Still listening?

Picture: Paramount/Gale Adler

The history of cherished TV shows being revived long after they’ve disappeared in their prime has not always been a happy one. For every success - a Doctor Who, say - you could cite the disappointing Open All Hours, relaunched without the deceased Ronnie Barker, or the recent attempt at reviving Will & Grace. Half the problem is that TV companies, much like their first cousins the film studios, have an interest in retreading something old and familiar rather than commission something new. 

Inevitably, this risks messing with the very magic that made a property much loved to begin with (the 2016 Dad’s Army film did just that - an awkward homage that failed to justify its rationale of updating a TV series that has arguably never been bettered). Some expired properties live on as spinoffs: you could easily argue that Better Call Saul is actually better than Breaking Bad, of which it serves as a prequel. 

Some, though, don’t live up to expectation. Matt Le Blanc’s Friends offshoot Joey was never the snappy ensemble piece of its parent. Even that highly anticipated one-off Friends reunion - planned for last May but shelved by the pandemic - hasn't exactly had people holding their breath in anticipation. Don't get me wrong, Friends was wonderful, 30 years ago in its pomp, and still holds its own in endless syndication, but are we really that desperate to see Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe and Ross in middle age? The whole premise of Friends was a group of twentysomethings living in New York. When it ended, with parenthood and suburban living, it felt like it had run its natural course.

So it’s with some apprehension that we read that Frasier is coming back, 17 years after it came to a timely end in one of the greatest sitcom finales ever. Paramount announced this week that Kelsey Grammer will reprise his role as Dr. Frasier Crane for a brand new run as an anchor of its new digital streaming service Paramount+. 

Demand may, then, meet supply in helping Paramount+ off the ground with a much-loved property like Frasier. But as Roseanne found, when it returned briefly, a revival is not helped if its principal then goes and does something stupid: Roseanne Barr brought it all abruptly to an end by posting a racist tweet (“repugnant”, in the words of the ABC Network president) that got her fired. 

That, though, didn’t hold back the reinvention of the show as The Conners - arguably the first ever spinoff of a reboot. It's still going, unlike Will & Grace which returned after 11 years away only to last three seasons before getting axed. In truth, it was no longer that funny, seemingly retreading old jokes around the central four characters and not offering much new. 

Frasier was, you’ll recall, a spinoff from the equally loved Cheers, and it’s still a matter of debate as to which was the better, both being blessed with faultless casting and faultless writing. Frasier ported one of Cheers’ supporting characters and turned him into the centrepiece of a new ensemble, built around the concept of the divorced and hoity-toity psychiatrist moving into a swanky Seattle apartment with his decidedly blue collar dad, and his scampish pet dog. The dynamic was brilliantly expanded by the addition of Crane’s younger and even more neurotic brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), and an English physical therapist, Daphne Moon, who looked after the brothers’ father while becoming the secret, and then not so secret love interest to the junior Crane sibling. Even Eddie the dog became a distinctive character in his own right, earning his own front cover on America's showbiz digest Entertainment Weekly. Rightfully, the show won 37 Emmy Awards over the course of 11 seasons, with Grammer and Pierce winning four between them, along with Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild gongs. 

This week's announcement placed Frasier’s revival as the headline act of Paramount+, and was accompanied by a suitably ‘corporate’ quote from Grammer, saying that he would “gleefully anticipate sharing the next chapter in the continuing journey of Dr. Frasier Crane.” However, it is not yet known who would be joining him on that journey: John Mahoney, the Lancashire-born actor who played Crane’s irascible ex-cop dad Martin, died of cancer in 2018; Jane Leeves, the other British cast member (who played Daphne, ironically as a Lancastrian, even though she was born in Essex), said earlier this month that had no intention of giving up her role in the US medical drama series The Resident to do the then-rumoured Frasier reboot. 

The joy of Frasier - much like Cheers - was that it was cleverly multi-dimensional. Frasier may have been the pivot - be it plot lines focused on his Seattle radio station, the relationship with Niles, or their dynamic with Martin - but there was also Martin's dynamic with Daphne, and Daphne’s ‘will-they-won’t-they’ relationship with Niles. For me, at least, it made Frasier ‘appointment TV’ on a Friday night. As for the new series, Paramount promised “more exactly the same than ever”, but wouldn’t be drawn on storylines or casting, including the likelihood of Pierce returning. Grammer himself had previously said that he wouldn’t revive the show without his on-screen brother, surely one of the most serendipitous casting decisions in television history (a happy accident - originally there wasn’t going to be a brother until a casting manager saw a 10x8 of Pierce and saw what appeared to be a strong family resemblance). 

In Cheers, the educated, pompous and ever-so slightly snooty Frasier Crane was the fish out of water amongst the bar flies he drank with in Boston. Frasier flipped personas in moving to Seattle, with his ex-cop dad and the Mancunian Daphne becoming the grounded points of reference, leaving the brothers to fuss over fine wines, Debussy and the cut of their well appointed suits.

Quite what the Frasier reboot will be like, then, remains wide open. When a potential return first surfaced in 2018, Grammer told The Guardian that there would be risks: “It would be quite a breathtaking failure to try to do it and not do it better than the previous show - and I think that’s almost impossible. To pick up that responsibility would be a very brave thing to do.” A year later the subject came up again, but this time Grammer put a little more substance behind ideas that were clearly under consideration, including setting the show in a city other than Crane's home town. “We’ll see how people respond to it because it’s not going to be the same place, it’s not going to be Seattle,” Grammer said in 2019. “It’s not going to be the same Frasier, it’s going to be the man in his next iteration.”  

