and improving facilities and increasing the provision of all weather pitches at grassroots level are all, on the face of it, good ideas but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Shoehorning B teams into the current league structure and upsetting the existing non-League pyramid does not strike anyone outside of Dyke's cosy little commission as a way to achieve the first of these stated aims, namely increasing the top flight playing opportunities for 18-20 year olds.

Remarkably, the proposed new league (intended to sit between the existing League Two and the Conference and proposed to consist of ten B teams and ten Conference sides) would not, according to the FA's report (which can be downloaded here : http://www.thefa.com/news/thefa/2014/may/fa-commission-report) apparently displace any existing clubs. Try telling that to the fourteen Conference sides not invited to join, who would effectively move down from the fifth tier of the game to the sixth and consequently push everyone below the Conference down one tier.

The FA cite the lack of competition or meaningful matches in the existing Under 21 League as a problem in developing young English talent. They state that fixtures are often nomadic, poorly attended or else played behind closed doors at training grounds, so it is astonishing that they believe that by simply changing the team name to B team (they still aim these teams at under 21 players) Premier League clubs will suddenly change their whole ethos. Yes, perhaps Kidderminster Harriers v Stoke City B will be an authentic work out for the Premier League youngsters, but next week it will be Stoke City B v Manchester City B; why are the Premier League teams going to treat that any differently from the way they approach an existing Under 21 game between the two sides? It is also more than somewhat demeaning to clubs currently in the Conference for them to be told that they are going to be making up the numbers in a league whose primary function is to give game time to Premier League youngsters.

Luton Town's Conference championship has had Kenilworth Road packed out...

...while U21 League games are less well attended.

And how well will these games be attended? It's difficult to imagine Aston Villa B v Crystal Palace B packing them in (wherever they play it) on a wet Tuesday in November and frankly the prospect for many fans of Conference clubs of the visit of a Premier League B team is not as exciting as the people on the FA commission may believe. Mind you they might have had some indication of that had they asked the fans of some Conference clubs, or even Conference officials; shamefully the FA commission did not consult with bodies like the Football Supporters' Federation.  Criminally they did not consult with the Conference itself, the league most directly affected by the proposed change. Any supporter of a Conference club who might have drawn consolation from the prospect of seeing their side play at a Premier League ground when they visited say, Manchester United B, would be disappointed by the statement in the report to the effect that " B teams would play in (separate) stadia, most likely a small stadium built expressly for the purpose or at a nearby lower league club’s stadium." Most likely the latter they mean; can anyone honestly believe that any Premier League side, let alone ten of them, are going to built brand-new (albeit small) stadia, to accommodate their B teams? Conference sides are likely to find themselves playing Away games at their own Home grounds that PL B teams deign to use for their "home" matches.

Danny Mills, a member of the FA's commission, believes fans would relish seeing their team play PL B teams; somehow I doubt it.

Underpinning the desire to increase the flow of young English talent into the Premier League is the wish, the hope and the expectation that this will improve the England national team's chances of success at international tournaments. There is an implication in this that the influx of overseas players into the English leagues has been responsible for a terrible decline in the fortunes of the national side; well this isn't actually borne out by the facts. In the last fifty years England have reached one major final and two semi-finals. The 1966 World Cup triumph and the 1996 European Championship semi-final appearance were achieved largely due to home advantage (and in 1966 success was predicated on a Geoff Hurst goal that remains contested to this day). Three times since 1966 England have failed to even qualify for the World Cup finals (1974, 1978 and 1994) and only one of those years fell after the creation of the Premier League, which ushered in the influx of overseas players. England's record at major tournaments has never been brilliant; the FA are deluding themselves if they think that B teams will suddenly (or even eventually) turn the national team into world beaters. Frankly I doubt that B teams will even make the pool of players from whom the England manager can make his selection significantly bigger because there is no guarantee that this experiment will bring forth any world class stars with English passports; it will not even guarantee that English youngsters play Premier League football. As long as top English clubs have non-English owners and managers whose objective is Champions League football first and foremost, they will continue to open their cheque books and buy top talent from around the world; it will have to be a very rare and exceptional English talent that supplants a proven world class player who can be bought in from abroad.

