Dates In My Diary

I am always interested when offered an invitation to a free webinar - they are great because you can dip out easily if it is not interesting but best of all you never have to leave your desk, so if the subject matter is good I try to attend. But when I received an invitation today I had to check the date and make sure it was not an April Fool's prank.

The invitation came via ExecuNet and it sounded good as it is part of the Power Break series and was entitled 'Weathering The Storm: Executive Talent Management In An Economic Downturn'. The sort of subject matter I'm interested in, I was about the accept the invitation when I noticed who the speaker was - a Dr. Anna Tavis who happens to be Global Head of Talent Management and Organizational Development at AIG Investments.

It was at that point that I reached for the calendar and checked the date.

AIG is not exactly the most shining example of best practices in terms of talent management or organizational development for that matter. On around its third or fourth round of Fed bail outs, it has consumed well over $200bn of cash pumped into it and is in state hands. Clearly the 'talent' they have is for building a house of cards in terms of investment and organizationally the company looks virtually defunct.

Still, I expect I will be getting invites to an RBS seminar on 'How to maximise your pension when your company is bust' and an invite from Jaqui Smith on 'How to maximise your expense allowances' in conjunction with Brown, McNulty, Conway and Darling. I am also waiting for tips on 'Knowing when to set up a blind trust when you are not meant to get paid enough to have one' by Lord Mandelson who follows on from his insightful series on 'How to get sacked twice, consort with rich Russians, get a peerage and a handsome pay off', 'How to get a passport pronto', and 'Mortgage loans made simple.'

I am also expecting a seminar invite from Tony Blair simply entitled, 'Timing', while 'The Janet and John guide to quantitative easing' by Yvette Cooper should be good too. The best should be the jointly presented seminar by Gordon Brown and Barack Obama called 'Big Number Theory - how to destroy an awful lot of money and someone else pay for it.'

Cool Facts of The Week For Pub Conversations

Did you know that monkeys show organisational skills? Perhaps AIG should consider using a few but it was found that monkeys at Stockholm Zoo pelted stones at visitors. Studies showed that before the Zoo opened each day, the monkeys would look around for stones, make piles of them behind a bush and then when the visitors came by, they would pelt the stones at them.

In another revelation, it seems that chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, thus proving that prostitution is indeed the oldest profession after all. I wonder many pieces of rump Max Mosely paid for his sessions over the years?

A recent study at John Hopkins University has shown a link between oral sex and some throat cancers. It seems to be all to do with the HPV virus which can cause cancer and it has been suggested that those who have oral sex with more than 6 partners have 9 times greater chance of getting throat cancer - which is a greater risk than from smoking or drinking alcohol. I'm sure there is some witty line to be added here but I shall refrain.

It is good to know that Reality TV is getting to the nub of topical issues. Fox TV in the US is putting together a series called 'Someone's Gotta Go' where employees of small companies decide which one of their colleagues gets laid off.

And finally, a woman in Berlin is to divorce her husband because he cleans too much. There, it's a message to all men not to try too hard - it could ruin your marriage.

Reality TV Gone Mad?

I think the new form of voyeuristic entertainment is cheap, unimaginative, morbid and totally lacking in talent. It's lining the pockets of the makers who are thin on ideas but exploiting the public's fascination with other people's lives - however uninteresting they may be.

Big Brother is about the nadir of it. The original formula of unknowns slung into a house and the camera is the fly on the wall. It could not be more boring and lifeless. I once spent an entire party talking to a guy who gave me the rundown of the characters and why they were entertaining. By the end I stopped him and said that he had said nothing of any interest in the last two hours so he called me an unintelligent expletive.

But that's the sum of it - try explaining the phenomenon to someone else and it sounds boring and that's because it is just like watching paint dry.