That man has, in truth, gone through two reinventions, with his own show and a guest appearance by Grammer as the character in a crossover episode of the sitcom Wings. But what garnered all those Emmys during its run between 1993 and 2004, building to an audience of 37 million in the US alone for its final episode, was the combination of saturated creativity - a vast team of show runners, producers and writers - and a core ensemble cast who lived in our hearts for thirty minutes every week. Only Fools And Horses comes to mind as an equivalent (although that had just one writer behind it). 

Here lies the key to whether the reboot will work. “Great television is about creating characters that resonate with audiences and creating universes that viewers want to spend time within," Tim Glanfield, editorial director of the Radio Times said this week. And from that, he said, some shows create a genuine emotional need. “The characters are missed, the world it occupied is mourned for, a little gap is left in people's lives, and audiences often ask, 'why couldn't they have made more?’”.

Picture: NBC

The compulsion will be for Frasier’s producers to do their damnedest to bring back as many of the original cast as possible, simply as that was where the magic lived. Cryptically, when appearing on James Corden’s US chat show in 2019, he hinted that any reboot would be a “third act” rather than a continuation. “The same group of characters, but in a different setting,” he said. “Something has changed in their lives.” Quite what, we don’t know, but it's wise to suspect that it will not be the sort of franchised reinvention that Blackadder went through. All of the principle cast - if they commit - will have aged (even the lad who played Frasier and Lillith Crane’s son, Frederick, is now 32), which, like the Friends reunion, might either inspire the creative premise, or be its failure. Hopefully we will find out, if Paramount confirms details of when - and where - the reboot will appear.

The bigger challenge, arguably, is how Frasier will connect with its audiences. Unlike Friends, the show was never a feature of younger viewing habits. Since it came off air, anyone under the age of thirty will have become hooked on the myriad reality series that keep the streaming services afloat. But, like the Friends reunion, I’m sure there will be a quorum of viewers eager to recreate their Friday evenings in the '90s, settling down at 9pm in eager anticipation of that jazzy xylophone riff and an animated squiggle of Seattle’s Space Needle, welcoming us into Crane’s KACL radio studio. All followed by Grammer’s mellifluous baritone saying the words: “I’m listening”.

A mighty wind

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For months now we’ve been looking for escape, a release from the relentless psychodrama that has been the pandemic. And yesterday, we caught a glimpse of freedom. No, not Boris Johnson’s “roadmap” out of lockdown, but a ten-second audio recording of a few puffs of celestial wind. Actual pops of noise created by a force of nature on another planet: Mars. Mind actually blown. 

The timing of NASA’s Perseverance mission to the red planet has been uncanny: when it was first conceived, no one could have imagined where the world would be in February 2021 - and will be for a few months to come. Since its rover landed on the Martian surface the other day, Perseverance has given the world something to properly marvel at, a true 'moment' in the expansion of human knowledge. 

We’ve understandably long held fascination for our planetary neighbours, ever since the ancient Egyptians and Chinese first plotted the sky at night. But Mars, that tiny but distinctive red dot amongst the brighter white lights, has been of particular interest, generating its own rich mythology. This was long before scientists theorised that this relative near-neighbour ('just' 253 million miles from Earth, give or take the waning of its solar orbit) might potentially be a cousin, a product of the same event, 3.8 billion years ago, that sent our worlds spinning into orbits they occupy today. 

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars has been an obsession for our kind for centuries. The Sumerians and ancient Greeks were the first to track its movements, then appearing to the naked eye as a little different to the others. But it wasn’t until Galileo Galilei conducted the first telescopic viewing of Mars in 1610 that interest really kicked into gear. Before long, astronomers were noting the planet’s features and by the Victorian era, it had become the subject of fanciful notions of harbouring life - and, possibly, hostile life. Quite what foundation authors like H.G. Wells had for assuming that little green men were looking back this way with nefarious intent is not really known, but as astronomer Carl Sagan wrote: “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears”. The planet’s depiction as the Roman God of War was even interpreted by composer Gustav Holst in the foreboding Mars The Bringer Of War, the opening movement of The Planets suite. 

Theories about Mars as a planetary body have been equally as intoxicating: through the telescope’s optics, fascination has grown exponentially deeper, as its surface revealed topography and geology so tantalisingly similar to the deserts of our own world, its volcanoes (including Olympus Mons, the largest known in the solar system) and ice-covered polar regions. Several years ago, scientists found minerals in Australia that were a likely close match to the geochemistry first explorations of Mars had discovered. Even its seasons draw vague parallels to our own. The idea that we might share geological DNA is mind-bogglingly incredible.

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance may not be the first time something from here has landed up there (or down there, or over there, or wherever Mars is, geographically speaking), but in these COVID-impacted times, NASA has brilliantly distracted us with vivid, colourful sight of another world, albeit one without many striking features so far, but at least we haven’t yet seen anyone wearing a face mask, scurrying about at two metres distance from anyone else.

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

There are seven billion people on this world, but to the best of anyone’s knowledge, no one on Mars. As one scientist on Sky News this morning said, the idea that we might find someone up there is a notion now long gone. Not that I really care: we’ve been exposed to preposterous depictions of alien life via science fiction for decades - centuries even (Ezekiel's Wheel, anyone?). That Perserverence is, in drilling into the Jezero crater on Mars, looking for evidence of past microbial life, is no less awe-inspiring. Think about it: something made on Earth is currently on Mars, controlled remotely from Mission Control in Pasadena, digging into another planet to see if, once, organisms may have existed in much the same way as primitive life emerged here. As The Fast Show's 'Brilliant Kid' would say, "Aren't planetary probes amazing?!".

