How many lists make five? A list, a list, a list and a half...

Lists

Back to the well in a little feature I like to call: Pitched ideas that may or may not have been picked up by magazines a few years ago. 

It's a rich vein of material and no mistake, if this sizzling stack of lists sent to the now defunct and much-missed Jack magazine is any guide. 

Not sure how many they used but these would have been done in about 2004 and give a fair insight in to the mind of the 30-something male of the day. 

I'd not long given up smoking and had recently rekindled a rampant love affair with chocolate (oh! Smarties bars and loneliness...) 

And don't forget, Eccles Cake or Egg Custard, while you're here.

Jack Lists

 Five National Lampoon’s Vacation things:

• Cousin Vicki: “I'm going steady, and I French kiss.”
  Audrey: “So? Everybody does that.”
  Cousin Vicki: “Yeah, but Daddy says I'm the best at it.”

• Rusty: “Oink Oink, my good man!"

• Rusty: “Dad, I think he’s gonna pork her!”

• Rusty: “So I says to him, I said "Get your own monkey!”

• Cousin Eddie: “I haven't seen a beatin' like that since somebody stuck a banana in my pants and turned a monkey loose.”

          Clark: “Thanks for the pick me up Eddie.”

Ha ha ha!

 Five awful sports brands:

• Troop
• British Knights
• K – Swiss (original five stripes? You’re fooling no one)
• Pony
• Skechers

 Five modern crisp classics:

Yummo!

• McCoy’s Thai sweet chicken
• Golden Wonder sausage and tomato
• Rib n’ Saucy Nik Naks
• Bugles – all of them
• Sweet chilli Doritos

 Five incredible contemporary confectionery treats

• Kit Kat Kubes
• Mars Delight
• Cornetto love potions
• Peanut Lion bar
• Smarties chocolate bars

 Five things you never got for chrimbo:

Fucking  A

• Big Trak
• Millenium Falcon
• Diamondback BMX
• TCR
• Battery-powered car you could sit in and drive

Five 70s rockers you won’t admit you like:

• Steely Dan
• Electric Light Orchestra
• The Eagles
• The Doobie Brothers
• Peter Frampton

Matt Smith wrote Jet Set Willy 

Five great football teams:

• Everton 1984 – 1987
• Manchester United 1994 – 1999
• Liverpool 1976 – 1984
• Arsenal 1998 – present
• Leeds United 1968 – 1974

Five great Spectrum games:

• Jet Set Willy
• Skooldaze
• Chuckie Egg
• Match Day
• Attic Attack

Five ace words to say:

• Undies
• Trump
• Blubber
• Crud
• Balderdash

10 Gatwick airport things:

Roomy

• Thinking “you’d better be foreign” at Nike Extravago-shod youths
• Departure screens all over the show - but no clock. Anywhere.
• An ill-advised wink at the passport control chap
• A double brandy
• A seven paaanddd brekky
• Yanks trying on flat caps
• The anxiety of a bearded man going through customs
• Stag dos going to Amsterdam, smiling
• Stag dos coming in from Amsterdam, smiling nervously
• Cavernous disabled toilets

Job application to Loaded

Where the magic happens

Continuing the theme of rehashing old shite from my huge teetering 'REJECTED' pile, I found this application I sent when Loaded was looking for a feature writer five or six years ago.
There was the usual guff about my work history and then I had to come up with some feature ideas, which are printed below.
(The idea in 'the pitch' has now been superseded by the insaness of telly with the likes of ITV's 'so you think you can spaff'. Also the boyand model appears to have been dismantled now in favour of under-age or ancient talent show horrors. Were we ever so young!)


Loaded feature ideas:




The pitch:
Take an idea - say a tribute album to rock’s great moustaches - and pitch it to a record company. Explain why it is precisely what the industry is missing (this works as well for even more bankrupt-of-ideas industries like TV) and how it is a sure-fire winner. 
These companies are under so much pressure to get new stuff out it seems they will consider anything so long as it is well presented. 

Print a transcript of the whole thing - from first call to an actual meeting right through to, if incredibly lucky, the thing getting made. It is a bit Alan Partridge ‘monkey tennis’ but still has cracking comedy legs. Basically you can pitch anything to anyone if done with enough front. 

I have two TV pitches to start with: Duke Clancey Disco Cop (a cartoon) and Box Fresh (a show about a boyband whose own tribute band overtakes them after their first single.)

Other examples: 
a: Footballer’s hats (book).
b: What’s in my sandwich? (Radio 4 quiz).    
c: The last page - a compendium of last pages of books
(book).

The yellow bib capers. 

This one has been slightly gazumped by the man who recently robbed a Glasgow post office dressed as a builder, wearing a yellow fluorescent bib and hard hat. Admittedly it was topped off nicely with a gun.

Put simply anyone can do anything if wearing one of these things, especially if they wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard at the same time. 

All it takes is brass neck of the sheerest kind. Even if this was not enough for a feature - although I really believe it is - the sight of the bib-wearer having made it to their goal would make a good photo. A series of tasks would be good too, with security and refreshments at various venues rated.

Queens Day and the pursuit of pleasure

Pleasure

When I was freelancing a few years ago I used to have loads of ideas, most of them completely unworkable, like the 'yellow bib challenge' where I'd put a high-vis bib on and see what I could get away with before the police stepped in. 