The Rise Of Talentless Stars

I had formed my opinion early on Jade Goody. She was brash, mouthy and in many ways unattractive as a person and the epitome of what is known as an 'Essex Girl'. Yet she was propelled from backwater Essex into stardom after winning a Big Brother series. She got her own shows, her own perfume and when her stock faded perhaps because the public found out there was not much more to her than her mouth, she got to go on that home of failed stars and former convicts, Celebrity Big Brother.

She rose again to notoriety, this time for the wrong reason. I watched some of the clips of the Show and was angry that this unintelligent girl with a mouth bigger than her brain had been allowed back on prime time TV and behaved in such a way. She was jealous of intelligence and sophistication and so she reverted to racist remarks - and like all who do so, claimed she was not a racist.

She tried much to rub out that tag - travelling to India after profuse apologies and then the ultimate publicity stunt, a place on India's version of Celebrity Big Brother hosted by the very person she had insulted, Shilpa Shetty. We were mugs to give her another chance and it sent out all the wrong messages to young people.

Jade Goody - The Person

But this Essex Girl had the ultimate clock ticking. On that program, results of her smear tests were revealed on air and she was given the news she had Cervical Cancer to a degree that she required immediate treatment. She left the program and returned home.

The sequence of events is lost for me as my interest was no more than passing. I have to honestly admit that I suspected a cruel hoax was afoot to try to endear the girl to the public and she would be 'cured miraculously' so she would once again have an elevated status on TV.

But reality has a nasty habit of being - well, reality.

Perhaps the ultimate insult to us all was that Goody had submitted to the influence of Publicist Max Clifford and agreed to a documentary tracking her treatments and her life with the The Big C.

I was cynical and alarmed. It opened up personal wounds and all sorts of dilemmas sprung to mind. For instance, Jade Goody was proposing to make money from her illness and I thought of the amazing Jane Tomlinson who had run for her life when terminally ill, raising countless millions in the cause of fighting her disease. I thought of another celebrity, Wendy Richard, who had recently faced her illness and death with dignified privacy. I thought of countless cancer victims like my father who faced their disease with humility and courage, who asked for little and got little. It's a disease that is very personal to a lot of people and here we saw a TV star doing the 'Big I am' and pointing the arrow of sympathy toward herself and making money in the process.

Something inside me was deeply affronted but something also thought differently.

The Reality of Disease And Death

"I never took my boys for granted, nor my house. I took just living for granted," said Jade Goody on the Show last night and I admit at that point my opinions changed. She was boorish, mouthy, unintelligent - she couldn't even pronounce 'Welwyn' least of know where it was even though it was not a few miles from her home - yet she was very human.

For all her lack of finesse, her shameless lack of any discernible talent, her seeming lack of intellect and ability to express herself without expletives, she had the nous and the savvy of a mother to provide for her offspring and family in the only way she knew how. Having exploited the public's fascination in reality TV stars to get where she was, she shamelessly was using the same people - and more - to extract as much money as she could to provide for her boys after her death.

You could have no truck with that no matter how you may feel about the silent deaths of millions of others from the disease.

What It Means

At the age of 27 and in the public's avid eye, this young mum was to show how she was fighting cancer and preparing for her death. From what little I have seen it has been a humbling experience - full of humility, more than a modicum of fun, full of the fear of dying and the anger of someone robbed of a long future and the lost prospect of bringing up her young sons.

It is the hardest of realities.

I have a problem with filming people dying. I have a problem with society's frenzy on celebrity. I have a problem with the violence in which we live and seem to accept as life. I have a problem with TV makers lacking in ideas just rehashing turgid ideas and exploiting society's fascination with the lives of others and the sin of 'Envy'.

But I no longer have a problem with Jade Goody. In her short life she has led us a merry dance - from loud-mouthed, talentless Essex Girl to racist to fighting cancer. If just one young girl avoids cancer because of Jade's celebrity then her Show and life will have achieved something.

But her one real achievement in life is the very human motivation of all mothers, to provide for her children both when alive and when gone.

She will have achieved it and good on her.