I’m no expert, and wouldn’t pretend to be, but having spent plenty of time exploring the rocky, arid landscape of California’s Mojave Desert, the high-resolution video images of the Martian surface coming from the Perserverence rover’s onboard cameras have only made the $2.7 billion NASA mission more impressive. Yes, there’s plenty money like that could be spent on, here on Earth, but the idea that human endeavour has landed a vehicle on Mars, with technical and aeronautical understanding that I’ll never begin to understand allowing a precision drop in that manic, seven-minute descent through the thin Martian atmosphere, is worth every penny in the pursuit of greater understanding of our own origins.

The Space Race in the 1960s eventually led to us becoming somewhat blasé about things beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Once Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the Moon, and subsequent Apollo missions appeared, briefly, to be routine, appeared to have been reached. In the 1980s, we grew used to the Space Shuttle missions - even in spite of the Challenger disaster - as the idea of a crewed reusable vehicle popping out to little more than Earth's front drive came across as the limit of endeavour. And then the excitement seemed to fade. Even astronauts squeezing onto to the International Space Station has become something of a mundanity. I would beg to differ: anything we do beyond Earth's gravity is a feat of staggering science, mathematics and engineering, both sending it up and bringing it back down again. I would still place the Apollo 11 mission, and the landing of men on the moon, as one of the greatest things mankind has ever done, along with developing language, inventing the wheel, medicine and air travel. 

Perseverance is not far off any of these. “I feel like we took a big leap of humanity,” Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa’s associate administrator for science, concluded about the mission. Last night’s video and - crucially - audio, added a fantastic new dimension. “All of us here on Earth [now] know what it’s like to see and hear on Mars and explore other worlds. This is as close as we can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”

In remarkable, clear pictures, we found ourselves looking on an alien world, as vivid as any terrestrial travel documentary. “It really is the surface of an alien world,” one of the Perseverance team said. They were not, of course, the first images of Mars we’d ever seen, but they were certainly the most staggering. Past missions had sent back pictures that, indeed, could so easily have been taken with a Polaroid camera out in the deserts beyond the Los Angeles city limits.

At some point we learned that Mars once featured vast liquid oceans, running water flowing across its geography in much the same way as it does here. The very juice of life. This has made Mars - perhaps more than any other body in the solar system - utterly compelling. And that’s what makes Zurbuchen’s statement so true and not hyperbole at all. 

Hearing Martian wind for the first time, caught by a microphone on the landing vehicle, compounded the marvel. Coupled with the rover’s myriad cameras, relaying back to us the rocky testures and actual colour of the ‘red planet’, we have been given access to the most unique tourist’s Instagram account ever. No wonder everyone at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena was “overjoyed, giddy” and “like kids in a candy store,” according to one project manager when Perserverence made its textbook landing the other night. They have a right to be. The team at Mission Control, plus thousands more working from home during lockdown, have pulled off another giant leap for mankind.

Chicken wings to the crib? Not any more

The power of advertising, eh? As my household will attest, one of the few TV commercials to get me animated over the last year since I moved in has been the Just Eat ad featuring Snoop Dogg. Now, I'd never hitherto given much attention to either Snoop or his music or, for that matter, hip-hop, but here I have been, involuntarily rocking along to the rapper expounding on his preferred home deliveries, namely...ahem...“Chicken wings to the crib,” “Tacos to the chateau” and “Chocolate fondue right on cue,” although I don't know which of the home delivery companies would bring that last item to your door.

The ad has become something of an obsession, to the extent that my girlfriend has agreed to it being played at my funeral, whenever that might happen (on an as-yet compiled playlist that should include Bowie's Heroes and Blue Öyster Cult's (Don't Fear) The Reaper, FYI), with the ancillary instruction that everyone in the congregation joins in with the ad's strapline, “Did somebody say Just Eat?”.

But now word reaches me that the spot is no more, and Just Eat is casting its net for an ad agency to dish up a new campaign for the brand. According to the advertising trade magazine Campaign, Just Eat has put their account up for grabs, with the agencies TBWA\London, Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Adam & Eve/DDB all reportedly pitching for the business, along with incumbent McCann London, who came up with the Snoop Dogg ad. The commercial, which made its debut last summer, was named by Campaign as one of its ads of 2020. In its citation, the magazine wrote that it was “pure, silly fun”, and Snoop's remix of the Just Eat jingle - which also works in the words “oodles of noodles” - leaves the viewer unable to watch “without nodding their head and singing along”. Yep, guilty as charged. 

Moreover, the Doggfather campaign (and its Christmas sequel featuring an all-puppet cast), proved to be a beneficially perfect storm for Just Eat, which tapped into the 387% increase in UK home deliveries during 2020’s lockdowns. So, if the rumours are correct, and the company paid Dogg £5.3 million for his services, the company will have seen a major return on their investment. A shame, then, to see the campaign end. It was silly and fun, but also brilliantly executed. And hats off, too, to the Dogg Man himself for not taking himself too seriously.

Celebrities have, though, been taking the corporate coin to shill for advertisers for decades. In fact, one of the earliest examples was Mark Twain, in the early years of the 20th Century, promoting pens with his name on them. Most celebrity endorsements have been of the straightforward “Hi. I'm X, and I endorse this product” variety, but there has been a shift towards the less serious. The Cinzano commercials with Joan Collins and Leonard Rossiter in the 1970s come immediately to mind.

But of the plethora of stars sending themselves up in return for, presumably, a juicy cheque, arguably the most baffling are the appearances of Robert De Niro - perhaps the greatest film actor of his generation - flogging cars and baked goods for laughs. In the last year we’ve seen the 76-year-old appear as “a trendy version of De Niro” in an ad for South Korean motor manufacturer Kia and its somewhat uninspiring electric model, the Niro (geddit?). Campaign magazine was less impressed, running the headline “Turkey of the Week: Robert De Niro's star power is wasted in Kia's ads,” concluding that enlisting a heavyweight actor like De Niro resulted in “very little reward” for the Kia brand. 

