Your Name Here (Subject To Bailout)

Much was made on tonight's Match Of The Day of the strange scenario at The Hawthorns, where West Brom played without a shirt sponsor because they don't have one and West Ham played without a shirt sponsor because XL Holidays went belly up on Friday, leading to this rather fetching example of the seamstress' art;

What went less noticed was that there was another club playing today whose shirt sponsor also recently collapsed. Then again, that's not entirely unreasonable, since Match Of The Day is not Newsnight* and, let's face it, amidst the shambles that is Newcastle United, who's spending any time looking at their kit?

Mind you, a few more people might be watching at Kingston Park on Sunday when Newcastle Falcons model this;

And if the rain continues to hold off, my beloved Gloucestershire will run out at the Riverside to be faced with this delightful number;

The difference, of course, is that Northern Rock only collapsed far enough for Alastair Darling to get his balls out of Gordon's pocket and do what Vince told him to. Even so, you might imagine that the newly-nationalised Rock would have cut out any extraneous spending, but apparently not.

It's entirely possible that our present Government have far too much faith in the ability of sponsorship to apply the aforementioned cosmetic product to the aforementioned porcine ungulate. Equally however, a cynic might suggest that Newcastle-upon-Tyne North and City Of Durham are somewhat more marginal than West Ham and East Ham...

Oh wait, that's right, I am a cynic...

*insert your own “Hansen and Lawro analyse Labour's woes” sketch here

Unintelligent Intelligence

Adland is a fairly mythical place and with good reason. Nevertheless, there is a fine distinction to be drawn between poetic licence and flat-out factual inaccuracy. Moreover, when the potential sinner is theoretically in the business of intelligence, proper appreciation of the niceties of reality is positively essential to avoid death by irony.

In fairness to GCHQ, the task they face in terms of recruitment advertising is enormous. MI5 and MI6 have the Beeb fighting their corner with Spooks which, while increasingly delusional (Code 9 may be the single most insane spin-off programme ever created) at least imbues the spies foreign and domestic with a little je ne sais quoi. GCHQ, meanwhile, sits in its monolith by the motorway with no action heroes or pin-ups to overcome the fundamental London-centricity of our national psyche.

Realistically, the only approach available is to turn that perch on the edge of the Cotswolds into an advantage. It's an approach that should be fairly easy to implement too; naturally biased against the place as I am, even I will admit that heading to the leafy Georgiana of Cheltenham is massively different to the sort of governmental exile that the DVLA or HMRC represent.

Unfortunately, the splendour of Montpellier and the gentility of Charlton Kings weren't enough for whichever agency is responsible for the latest round of shelter posters that were adorning the Great Western Main Line as I made my trip east this weekend. Instead of classic urban living or suburban bliss, the image we instead find beneath the vaguely pathetic but contractually required claims of coolness by association is that of a Cotswolds village. The tagline?

Work for your country. Live in the country.

It's a beautiful sentiment, but one let down by those pesky strictures of reality. Note in particular the key enjoinder of the poster, namely that the energised reader should text a word to a five digit number. It is fairly fundamental that, if your chosen method of communication is a text message, the type of person you are trying to attract is a young one; then again, the type of person you're trying to attract to a career with a poster is probably not exactly middle-aged either.

Equally, said young person is unlikely to be far along the career path and as such is being recruited to a junior post, and a junior non-London weighted government post at that. One thing that you can say for certain about such positions is that the pay isn't going to get you very far in the property market of the Cotswolds, the land that affordable housing forgot.

Still, advertising would not be advertising if there wasn't one born every minute. And yet somehow the thought of the ones born every minute being our first line of defence in the intelligence war doesn't exactly inspire confidence...

And I Got 75% On That So They Let Me Right In…

Living as I do as an ex-pat in the North, most of my information about goings on in the south comes from the view from train windows. And if my experience of station platforms from Winchester to Wolverhampton is anything to go by, there is a least one trend that has bridged the North-South divide.

I refer of course to the incessant marketing of universities. In Granadaland we’re very much in peak season for it, which is great because no university has yet produced an advertisement that wasn’t unintentionally hilarious. To wit;

• Salford – It’s bad enough that their official slogan is “A Greater Manchester University”, but now they’ve produced a poster that’s meant to be a painting-by-numbers key to why there are 30 great reasons to study at Salford, half of which boil down to, “Salford; It’s quite near Manchester”
• Huddersfield – I’m sorry, I don’t care if he is the Chancellor, but it is impossible to take seriously an advert in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells me I should go to Huddersfield.
• Lincoln – This advert basically shows every single building the university has with various graduates in front of them. I’ve been to that campus, and I swear it was so nondescriptly modern I didn’t recognise it till they told me where it was at the end.
• Edge Hill – In fairness Edge Hill have updated their ad, but not so much as to remove the two key flaws it has, namely 1) that if you want me to be impressed by how many courses you offer, name-checking Sports, Business and Performing Arts isn’t going to cut it (and by the way, way to go reinforcing the stereotype!) and 2) flashing the words Liverpool and Manchester in front of me will not disguise the fact that you are in Ormskirk.

But what really gets my goat is this sudden craze for having university signs in train stations. I can think of two universities that have a legitimate excuse for this; Salford and Birmingham, and then only because they have stations on campus. For anyone else in university administration who thinks it’s clever, get your butts on the seats, zip your lips and listen hard…

In the first instance, marketing is a powerful force but it has not yet managed to raise anyone from the dead. There are only three groups of people going to university; those who want to get as far away from home as possible (there are reasons why I ended up at Manchester and this is one of them), those who want to stay as close to home as possible, and those who only bother at the last minute. The first two will research where they want to go and make an informed decision, the third will go to the university closest to where they live. Your sign on the station will matter to precisely none of these people.

Secondly, I have £14,000 worth of debt because I went to university, people starting now are likely to develop £23,000 and if you all have your way that number will be £35,000 (seriously, the Russell Group want fees to go up to £7,000), so trust me when I tell you that seeing that money pissed away on tacky signs makes me rather angry, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…

More importantly, however, no-one is going to decide to both go to university and to go to a particular one because they see a sign in a station. And if they do, it might be suggested that needing to see a sign in a station to realise that the University of Reading is a higher education facility in Reading to which one may apply is a pretty good indicator of incapability as far as academia is concerned.

I am not one of those who would seek to belittle graduates of the likes of the University of Gloucestershire (not least because my sister’s at that one right now doing Early Childhood Studies, a by no means unworthy choice), but we must understand that urging universities to become ad hoc ad agencies to meet an arbitrary target is folly. Yes, we need more graduates, but the problem is not that, say, Poland is producing more graduates than we are, it is that it is producing graduates with qualifications in science, in engineering, and yes in plumbing. No degree is meaningless to the person who obtains it, but it is the government’s duty to ensure that degrees are not meaningless to the nation, and right now it is a duty they are spectacularly failing to meet.

PS I should make a special mention of the University of Southampton, who manage to have their grubby little paws on three stations, at least one of which is quite rude, as I’m fairly sure Winchester has a university of its own (not least because one of my friends is at it right now too!)

PPS There’s a special prize to anyone who can identify the two comedy references (i.e. not the Incredible Hulk one) in this entry. I have to have a little fun with it sometimes, nerd-like or otherwise!