He says the only split that has been shown to work is the divide between London weekday (Monday to Thursday) and London weekend.The alternative to a weekday/weekend split is an alternate day arrangement – which ITV has said is unworkable – or splitting up the day into bands sold by different sales houses.This could mean one sales house selling adverts during Coronation Street and another selling Lucky Jim It could be the only way to make it Lucky ITV.. It’s art, no question. But will the new Honda Accord commercial do the business as well? (If you haven’t seen this one yet, you’ll soon feel you have: it’s unquestionably the water-cooler ad conversation of the year – the one-where, the bit-where.)
It’s art, no question. And it’s a long commercial, two minutes, so it feels almost as long as the clever “shorts” they used to show in arthouse cinemas And it looks … just beautiful, in an installation kind of way.A cog-ish thing rolls across the floor, hits a car wheel, which sets off an incredibly inventive chain of perpetual motion among a range of bits of metal, plastic and rubber.
A ball bearing will run across a seesaw bridge and drive a sculptural chunk of metal to spin on its axis and hit a tubular affair, which then provokes a sort of robot crab to pincer itself forward. Some of the objects look familiar (the car wheel, for instance), some look pretty abstract (what was that?) and others again look like classic mid-20th-century art shapes – a touch of the Giacomettis.Actually, they’re all car parts.There’s a real Boy’s Own tension to it too, about whether they can keep up this very complex relay. Will the exhaust pipe moving sideways in a painfully slow flipover movement actually make that last quadrant that pushes the wotsit into the dingbat?And just like those films, there’s a clever through-leaves soundtrack of perfect clicks and whirrs.This is Heath Robinson or Emmett redesigned by Leonardo. Along the way there are several sequences that would make a commercial or an art video – or a directorial career – in themselves. For instance, there’s the pseudo-Alexander Calder mobile of car window glass, or the crawling crab made of windscreen-wiper arms.The whole thing nudges forward to a disembodied dashboard and finally to a steel seesaw with a steely-grey Honda Accord on it, which tips forward and lets the car move across the screen to a blast of updated Isaac Hayes-ish clean funk, while a laconic PJ O’Rourke American voiceover says: “Isn’t it nice when things just …work?”This is obviously going to win every prize going.
It’s going to get you, gentle Sindy reader – a nice class of person – talking about it. But will it help move Honda out of the Jap also-ran league into the BMW and Audi shortlist one, the place where people really want your brand and will pay the premium? I think it will. A business clever enough to commission this work will seem more like your kind of person, and a car with so many delicious clicks and whirrs will sound seriously well made.peter sru.co.uk. The housing market is spiralling out of control – but only on television. Never have the schedules been so dominated by one genre of programming And it’s spreading. And it’s spreading.
In an effort to capitalise on the phenomenal success of series such as House Doctor and Location, Location, Location, programme-makers have devised more weird and wonderful new property shows.Gardening, renovation and even housework are among the subjects to be covered in a glut of formats designed to show viewers how to maximise the value of their homes.Though the property boom may be waning, producers are confident their latest shows will be recession-proof. By focusing on home improvement, rather than buying and selling, they hope to appeal to people with no intention of moving, as well as those who need to extract every ounce of value from their sales in a more depressed market.And the most aspirational property series, Relocation Relocation – in which city-based professionals sell up and buy two new homes elsewhere – is to focus on less affluent house-hunters in its next series.Kirsty Allsopp, who presents the Channel 4 show and its sister series, Location, Location, Location, says property programmes are being forced to adapt to the changing concerns caused by fluctuating house prices.
But she believes viewers will always want to “snoop” around other people’s homes – no matter how far the market plummets.”We are a nation unlike any other obsessed with purchasing, decorating and improving our homes,” she said. “I’m amazed there haven’t been property programmes long before now. If the market dips, I don’t think it will make so much of a difference. People will just become armchair traders.”Ms Allsopp, who runs Garrington Home Finders with her co-presenter, Phil Spencer, says the second series of Relocation Relocation will reflect the fact that not all sellers are left with £500,000 to spend. While many Londoners have seen the value of their homes soar over the past 10 years, large numbers of people are currently priced out of the market in the South-east.”I remember when I bought my first home for £72,000 in Battersea 10 years ago,” she said. “Now it’s worth £240,000 and there’s no way someone in the job I was in then would ever be able to afford it.”She added that a fall in house prices would arguably make some property shows more popular – by appealing to those on lower incomes who now felt able to consider buying their own homes for the first time.The makers of most of the new shows seem to be following Ms Allsopp’s advice.