However, film critics will draw attention to the fact that the star of Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Godfather Part 2 has veered towards more light-hearted roles in his latter years (you could say it began with Meet The Fockers in 2004), but for someone usually regarded as the ultimate Method actor, seeing him dressed in a beanie hat and braces for Kia’s commercial still took a lot of acceptance. Not, however, as deep as his ads for Warburtons, the 146-year-old family-run bakery based in Bolton, to where De Niro flew to shoot a commercial for the company’s bagels.

The construct, you might recall, is of De Niro, brazenly playing an amalgam of his various gangster characters, attempting to “discourage” Warburtons chairman Jonathan Warburton from selling their own brand bagels in favour of “Nu York” buns, with the executive believing that the screen legend is actually in his office pitching a new film. You’d be right to consider this a strong case of suspended disbelief.

Picture: Warburtons

While De Niro’s comedy ads - and especially those for Warburtons - have inevitably prompted social media wags to suspect that the actor clearly must have a heavy divorce bill on his hands (he and wife of 21 years, Grace Hightower, filed for separation in December 2018), ‘Bob’ has been fairly sanguine about the role. He told GQ that he decided to do the spots after seeing Sylvester Stallone do one for Warburtons: “Look, they asked me to do it and I met the guy, Warburton, and I thought it was funny. I saw Stallone do it and I thought at least he has a sense of humour about it and about himself. And I thought I can look at it two ways: should I think I should never have done that? I'm too good for that or something? And I said, ‘fuck it!’, I'll do it. Why not?" adding: “Don't hold it against me." 

Whatever it did or didn’t do for De Niro’s reputation, it certainly hasn’t harmed Warburtons. The ad helped the company reverse 2018 losses of more than £6 million and return it to a £11 million profit in 2019. Quite what luring De Niro to the Lancashire mill town to shoot the ad (Snoop Dogg's Just Eat spot was shot at his 'Dogg Pound' in Los Angeles) cost the company is still not known (it’s rumoured to be six figures), but the Warburtons board was able to award itself a handsome £15 million dividend on the back of their fortunes driven by the star’s turn in their ad. On top of that, there’s the sheer kudos of adding De Niro to a list of celebs that have already shilled for the bakers, including Stallone, Peter Kay and The Muppets. And, let’s face it, if people like me are still talking about it, and that’s the kind of brand power that many advertisers can only crave.

Who's Zooming who?

Without doubt the story of last week had nothing to do with COVID-19, for once, but was about a Zoom call that went viral. By Friday evening, everyone had heard of Jackie Weaver, the heroic chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, who had presided over a meeting of Handforth Parish Council and ended up thwarting an attempted coup d'état. 

The chaotic session - which took place in December - found itself onto social media last week, and before you knew it, was being replayed every hour on Sky News and the BBC's rolling news channel, and even found itself on the world stage via CNN. Sitcom writers burst forth to say that the Handforth meeting was more comical than anything they could have devised. Even Reece Sheersmith, who created The League of Gentlemen and its hilariously surreal depiction of life in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, and on which you could easily have thought the stroppy burghers of Handforth were based. But, by yesterday, more tales had emerged of similarly dysfunctional public assemblies taking place on Zoom, which struck me as significant - not the fact that local administration is chaotic or being conducted online, but the prominence of the meeting platform itself: Zoom. 

In less than a decade Zoom has gone from a typical Silicon Valley startup to the de facto generic noun for online meetings, supplanting Skype and Apple’s FaceTime in the process - and pretty much in just this last year. To the chagrin of Microsoft and its Teams application and Cisco’s WebEx, everything is now “a Zoom call”. I had never heard of the platform until a couple of years ago, when the PR agency I was working with at my last company recommended that we switch to it from the company-mandated WebEx. It wasn’t entirely clear what the USP was, but it seemed more reliable as well as less rigid for participants at multiple companies and their own unique IT environments.

Picture: Zoom

It is clear, though, that throughout the last year of lockdown that the company founded by former Cisco engineering executive Eric Yuan (pictured right) in 2011 has come into its own. So much so that easily the smartest career move I’ve ever seen is that of a former colleague who joined Zoom last April as a international marketeer, just as the company's usage was going nuclear. 

By last spring, everyone and everything seemed to be taking place via Zoom. Even the business of government during the COVID-19 crisis, when Boris Johnson - confined to quarters by his own bout of the virus - was seen to hold a crucial meeting, during which the Zoom meeting ID was clearly visible. This prompted inevitable questions about the platform's security: to some, it came as a surprise that Her Majesty’s Government was, effectively, using the same app as families doing quiz nights and birthday drinks. This wasn’t the only occurrence of concerns about Zoom’s privacy, with the emergence of ‘Zoombombing’, whereby it was discovered that nefarious scrotes could hack into a Zoom meeting and bother it with explicit images. This was on top of more innocent Zoombombs when barely clothed flatmates accidentally walked through kitchens, along with children bouncing into meetings and cats leaping in front of webcams.

There is no doubt that Zoom, more than any other video communications platform before, has played an unprecedented role in creating a new and strange normality over the last year, taking the place of restaurants, pubs, living rooms and kitchen dining tables in enabling some form of social life, as well as keeping the business meeting culture going. It has played host to school lessons, church services, stag parties and blind dates. Even Britain’s Houses of Parliament have adopted a Zoom-based technology to facilitate business in the Commons, enabling up to 120 MPs to join any particular session while only 50 are allowed to be physically present in the chamber due to social distancing measures. Italy’s biggest ever mafia trial - the mass prosecution of 355 Calabrian ’NDrangheta suspects - is currently being conducted in a special courtroom in Lamezia Terme, with defendants in jails dotted across the country facing their accusers via Zoom.

