Werther's Original

We all know this toffee. It is a byword for old, sentimental and a bit boring. I have been called Werther's Original by young people on occasions. The toffee itself isn't great, it's not the definition of a toffee for me; I prefer Thorntons or the round one in Quality Street. What gives Werther's the right to call itself original? It's not even the oldest Werther's, as you can find out here.

So if you can't have trust in the world of toffee, what hope is there for t.v.? Well actually, in tv, originality is not a particularly revered attribute. In certain genres, two networks may well be working on exactly the same idea - no one at network A will be that bothered if network B's show gets on air first, in fact they will usually be praying for it to be a hit - their own show is more likely to find an audience who will know what they're getting, because the bottom line is, the audience aren't that bothered about originality either. I mean if they were, Werther's wouldn't have been able to laugh off the "Original" scandal, would they?

I was having this sort of conversation with a very funny tv producer called Jo Bunting, who you can occasionally see on ITV's Loose Women (I watch a lot of daytime tv) who gave me a great tv tip which has applications in life generally. We were watching Car Boot Challenge in the office, which is one of the many identical daytime shows about going around Britain's car boot sales and selling your old junk. They are all the spawn of Bargain Hunt, which in its early days was a terrific programme, up there with Watercolour Challenge , until David Dickinson jumped the shark.

What all these shows do, to give us a "feel" of Trowbridge, or wherever they happen to be rifling through bric-a-brac this week, is play in a vt package featuring sites of local interest, cut to some inappropriately funky music. But as the the director and cameraman spend a lot of the time gossiping and having a smoke, they don't have long to get all the GVs (General Views, apparently) in the can. So Jo Bunting's tip, if you ever find yourself in this situation, is go to the nearest gift shop and buy a tea-towel. It will have all the sites of local interest lovingly depicted from the most photogenic angle. If it's a good tea-towel it will have a map on it, so you know how to get there. Brilliant.

I thought I'd test this by having a look at some tea towels on the internet and do you know? It's true. Look.

I particularly like this one for Norwich - nice black and white illustrations. I actually didn't know the palette of tea towels was so rich. I'm not talking about the Rules of Cricket, or Rudyard Kipling's 'If', but a whole colourful reference library of fascinating stuff. By definition, anyone who puts information on a tea-towel will have a lot of unusual information going around in their head, so it's a guaranteed gold-mine of trivia.

A Confederate Ghost Air Force!? Who knew? as they say. So, after a decade of having to leave the "hobbies and interests" box empty on registration forms, I have something to throw myself into. There might even be a blog in it. I wonder if it's been done already?

Comments

[Charles Frith]

Cool bananas. This is what the internet was invented for. :)