Taking the royal horses for a walk was one idea, announcing a terror scare in a department store was another, while holding a clipboard to look doubly official. They were innocent times. Not like now with your Ay-rabs making everyone twitchy.

A better one concerned an idea for a pleasure machine me and a pal had. The product was a thing which had massive feathers on it, from which bird we knew not. 

It would be powered via a system of pulleys and chords with your feet while lying on your front and the feathers would brush your back and hopefully bum. Sounds ace, doesn't it?

We took pictures of us trying it out - a very early stage effort was built but it didn't work, which didn't really damage my artistic vision of the story. 

Because we didn't have photoshop we put black strips of paper on our eyes so it would look like the people in those 'contact' mags from the 90s. As I understand it. I've still got the pics somewhere but you've got no chance. 

We thought we could try and flog it during Amsterdam's Queen's Day, a 36-hour drinking festival held in honour of the current queen's mother.

Queen's Day is summed up by an Amsterdam resident like this: "If it was held in England there would be a rough survival guide published beforehand, then it would be banned the following year."

To me this one seemed a real goer, and I pitched it to FHM in the form of the opening 300 words or so, as you can see below (they passed). Anyway, here's the pitch:

Queen's Day

Queen's Day

“If blokes are prepared to pay good money to mount this… thing…” FHM’s Amsterdam contact is in full, scathing flow as he points at a blow-up doll. “They’ll defo buy this,” he continues, waving a poorly sketched blueprint at no one in particular. His face screws in disgust until all that remains is a nose, prodding at

the air like an old man’s foreboding finger.

“You couldn’t poke that - it’s a dinghy with a badly sketched woman's face on it,” he concludes. It’s hard to argue with pure logic – especially when it comes from a man in a bathrobe. On such moments revolutions are born.

Summer 2005: The world is plunging headfirst into a chasm of crud and it hasn’t packed a mac. Leisure and relaxation have become more sought after, and more important, than ever before. Won't someone deliver us from this hellish existence? Yes. Yes they will.

What if a product came along that, at a stroke, could banish the cares of the day and deliver the user to Xanadu – and all in the comfort of their own home? Wouldn't you want a bit of that? And what better place to introduce this new gadget than Amsterdam – don’t answer that, you’d cheapen us both.

The scheme is simplicity in its purest, most beautiful form: Turn up, buy the ingredients, make the thing, take if to those Queensday-addled Amsterdamers and empty their pockets. All in time for happy hour at the Flying Dutchman – home of the drunken fatty.

We hit the streets with a plan, a pocket full of Euros and a shopping list:

Fishing wire

Fishing weight

Screws

Washers

Wall brackets

Clock motor

Three big feathers (extra-fancy kind)

Pole (snooker cue, telescopic shower rail or similar)

On Leidseplein in central Amsterdam people stroll through the crisp, bright day – smiling and chatting as another afternoon drifts aimlessly by. Two Englishmen cause no stir as they walk through the crowds towards Blokker – your one-stop-shop for household goods. 

Ends.

And that was it - shame on you, FHM! You had a corker right there in your hands.

Eccles cake or egg custard?

An Eccles cake

An egg custard (pen not included)

Yonks ago I had this ace idea for a running magazine feature called Eccles Cake or Egg Custard? Basically it involved ringing round celebrities - and this was when the tag was earned as opposed to being a lazy-arse job description - asking them which of these wonderful treats they preferred.
The results would then be printed verbatim. None of the mags I approached - including the Loaded, the FHM and the Sunday Times one - went for it, even though I'd already done a few to get the ball rolling, reproduced below:

Ditherer

Richard Whiteley
Biff: Hi Richard, my name's Biff and I'm calling from **** magazine. Which do you prefer, Eccles cake or egg custard?

Richard Whiteley: Oh, egg custard. Definitely. Although there's a lot to be said for an Eccles cake. All that flaky pastry and currants. Mmmm! Can I change my mind? I'm going for Eccles cake.

Biff: Are you sure? Mike Reid went for egg custard.

RW: Oh Mike!

Decisive Brett

Brett Anderson from Suede
Biff: Hi Brett,  my name's Biff and I'm calling from **** magazine. Which do you prefer, Eccles cake or egg custard?

Brett: Eccles cake.

Biff: Cheers Brett.

Brett: You're welcome.

Get the kettle on Steve!

Keith Burkinshaw
Biff: Hi Keith,  my name's Biff and I'm calling from **** magazine. Which do you prefer, Eccles cake or egg custard?


Keith: Egg bloody custard. *hangs up*

Steve Harris from Iron Maiden
Biff: Hi Steve,  my name's Biff and I'm calling from **** magazine. Which do you prefer, Eccles cake or egg custard?


Steve: Ooh, now you're asking incha? Can I say both?

Biff: No. It's like a war. You have to take sides.

Steve: Hmm, I suppose it depends on circumstance. If I'm having a brew, then probably the Eccles cake, but if I'm out and about, the egg custard. Because that's easier to eat on the hoof.

Biff: Well, where are you now?

Steve: At home.

Biff: Have you got a brew on the go?

Steve: No, but I've got Wolfsbane coming round in a bit to put some shelves up so I'll probably put the kettle on.

Biff: So are we saying Eccles cake?

Steve: I think we are!


(Next time: Rock's greatest moustaches)

(I think the Richard Whitely pic is in the public domain - if it isn't a thousand apologies. I'll remove if it offends)