High wire media finances, controversial award winners and CMO successions
Welcome to Unmade, written in the UK on Thursday afternoon my time, early on Friday morning yours. Still no glimpses of the sun at my end.
I remain in the jetlag-and-adjusting-to-the-bad-coffee phase. I’m sure last night’s 1.30am alarm call for Nine boss Mike Sneesby’s press conference didn’t help the body clock adjustment. But I’ll come to that conference call later.
Earlier in my career, when I edited a British magazine about the media industry, we hired an Australian journalist. She became known in the office as “Uncle Albert”, after the Only Fools and Horses sitcom character who would constantly hark back to “During the war…”
In our colleague’s case, her catch phrase was “In Australia…” before finding some new way to explain how her home country was superior.
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I’m sorry you’ve been unable to find decent coffee in the UK, but I do assure you, it most certainly exists. Perhaps if you told us where in the UK you were, we’d be able to give you some good recommendations: but I was terribly disappointed with the coffee I found in Melbourne when I last had to visit that grimy miserable city, and here in Queensland, Coffee Club is hardly top of the world when it comes to a decent brew either. Reddit describes it as “airplane food at airplane ticket prices” and I think there’s quite a bit of truth to that.
I fear the amusing “there’s no decent coffee here” is going to be as repetitive as Triple M’s playlist: and it’s only a short step from that to tropes about all Brits having bad teeth, or an inability to cook anything other than boiled vegetables and roast beef, or, even worse, lazy comments about ‘warm flat beer’.
At least Qantas no longer runs that video showing those two annoying city spivs claiming “there’s great coffee on board, too”.
Haha, good point James! The quest continues…