So, on Friday thelondonpaper, a new freesheet in the city, ran an interesting story on its cover. ‘Hostages or Specimens?’ read the headline, above a blurred picture of three men and a woman bound and gagged. ‘Oh’ I thought. ‘I wonder what’s happened to those people taken hostage yesterday in Iraq?’
What a sucker. It was, on closer inspection, a photo of our heroes Jack, Kate, Charlie and the fat one from Lost together with four pages of publicity blurb about Season 3 of the pisspoor drama, which began on Sunday on Sky One. Turning over, I found the ‘real’ front page of the paper, (but of course, no news of the hostages in Iraq).
Metro, another London freesheet, pulled the very same stunt the following morning. If it all strikes you as being in rather poor taste and perhaps not the sort of thing newspapers should be doing, I need only tell you that both papers are owned by Associated Newspapers, a tendril of Rupert Murdoch’s Worldwide Empire of Toss… Sky One being another such tendril.
Was there ever a Murdoch hack brave enough to get in the way of a good bit of synergy? You can just imagine how they tried to sell it to themselves in Wapping. I can picture Stefano Hatfield, editor of thelondonpaper, saying ‘Yes, it may offend people, but, you know, it’s edgy.’ To which Kenny Campbell, editor of Metro, hypothetically replies: ‘Absolutely. I mean, in the current climate, it’s an oddly vital thing to do.’
Why is old Kangaroo Claws massing his troops so dramatically behind Lost? Because most people see a migration of their favourite show from terrestrial TV to Sky One as a signal to switch off. This has been the rule for other shows such as 24.
But hey, maybe Lost has got what it takes to buck the trend. It certainly has some devotees out there… I even saw a woman in HMV on Saturday buying Season 2 on DVD. It’s difficult enough to understand why people would watch the show a first time, but again? Don’t they, kind of, know what’s about to happen? I very nearly said to this woman, ‘Excuse me, but do you rub out your crosswords too?’
How will these people feel at the end of the last episode of Season 5, in the scene where JACK WAKES UP? A little bit cheated, perhaps? But then, will anyone still be watching?
My intention was to publish a Lost piss-take today but this cue is now so long I think I’ll leave it till tomorrow.
Think of the above as prepublicity.
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Meanwhile, another exercise in synergy backfires in spectacular fashion, as Fox TV affiliates stand up to Kangaroo Claws