Thanks to Zoom and its rivals we have all, in the last year, spent more time in strangers’ houses than ever before. I joined my current company in April and have only ever spent time with my new colleagues via laptop's webcam. And, yet, I know what my colleagues’ kitchens look like, their bedrooms even and what books they read (or purport to read, given the craze of artfully arranging bookshelves to showcase one’s literary tastes). We’ve even succumbed to insecurities about what we look like on Zoom: working from home used to mean rolling out of bed and sitting at the kitchen table in pyjamas and the first T-shirt that came to hand, until people realised that a meeting on Zoom placed dress code under even greater scrutiny than if you were actually in the office. 

This has led to fashion and beauty magazines running vacuous features about the perils of spending so much time on video calls. Ofcom has estimated that since the pandemic began we're spending 40% of our working weeks in online meetings. ‘Zoom face’ is, apparently, a thing, that we're now hyper-conscious of how we look down the barrel of a webcam, and that having it look up your nostrils and displaying the contents at the other end on a high-definition stream may not be the most attractive thing in the world. Scientists working for Unilever has even claimed that the blue light emitted by laptop screens is putting us at UV risk, and that five working days a week spent on video calls has the same impact on our skin as as 25 unprotected minutes in the midday sun. There are, too, more physical debilitations from the constant round of video conferences that now, as spines grow weary from being hunched over laptops on home furniture that wasn’t designed for nine-hour working days, and eyes that have become sore and tired from LED screens.

Our pain is Zoom’s gain. As the pandemic took hold last spring, daily downloads of the app increased by 30-times, year-on-year. Zoom became the United States’ most downloaded iPhone app for much of 2020. Recent figures put daily usage at some 350 million - up from just 10 million at Christmas 2019. Every financial quarter since the coronavirus emerged, the company has seen its quarterly revenue grow by enormous orders of magnitude as much, at one point, as 355% in a year. The explosion in use even appeared to catch the San Jose, California-based company by surprise, with its international head of partner marketing, Derek Pando, telling advertising industry magazine The Drum that it was, early on, like being in “a war room”. “We didn't know where it was going next and we didn't know how bad it was going to be. We were constantly trying to shift our resources to try to support people that were using and relying on Zoom,” he said.

The big shift for Zoom was its breakout from being just a rival to business communications apps like Webex and Skype. Until COVID-19 hit, most Zoom users were businesses and, even if home users had experience of using Zoom at work, it meant learning-as-you-go for families. Grannies, aunts, uncles and teenagers alike all had to quickly learn Zoom etiquette and dealing with Internet latency and not all talking at once. Everyone become their own television director, learning the simple art of framing to avoid the alarming sight of someone’s enormous, looming forehead. There was also the lesson - sometimes learned painfully - of knowing when to have the microphone on and when to have it off, not just to preserve bandwidth, but also to save fellow participants from the sound effects human bodies generate of their own volition.

Zoom has arguably been the technology success story of the pandemic. But as vaccine programmes start to take effect, questions are inevitably being raised as to how it will fare when things return to some form of normality (it's share price even took a hit when the Pfizer jab was announced in November). The company is hopeful that remote working will remain in place, continuing to prove a boon to corporate use. Certainly at this stage it’s still unclear just how and when business life will return to in-office working - even if it ever will. Office workers will, I’m sure, be eager to get back to their previous routines, even the arduous urban commutes. along with the social aspects of being in the same workspace as others. What’s not known, however, is just what measures companies will have to put in place, all the while COVID-19 is still out there, and 100% vaccination has not been achieved. One likelihood is that a hybrid model will be adopted. Home life, on the other hand, will be different. Hardly anyone you or I know is exactly happy about being barred from seeing loved ones and friends in the flesh, but with the virus showing signs of being countered by vaccines and lockdowns, and with the days already starting to grow longer, you get the sense that it won’t be long before we can step out from behind the webcam and see people in the flesh, even touch them.

Realistically, the biggest threat to Zoom’s future will be from the companies that it managed to eclipse in a record space of time. Microsoft, Cisco, Google and even Facebook have not stood still when it comes innovating their own video platforms, and will not have been best pleased by the ten-year-old upstart stealing their thunder. Microsoft, in particular, stands to benefit more than others, given the ubiquity of its Office software and packages like Word and Powerpoint, and the corporate licences that companies buy to provide employees with the complete suite, which also includes Teams. All of Zoom's rivals have added new features, such as background noise cancellation to make working from a crowded home that much less perilous. Teams even added ’Together Mode’, designed to give multiple users the sense of all sitting in the same environment, though in reality it makes a group of colleagues look more like participants in the opening title sequence of The Muppet Show. Time will tell, then, whether the innovation arms race in video conferencing will continue to be as vital, as the world gets back to normal. 

Other workplace collaboration tools with video calling, like Slack (which has just been acquired by Salesforce) are also gaining ground, and its likely that all the players in this market will have also reached peak usage over the last year, limiting further growth. Zoom will have heard these arguments before, and will argue that it already successfully penetrated a crowded market when it launched in 2011. It’s just that the coronavirus has given it an unprecedented bump.

Picture: Zoom

We may - thankfully - be soon seeing the back of quiz nights and laptop dinner parties, but in the business world there’s enough uncertainty about future working practices that it’s fair to say that Zoom and its rivals are here to stay. And until computing intelligence develops to such an advanced degree that software will be able to detect when a call participant is about to speak, we will still be hearing the words “You’re on mute!” for a long time to come.