Even when English players with potential begin to break through it appears to be one step forward and two steps back anyway. Take Jack Rodwell. He began his career with Everton, a club who actually do have a good track record in nurturing English talent, and made 85 PL appearances for them before being sold to Manchester City in 2012, since when he has played just 15 first team matches. Two England caps while at Everton speak of Rodwell's potential, but he is never going to realise it if he cannot make even five first team appearances for City this season. Clubs in Leagues One and Two have already voiced concerns about the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) which allows Premier League clubs to hoover up young, talented players for nominal fees; the introduction of B teams will only exacerbate that problem. Even players of Rodwell's potential will be sucked into the abyss.

Jack Rodwell: The potential shown at Everton has stalled at The Etihad.

An unpleasant truth that Greg Dyke and the FA need to grasp is that football supporters generally put their club before country. As a non-League supporter; yes , we would like to see England succeed at the World Cup finals, but given the choice between that and our club getting promoted into the Football League (and playing Portsmouth's first team, not Southampton's B team) we are going to pick the latter option every time.

                                                                                                                                                                     

 And what will happen if this B team farrago ever comes to fruition? Will the England team benefit? Probably not. Will the FA pick up the pieces when it fails? No. Will the foreign owned and managed Premier League clubs blithely carry on as before? Yes.  Will the clubs in whatever is left of League Two, Three and the Conference be left to pick up the pieces? Definitely.

The Football Association are guardians of the game at all levels in England; at all levels, not just the national team and the Premier League, and in 2013 they recognised Ebenezer Morley and his contemporaries as founders of the structure of association football in England 150 years ago. Chances are that in another 150 years time our children may be remembering Greg Dyke as the man who tried to dismantle it; it would be a tragedy if they remember him as the man who succeeded.

We Are What We Share

Who remembers the Yellow Pages? Or the Thomson Local Directory? In years gone by the Yellow Pages weighed about the same as a housebrick and ran to hundreds of pages. The Thomson directory, though more modest, was also a sizeable tome. Nowadays they have shrunk in dimensions as well as pages to the point where they are little more than pamphlets and when the new ones arrive I throw out last year's editions with the realisation that I have not looked at them at all since the day they were delivered. I am amazed that they keep printing them, that they haven't gone the way of the telephone directory, although I guess that there are still plenty of people (my Mother for one) without access to the internet who still rely on the Yellow Pages if they need a plumber or the like.

We now have a generation who have grown up with the internet and probably cannot imagine life without it; a generation that reacts to new apps, new ways of interacting with friends, new ways of working and of doing business quite effortlessly and nowhere is this more obvious than in the use of social networks. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and  Instagram may be the most well known of these, but there are literally hundreds of social network sites worldwide and it is rare these days to meet anyone who is not a member of  at least one (again, my Mother would be an exception). The odd thing about these sites is that they tend to provoke some quite extreme views; everyone it seems has an opinion on how these sites should be used (based normally on their own prejudices, which they may try to foist upon others as though they were holy writ). As you might have guessed, I am now about to add to the sum of ignorance by foisting upon you my own opinions, although I must stress it is opinion only and I should be most grateful if you would not abide by any of it except in the exceptional circumstance that you happen to already hold the same opinion as me.

I suppose I was moved to write this because of an article by James Graham that I read in last Friday's London Evening Standard (Hey, thanks for sharing, but this has gone too far)[1]. Graham makes some valid points; it is true that the amount of data that we share on social networks, the amount of confidential information we blithely transmit over the internet and the lack of control we have over the use that information is put to is something that perhaps we should all worry about more. You can argue that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, but if for no other reason than combating identity theft and fraud we should perhaps be more circumspect about how much of our private lives we reveal on Facebook or Twitter, et al.

James Graham

Graham asks, quite rightly, why have we started to share so much? It made me smile when he said the old playground chant,' “I know something you don’t know” used to give you an edge' as I can recall that taunt flying around the schoolyard and yes, it was used in a superior, boastful way. Unfortunately this attitude can also prevail in the workplace, where some people jealously guard information or knowledge to give themselves an air of importance and make them appear indispensible (which causes problems when they are off sick or leave). Ok, so sharing knowledge about how to perform a particular task with one's workmates is not the same as sharing a picture of your dinner on Facebook, but there is a mindset change going on and whereas some people might be unnerved by the ease with which the current generation are happy to live their lives in public through social networks, it is probably healthier in many ways than the stiff upper lipped approach of our parents' generation who bottled up and repressed their emotions in  a way we might now think unhealthy.

