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Someone on Twitter had been goading Lord Sugar about his (frankly ridiculous) emailer phone. But he was having none of it. He replied to the tweet, "what's the point of home phone that lets you display emails?†by saying "......500k sold and £10m in my pocket.... what have you done tw..â€
Had he really sold that many and made that much money from them? They retailed at about £80 and according to his stats he had personally made £20 from each (and apparently put all those twenty pounds into his pocket which must have really stretched the fabric, but then I guess if you've got that much money it doesn't matter as you can buy more trousers and ask the tailor to give them super huge pockets). Did he really get 25% of the retail value - it seemed a bit Jimmy Hill. But looking into it I discovered something I didn't realise. The Amstrad emailer phone would charge you 20p every time you checked your emails and had lots of other premium line charges for games and web surfing and apparently even access to grainy black and white porn which Mark Wilson on Twitter described as “being drunk and looking at something in 1930â€. I know this machine came out at the turn of the century when maybe not everyone had access to a laptop, but the idea of paying all that money just to get your emails via dial up must have still seemed like an expensive anachronism (certainly by the mid-noughties). Was Sugar right to be proud that he had fleeced half a million people with such a clunky and useless bit of tech? Half a million of those things are presumably not cluttering up landfill (not that Amstrad is alone in creating expensive plastic devices with a short shelf life and limited use). I know he is all about the money, but such pride should surely come from something that turns out to be innovative and useful, not something rubbish that possibly ended up costing the user more than a cheap laptop might have done. And at least you could have got some colour pornography on that.
I know that I am on thin ice when it comes to criticising someone for churning out rubbish, but at least most of my stuff is free and none of it has put £10 million in my pocket. My pockets have remained unstretched which is at least something.
I also massively enjoyed Simon Brodkin's Sepp Blatter stunt in which he walked into a press conference, tried to buy the World Cup for North Korea and then showered Blatter in bank notes. He's a very accomplished stand-up, though his stuff hasn't always been my cup of tea, but the live stunts that he is presumably doing for a TV show are brave and often properly satirical. The image of a sad-faced and fuming Blatter surrounded by cascading money will be one that he will never shift and I suspect might well be used on his obituary. The coolness required to keep on talking and to casually turn as he walked away and throw the money so perfectly is almost chilling. But it's very exciting when comedy interacts with the real world in this unpredictable way. It's improvised and it might backfire and there's no real way of knowing the consequences when you go into this (and there is surely the real possibility of being hurt or even shot in such a scenario - though to be honest the security took so long to deal with it I think any bullets they shot might not have arrived until next week). Like Al Murray's decision to stand against Farage this was a thrilling bit of comedy that had the possibility of going wrong, but also of changing the situation and affecting the perception of the person it was aimed at. Stunts are damp squibs more often than not, but when they work they are amazing.
And I had two more great chats tonight with a delightfully gossipy Paul Sinha and the considered and smart Al Murray. They won't be out until September, which led to some funny exchanges as we tried to pretend they were being recorded in the week they went out. But they will be well worth the wait.