Under doctor's orders: Foo Fighters' Medicine At Midnight

Full disclosure: this is the first time I’ve ever attempted to review a Foo Fighters album, and I’m somewhat apprehensive. Not because there are people I know who worship the very ground “ver Foos” walk on, or because I have friends who loathe the very idea of the band. No, it’s because they’re a bona fide rawk-and-roll group who, on an interplanetary scale, are gargantuan and yet still hard to know where they are pitched. 

They’ve been with us for more than 25 years, releasing ten albums in that time, a length of service and respondent following that is comparable with the great legends of classic heavy rock whose DNA clearly courses through the Foos’ veins. They are a Major Stadium Band, with Dave Grohl generally thought of as the Nicest Man In Rock™. Some fans lust after him, others just want to hang out with him in the blokey sense. Indeed such is Grohl's avuncularity - and, indeed, that of all six Foos - that he can eff-and-blind his way through gigs and still have grannies digging him, even the songs on which he screams his vocals. 

There is, then, something polished about the Foo Fighters. Yes, the music has an edge, but it’s cultivated. If you turn down the volume a notch, they offer comfortable rock and roll, ideal for mass arm-waving summer festival singalongs. The brothers Gallagher would probably baulk at this, but at times the Foo Fighters' music resembled an Americanised Oasis. In some respects they are the Three Bears of rock - the bowl of porridge that is 'just' right. But there is a nagging sense with me of ‘So what?’. Nice band, a few catchy daytime rock radio staples, but nothing artistically groundbreaking. Like the Volkswagen Golf, nicely designed, superbly constructed and brilliantly executed, but, you know…

Which begs the question: will their new album, Medicine At Midnight, do anything for the doubters or, equally, for the already confirmed? Well, let’s start with its premise. Grohl says that, for their tenth album and 25th anniversary (last year, when they were originally intending to release it), they wanted to do something different. “When you look back at all the records we've made in the last 25 years, it's like 'OK, we've done the noisy punk rock crap... We've done the sleepy acoustic stuff...,” Grohl explained to Radio.com. “We've done the three-and-a-half minute-long, fun pop-rock song. Hard rock, heavy stuff...‘What's the one thing we haven't done?’. I was like, ‘You know we haven't made our David Bowie's Let's Dance record. We haven't made the Stones' Tattoo You or, like, a Power Station record. We haven't made a rock band record that you could shake your ass to.”

So, instead of making some mellow AOR record, Grohl thought they’d make a party album. “A lot of our favourite records have these big grooves and riffs,” he told the NME. “I hate to call it a funk or dance record, but it’s more energetic in a lot of ways than anything we’ve ever done and it was really designed to be that Saturday night party album.” Wait - a party album? Well, yes. “It was written and sequenced in a way that you put on, and nine songs later you’ll just put it on again,” says Grohl. So let’s see if that’s the outcome. 

When it was released in November, lead-in single Shame Shame gave some hint at Medicine At Midnight’s direction of travel, with its pizzicato strings, bass riff and Taylor Hawkins’ hi-hat-heavy drum pattern seemingly drawing on the aforementioned Power Station. It is, however, arguably the album's weakest track, and for all its pleasantry, doesn’t really represent the party vibe Grohl speaks of. Far better is the track preceding it, Making A Fire which kicks off the album with a bright blast of happy-clappy, na-na-na-na-chorused drive up Pacific Coast Highway on a gloriously sunny day.

When it does come, the Bowie reference is not immediately obvious. Midway through the album, the title track opens up with an ambience that does indeed appear to emulate that of the sonics found on Let's Dance. By the time of its funk-blues guitar solo, which bears a strong resemblance to Stevie Ray Vaughan's on the Bowie hit, the reference is complete. You can sort of seeing where Grohl is coming from, even if it's also a good soundbite on his part. The better reference point, in my opinion, is indeed The Power Station, that mid-80s supergroup formed by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor and John Taylor with Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson, the former Chic drummer, working with producer Bernard Edwards, who co-created Chic with - guess who? - Nile Rodgers, Bowie's arch-collaborator on Lets Dance. Perhaps now I get it, but it would be a stretch to say that Bowie/Rodgers' influence courses through the sonic framework of the album as a whole. Cloudspotter might have a trace about it, but only a trace, and Making A Fire does contain some funk chops (Grohl says it's rooted in Sly & The Family Stone).

However, this album is not a discoification of the Foo Fighters’ stock-in-trade. For the most part, Medicine At Midnight it grown-up heavyish rock, with plenty of riffing by the guitar triumvirate of Grohl, Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett. Holding The Poison is almost Foo-by-numbers. There are mellower moments, such as Chasing Birds and the gently reflective Waiting On A War, which recalls the shared childhood of, I think, all of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear threat. Coming four tracks in, it diverts from the party spirit somewhat, but affords the opportunity Grohl to expound on the modern-day risk of global conflict, a thought triggered by his daughter one day while out in the car. It does, however, evolve into the closest thing on this record to the bombastic stadium stompers that blasted them into rock’s top tier to begin with. In similar vein there’s No Son Of Mine (no, not a Genesis cover…), apparently a tribute to the late Lemmy of Motörhead and, yes, it does resemble Ace of Spades, a song which, if you think about it, actually provides part of the Foo Fighters' original blueprint.