Yes there is a load of old rubbish on social networks, but no one forces you to read other people's posts if you don't want to. It is similar to people who complain about TV programmes because they are not to their taste; no one forces you to watch, use the Off button! I do not believe that " The value of life experiences has been reduced to how many likes they get on Facebook" as Graham suggests in his article; if I post something on Facebook and people like it, all well and good, if they don't then it isn't really all that important (now if we're talking about how many hits this blog gets...)

There may be people out there who post deeply personal stuff about their private lives on social networks; about their relationships, about their hopes, dreams, worries and nightmares, and my set of Facebook friends may be atypical, but the majority of posts that I see are light-hearted,  fairly entertaining stuff that keeps me in touch with what people are up to. There is a point of view that says that we should interact more with our friends face to face rather than by proxy through the internet, that some of our Facebook friends are not friends at all because we don't really know them in the "real world." Well,  I don't see some of my Facebook friends that often for various reasons, but social networks keep me in touch; oh you could argue that if I wanted to keep in touch I could ring them, or write to them but personally I've never been one for ringing people 'just for a chat.'

As for who you should be friends with online, this is an area fraught with opinions and difficulties. There is a very good case for declining some friend requests, but even if you vet your friends carefully, the  people with whom you are friends may not be so circumspect.  Things that you post online are a bit like the conversation you have with a friend on the train or in the pub; you may think it is private but more people will hear it than you imagine.

A point that Graham makes in his article is that years ago people kept diaries, which were generally private (at least during the writer's lifetime) but that now we post updates: but times change. I can imagine, centuries ago, an early diarist being teased with something along the lines "What do you want to write that drivel for? No one's going to read it you know." The times change and social networks are to  today's generation what diaries where to Jane Austen's. Graham argues that this may mean we aren't dealing with things like grief in the way we used to, packaging it rather than confronting it, but I would disagree. Social media sites can allow people to get things off their chests, to express quite important emotions coherently, and adding a note to someone's 'wall' sympathising about something is probably a lot more sincere than sending a mass produced condolences card bought in Clintons.

Twenty years ago we could scarcely have imagined the changes that increased internet coverage, mobile internet devices and the growth of social networking websites would make, and we now discuss and analyse their use and significance with a seriousness that is possibly disproportionate to either their importance or longevity. In twenty years time we may be waxing nostalgic about Twitter and Facebook as we ponder whatever it is that has long since supplanted them, although many of us will still be asking the question some people are asking even today; what exactly is the point of LinkedIn?

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[1] You can read James Graham's article online at 

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/james-graham-hey-thanks-for-sharing-but-this-has-gone-too-far-9316068.html 

Valuing The Value Of Values

Comedy is a broad church; from the slapstick to the subtle, it embraces many forms and in my experience a successful comedy does not need to make one laugh out loud to be successful. This is nowhere more true than in the mockumentary style of comedy, in films like This Is Spinal Tap, or on television with shows like The Office. The BBC's recent offering, W1A did not actually make me laugh as such, but was nonetheless quite exquisite comedy. For those of you unfamiliar with the show it followed the appointment of Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) as Head of Values at the British Broadcasting Corporation after his character's role as Head of Deliverance at the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission preparing for the 2012 London Olympic Games in the programme 2012. You can guess the flavour of W1A simply from Fletcher's job title; Head of Values is a meaningless, wide ranging designation that for all its high-falutin' name signifies a totally pointless role that adds precisely no value whatever.

Hugh Bonneville, seen here with Clare Balding, plays BBC Head of Values Ian Fletcher.

