"After doing this you can do anything. You can be the next Fellini!"-- Raef (Fiennes?)
It's the advertising task this week. Sir Alan tells the teams they have to create a brand of tissues, design the packaging, film a television advert, and make a print-ad, before pitching their new product to industry insiders Ogilvy.
Alpha team are led by Alex, with Lucinda and Lee – who start brainstorming tissue-related names for their product. Snot and Cosynose are considered, before they settle on Atishu. Renaissance is led by Raef, with Claire, Helene and Michael – who decide to call their product I Love My Tissues.
Raef and Michael decide to co-direct the advert, meaning Claire and Helen tackle the packaging, design and print-ad by themselves. Claire's experience as a beauty buyer ensures a stylish, professional-looking product. Raef and Michael, both budding thespians who have starred in Guys & Dolls, spend most of the day fawning over each other's am-dram background and scouting locations. They eventually decide to hire a celebrity to appear in their advert, and choose weathergirl Sian Lloyd to play a snotty-nosed schoolboy's mother – despite the fact Lloyd isn’t know for being a mother, and has strong connotations with meteorology, not tissues!
On Alpha, Lucinda feels that her female perspective is being ignored by Alex and Lee. Unfortunately, she's generally ignored by her team-mates, and can only complain once the garish yellow tissue box is unveiled. Alex clearly enjoys directing the TV advert with three professional actors, but the finished promo is limp, naff and hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
Next up is the preparation for the presentations each team will give. Claire isn't happy with Raef and Michael's advert, but she delivers a confident and professional pitch (without notes) to a room full of industry big wigs and surprise attendee Sir Alan. In stark contrast, Lee's pitch is bland, stuttering and clearly needed a lot more work.
The adverts are shown: Renaissance's has a brief glimpse of Sian Lloyd wiping her son's nose before he heads to school, where he arrives on a park bench and offering another tissue to a crying little girl. See it here. Alpha's concerns a sickly looking girl being looked after by her parents, before the dad heads off to work, safe in the knowledge that anti-bacterial tissues will help get his daughter over her illness. See it here.
Sir Alan meets with the advertising hotshots, who give their honest opinions on both adverts. Armed with that knowledge, Sir Alan calls both teams into the boardroom for the results. Inevitably, Alpha's sub-par effort with its brash yellow box and dodgy acting comes under fire from Sir Alan for its unsubtle awfulness. Renaissance's advert was much slicker and artistic, but failed to underline what the product was, or reveal any information about it.
Against everyone's expectation, Sir Alan says it's a win for Alpha, saying: "You won because although you had a horrible advert and horrible box, you threw it in people's faces. The actor talked about tissues three times, and mentioned they were antibacterial twice." As lucky winners, they head off for a spending spree at Harvey Nichols.
Raef, Michael, Claire and Helene are called back into the boardroom for failing the task. Sir Alan offers his opinion on where they went wrong: "You made the biggest error going. I don't know what your bloody advert was about. You don't mention tissues once in the voiceover. It would not sell many tissues. I am frustrated because you did 95% of the work better than the other team. And we've got Spielberg and Fellini sitting over there. I didn't send you out to make a remake of Ben Hur, I wanted a hard-selling advert. Artistically it's wonderful. It might win some award in Cannes but where are the bloody tissues?"
Michael starts to claim there was a shot of the tissue product in the first cut of the ad, but it was taken out for looking vulgar. This infuriates Raef, who doesn't think its fair his co-director take the credit for everything good about the campaign, and put the blame for everything else on his shoulders. Sir Alan eventually comes to an unpredictable conclusion: "Raef, you put yourself across as Mr. Elegance, as Mr. Perfect, yet I feel -- and I've never said this before -- I feel you've been lucky. The one of you that is going is the one who, with all due respect, is a lot of hot air. Raef, you're fired."
So there you have it. One of the better episodes, packed full of hilarious moments – like Raef and Michael's "romance" (love the yoghurt moment), and the abysmal adverts. There were 2 lucky escapes this week: useless pretty-boy Alex, who masterminded a hideous advert and helped create an unsightly tissue box, but clawed a victory purely because the other team made a vital error in being too subtle. The only good thing about Alpha's campaign was the product name "Atishu". I don’t blame Lucinda for criticising everything, but it was irritating. I didn't understand why Lee and Alex didn't get her input and approval with any of the big issues, though.
The second escapee was Michael -- again. It seems like he has a full-proof way of getting around Sir Alan: look upset, make puppy dog eyes, agree with Sir Alan on why the task failed, claim you've learned from your mistakes, work out what Sir Alan thinks was the primary reason for failure, and then blame someone else for that underlying decision. This week must have been harder for him, as I do think he liked Raef quite a bit, and they did a decent job with the advert (artistically) – but he still wormed his way out of a firing. Scoundrel.
I'd started to believe Raef could win this year, but was Sir Alan right in suggesting he's superficial polish with no substance? Maybe. But who's going to win now? I have a suspicion it's going to be Claire...
Alex: Project managed a truly awful campaign in every respect, apart from the witty name (that Lee thought up) and the fact it hammered audiences over the head with the product. This was the luckiest escape I've ever seen on the show. Can he go all the way on this lucky streak?
Claire: A very slick and professional pitch. Maybe she could have worked out what was wrong with the Renaissance advert and helped put it right at the eleventh hour (in an ideal world), but I don't blame her for the failure. She did her part very well and created a very appealing box – despite its god-awful name. I Love My Tissues? Seriously? Ugh.
Helene: She wasn't very prominent. But is she ever? I really can't see her winning, but she does have a strange knack of slipping through the net week to week...
Lee: This wasn’t a good week for Lee. He made bad decisions everywhere, but he did come up with the name Atishu – which earned him a brownie point. But I take it away for that incompetent, last-minute scramble to give a pitch.
Lucinda: I think she has good judgement and nice people skills, but her nutty demeanour means she sometimes has trouble being taken seriously. And did anyone else find her strangely attractive in that silver, sparkly dress at Harvey Nicks? Hmm, just me then.
Michael: The villain of the fourth season, clearly. Why did Sir Alan make Raef project manager instead of Michael, who had volunteered? If he had of done, I'm sure Michael would have been fired this week. Is he destined for the final? Can he win this thing? What does Sir Alan see in him? Does it tell him anything that he's constantly in the board room pleading for leniency? Oh, I give up.
21 May 2008
BBC1, 9.00 pm