There is no known music lore that dictates how long any album should be: Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece What’s Going On clocks in at 35 minutes; Elton John’s classic early 70s trio of Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water and Honky Château all ran to no more than three-quarters of an hour apiece; the record for shortest album is probably still held by The Beach Boys’ Wild Honey, a miserly 23 minutes and 58 seconds. So, at 37 minutes long, it’s hard to see what kind of party Grohl had in mind when he cast Medicine At Midnight as the soundtrack of a romping night in. But, then, given modern attention spans, an album you can listen to in the time it takes for my lunchtime constitutional is not that unusual. “So we picked the nine songs that we really enjoyed and thought, ‘Great.’ Okay, it’s 37 minutes,” he recently told The Irish Times, pointing out that to his teenage daughter “37 minutes would be like Gandhi or War And Peace.”

So, to describe the Foo Fighters' celebration of a quarter-century as a functioning musical entity as some sort of liberating milestone would be a misnomer. But you can see what Dave Grohl means. He also knows that the band could, simply, keep on pumping out clones of My Hero or Best Of You, just to keep their hardcore fans happy. In truth, Medicine At Midnight doesn’t stray all that far from the formula, but nor does it slip on trademark quality. This band may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s nothing here that’s really not to like. And right now, that’s no bad thing.

Tomorrow was a good day, thanks to Captain Tom

Picture: The Captain Tom Foundation

In a year when, for a few months at least, we clapped for the heroes on the front line of the coronavirus, an unlikely hero - an actual war hero, in fact - emerged. Captain Sir Tom Moore was that quintessential British national treasure: in his 100th year, the plucky former Royal Armoured Corps officer, who'd seen Second World War service in Burma and India, and whose previous own brush with fame was a 1983 appearance on Blankety Blank, turned the humble idea of celebrating his centenary by walking 100 laps of his garden for charity into an emblem of the nation's fight against COVID-19. But instead of remaining just a quirky "and finally..." item on News At Ten, his modest plan to raise £1000 by the time of his 100th birthday became more than £32 million (closer to £40 million if you take tax benefits into account). A phenomenon was born.

For those of us who've struggled to get off the sofa during lockdown, seeing this sweet little widower, hunched over his walking frame as he padded up and down outside his Bedfordshire home, was a genuine inspiration. Last April, in early spring warmth, he became a beacon of hope, too, not just for the fundraising but also for his endearing personality and seemingly ever-ready ability to deliver a pearl of wisdom on demand. "Tomorrow will be a good day" became his catchphrase, but also a note of positivity in an otherwise depressing landscape of lockdowns and an absence of hope in the short term. 

Too right that he was rewarded with a knighthood. Too right that the RAF's Battle Of Britain Flight flew a Hurricane and Spitfire over his home to mark his 100th birthday (a moment that, soppily, still brings a lump to my throat in the footage of the centenarian, wrapped in a blanket and sat in a wheelchair, waving at the planes as their Merlin engines roared throatily overhead). "I'm one of the few people here who've seen Hurricanes and Spitfires flying past in anger," he said at the time. "Fortunately today they're all flying peacefully."

News on Sunday that Captain Tom was being treated for COVID-19 following a bout of pneumonia was met universally with the grim expectation that there wouldn't be a good outcome. Today that inevitability came to fruition. Thomas Moore, born on 30 April, 1920, in Keighley, Yorkshire, passed away. His daughters, Hannah Ingram-Moore and Lucy Teixeira, called the final year of his life as "nothing short of remarkable". "He was rejuvenated and experienced things he'd only ever dreamed of," the sisters' statement added. That, presumably, would have included having a Number 1 hit single (with Michael Ball - a charity recording of You'll Never Walk Alone), writing (or co-writing) an autobiography, and even getting into the Guinness Book of Records for the money his walk raised. 

For the birthday that actually started it all, Tom received more than 140,000 cards, so many in fact that a dedicated sorting office was set up at his grandson's school. In December he became the oldest person to appear on the cover of GQ as one of its 2020 Men Of The Year. "Not only was he the oldest person ever to grace our cover, he was one of the most gracious," editor Dylan Jones said tonight. "He was a hero, a genuine old-fashioned hero, and I feel blessed that we were in his orbit, albeit for a very brief time." 

The tributes that have been paid have gone rightfully beyond the normal platitudes of condolence. The ceremony, last July at Windsor Castle, to confer his knighthood by the Queen - a mere six years Moore's junior - put another smile on the nation's face, an occasion Buckingham Palace acknowledged in its statement: "Her Majesty very much enjoyed meeting Captain Sir Tom and his family at Windsor last year. Her thoughts, and those of the royal family, are with them, recognising the inspiration he provided for the whole nation and others across the world." Tonight's comments from Downing Street added to this further: "Captain Sir Tom Moore was a hero in the truest sense of the word," said Prime Minister Boris Johnson. "In the dark days of the Second World War he fought for freedom and in the face of this country's deepest post-war crisis he united us all, he cheered us all up, and he embodied the triumph of the human spirit. He became not just a national inspiration but a beacon of hope for the world."

In tributes to other figures, that might sound hyperbolic but in the short space of time that Captain Tom was in our consciousness, he managed to transcend the mounting misery of the virus. His fundraising for the NHS even attracted well-wishers from all over the world, who flooded his home with cards and donations. He also stood for something old fashioned, traditional, unsurprising in an individual of his generation. But he was more than just a novelty, no flash-in-the-pan media event like Brenda from Bristol. In a matter of weeks he was elevated from humble war veteran, doing his bit, to the status afforded to Sir David Attenborough. His fame may have been fleeting - spanning just the nine months or so to today - but his memory will last long after the virus that ended his remarkable life has been brought under control.

"I am still very proud of our country. There is nowhere like ours," he once said. Tonight, his country is proud of him. Rest in peace, Captain Sir Tom Moore. And thank you. You were the one bright spot in this last year of so much gloom.