Viewers who have never worked in large organisations may have watched the programme and been incredulous, unbelieving, unable to conceive that anything on screen was even remotely plausible (and there was the humour for them). Those of us who have worked in a large organisation (in the public or private sectors) will have watched it and recognised almost all of it as being all too credible (and there was the humour for us). Fletcher's role is defined as being to "clarify, define, or re-define the core purpose of the BBC across all its functions and to position it confidently for the future," which, as Shakespeare said," is sound and fury, signifying nothing." In the series'  first episode Fletcher's appointment is described as resulting from "learning opportunities" that have arisen within the organisation; learning opportunities being corporate speak for mistakes or foul ups that have occurred. Bringing someone in to deal with these assuages corporate guilt and provides the opportunity to create a scapegoat who can take the flak, leaving time servers to carry on as before without any need to accept any sort of responsibility whatever.

Each episode includes the depiction of a daily "Damage Limitation Meeting" which anyone who has ever worked in a major organisation will be familiar with. The delight of the damage limitation meeting is that the perceived damage is largely self inflicted and the remedies grow to the extent that the means become ends in themselves, with everyone rejecting any liability to the point that the new boy inevitably has to take responsibility. Key to this is Simon Harwood, Director of Strategic Governance (played superbly by Jason Watkins), who again has a responsible sounding role that the organisation would thrive without, who actually provides no guidance whatever and whose response to everything is "brilliant," even in the face of major problems. Harwood invariably passes the buck to his subordinates while making much of his relationship with the Director General, creating for himself a position of invulnerability regardless of how much goes wrong.

Fletcher and team.

Then there is Anna Rampton, Head of Output (Sarah Parish). Ostensibly her role in commissioning programmes should require her to have a very hands on approach, but yet again she consistently abdicates any form of responsibility, largely to the completely useless David Wilkes, the Entertainment Format Producer (Rufus Jones) and the long suffering producer Lucy Freeman (Nina Sosany).  Freeman's character is probably the most sympathetic in the show;  she actually wants to get on with her job and do it well, she is probably a very able producer but is never given the opportunity to prove this as she has been worn down by the bureaucracy and buck passing, the paralysis that prevents any decision making taking place and the fact that the job she is now doing is a world away from the one she was originally employed to do. All too often she finds that she is placed in difficult positions by her incompetent peers and blame shifting, risk averse superiors for whose neglect she has to assume responsibility.

The dynamic of the department is changed by the introduction of an outside consultant, Siobhan Sharpe  ( played by Jessica Hynes)  the Brand Consultant  from a company called Perfect Curve. Sharpe has all the buzzwords, all of the jargon and all of the false expertise that add precisely not one iota of benefit or value yet are so beloved by management. Perfect Curve's total uselessness is summed up perfectly in their attempt to create a new logo for the BBC app that they completely fail to realise is in fact The Star of David.  It is a fact of life that in large organisations those who have grown up in the company, those who understand the business, who have the expertise, experience, skills and "let's get the job done" mentality are less valued than an newcomer (particularly an outsider) who understands little of the business or organisational culture but can talk the talk regardless of their total inability to walk the walk. These nonsense speaking neophytes waltz in, wreak havoc then depart with large bonuses and pay-offs to repeat their gibberish elsewhere while those they leave behind are left to mop up the mess they have created.

"Brilliant"

Another aspect of the programme that resonated for me was the so called "Way Ahead" task force. Described as a "journey" and an opportunity to establish "the value of values" (within the organisation), the Way Ahead is the type of vacuous nonsense so beloved of corporate management. Establishing such a programme makes management feel that they are really adding value, introducing  a programme that will make staff more engaged, more energised and  more productive. Teams are assembled at vast cost (both in terms of time and money) to promote these programmes; resources are thrown at the effort, yet the tangible benefit is usually a big, fat zero. These sorts of programmes usually make staff resentful, distract them from their genuine work, become ends in themselves rather than a means to an end and are, after a period of grace in which everyone is obliged to pay lip service to engaging with them, quietly dropped. A year or so later another similar, completely useless programme is introduced; strangely no feedback is ever delivered on the efficacy of the programme this new initiative has replaced.

New Broadcasting House is one of the stars of the show.

As I have never worked for the BBC I cannot say how accurate W1A is as a depiction of what goes on there but my suspicion is that it is pretty close to the truth in many ways if my experience in a large organisation is anything to go by. You, like me may recognise some of the characters from the programme in your field of work!