You can always get what you want - merchandising the Rolling Stones brand

© Simon Poulter 2021

As someone lucky enough to have seen the Rolling Stones more times than any other band, and on a beautiful, sunlit morning in November 2016, was amongst the first punters through the door of New York's Industria to see their Exhibitionism showcase, you could say I’m a fan. A trawl of my T-shirt drawer reveals a disproportionate number of garments bearing the famous tongue motif, easily the most famous piece of iconography in rock’n’roll history. While it will never compete with a clothing logo like, say, Ralph Lauren's Polo, the Stones preside over a brand that, it would appear, has limitless application. 

This week they've added it to confectionary, with the launch of Rolling Stones-branded chocolate bars, available for £5.95 a pop (plus £3.95 for COVID-friendly home delivery) from the band's substantial online store. Should you be so inclined, you can purchase a bar of Brown Sugar (milk chocolate) or - wait for it - Cherry Red (dark chocolate infused with cherries). There is, now, literally nothing that tongue logo won’t appear on, a trade I have willingly engaged in, given my aforementioned T-shirt collection, the socks, the limited edition Moleskine notebook and, naturally, the super deluxe edition box set reissues, like last year’s Goats Head Soup. 

Undoubtedly, I am the Stones’ target market, and partly who they had in mind last September when they opened their own “flagship” store at No.9 Carnaby Street in London. Effectively an extension of the merchandising stands you’ll see at their live shows, ‘RS No.9 Carnaby’ is an Aladdin’s Cave of Stones stuff, all bearing that tongue, and fitted out in ‘Stones Red’, now a registered Pantone colour matched to that logo. Given that Carnaby Street would normally be one of London’s biggest tourist attractions (smart marketing in the early 2000s transformed it from the somewhat shabby cove of novelty tat shops it was when I used to visit the Smash Hits offices at 52-55 in the mid-1980s), you could say that even this outlet is further evidence of the Stones’ business smarts.

Along with the limitless racks of Stones-branded clothing, ‘RS No.9 Carnaby’ will sell you tongue-branded Baccarat Crystal wine glasses (£245) and matching decanter (£535), chiffon scarves (£350), a water bottle (£30) and even an umbrella (£25). Actually, the Carnaby Street store was a tad limited when we visited last October, but then this is where retail wonks like to get into the world of “brand experiences”, whereby consumers “engage” with a brand, as opposed to just shop. Think of Apple Stores where everything from the layout to the staff is designed to the Nth degree to exude the company's considerable brand values as much as flog you things.

However, retailing is only one tip of the Rolling Stones business iceberg, which includes the band’s recording, publishing, touring and sponsorship entities. They are, in essence, every bit a corporate brand, and the lips-and-tongue is as powerful an emblem as the logos of Apple, Nike, McDonalds, Mercedes, Coca-Cola or Volkswagen. But, then, the Stones have long been rock’s most successful corporate bands. Such is their endurance on the world stage that, beyond chocolate and branded umbrellas, they remain one of music’s most profitable touring forces. Their No Filter tour, which commenced in 2017 but was postponed last year due to the coronavirus, has so far booked over $415 million at the box office; their 2005 A Bigger Bang Tour remains the fourth highest grossing concert series of all time, trousering $688 million. By the time No Filter resumes, the Stones will have a combined age of 306 (drummer Charlie Watts reaches his 80th birthday in June). Mick Jagger is said to have amassed a net worth of $360 million, with Keith Richards a little way behind on $340 million. Most of this wealth has been generated by business acumen. 

The common thought is that Jagger’s uncompleted course in accounting at the London School of Economics in the early 1960s made him the fiscal brains of the operation, but it probably owes more to Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Bavarian count who was their business manager for almost 40 years. His legacy (he died in 2014) is that the Stones are one of the most smartly-managed companies in music - even to the extent that they exist as a Dutch “BV” (besloten vennootschap or private limited company - said to be a tax-friendly arrangement), and hold annual company meetings every year in Amsterdam, a ready source of chuckles, given the city's notorious recreational delights.

Central to all of this has been that logo. What has become one of the most lucrative emblems of all time was the result of a £50 commission from Jagger to art student Jon Pasche in 1970 to produce a poster for their European tour that year. After rejecting the first couple of designs, Jagger suggested that Pasche produced something witty that combined the simplicity of the Shell oil logo with the Hindu deity Kali for further inspiration (which actually provided the emphasis on a mouth and tongue - not, as was assumed, a conscious effort to replicate Jagger’s own prominent lippage).

The tongue made its eventual debut on the back cover of the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album in 1971, and has been part of the band’s visual language ever since. According to one intellectual property lawyer it has earned “hundreds of millions of pounds”. Pasche, on the other hand, says he probably only earned a few thousand pounds from his design, eventually selling the copyright in 1982 for just £26,000. Still, though, it has become emblematic of a form of brand marketing that students of such dark arts should and will be examining for years. Merchandising has always been a core part of rock bands' money-making, but few have taken it to the industrial levels of brand exploitation as the Rolling Stones. And they've done it with one of the most controversial and irreverent pieces of corporate imagery ever created.

Band logos have always held a fascination for me. As a schoolboy, it was fashionable to emboss the names of rock bands on the canvas, army-surplus shoulder bags that everyone carted around when I was 13. Bands like Genesis, Steely Dan, Yes and Rush generated a weird form of fan loyalty via their logos, which would be painstakingly scrawled in biro on such bags. No one, though, has ever come close to monetising a graphic identity quite like the Stones. Any band can produce T-shirts, mugs and even sleepwear, but only one band can get away with a £500 decanter or, now, a six quid bar of chocolate. It seems you can always get what you want, for the right price, that is.