DairyWorks

Twice in the last month or so I've been part of a nine-person focus group looking at a particular company that sells dairy products. At the first of these two groups, which were held in the Southern Cross Hotel in Dunedin, we were primarily given choices of three brands of cheese and asked to make a number of comments about them, the packaging, the design, the way they were packaged, the detail on the packaging, and much more. We discussed them with the coordinator of the group and with each other.  Everything was recorded - with our permission - and there was also another woman there who took notes throughout. These focus groups are going on throughout the country at present on behalf of the company that's paying for them.

The three brands were Mainland, Anchor and Rolling Meadow. The first two were familiar to everyone in the room and everyone had plenty of opinions about them. The third was one that most of us didn't recognise at all, and yet they're the number two brand in the country in supermarkets in terms of dairy, in particular, and, unlike most other dairy products in New Zealand, aren't owned by Fonterra.

But the curious thing is that even though we didn't recognise Rolling Meadow, most of us have brought the butter with this brand on it, and we've also bought the cheese. In fact, when I got home I found I had Rolling Meadow butter in the fridge. I'd bought it because it was on special, I guess, and it's probably the way most people buy this brand. (They also have another brand name for their cheese - Alpine - this is sold by the Progressive chain of supermarkets. Rolling Meadow is used by the Foodstuffs chain.)

Anyway, these focus groups are happening because the company that produces Rolling Meadow and Alpine - DairyWorks - wants to increase its visibility. It doesn't advertise on television, which is interesting, so it's a surprise to find it's doing so well in the marketplace. The fact that the product is good, of course, will help (!) and their current packaging is attractive in a simple, straightforward way.

But they are looking to redesign their look, and this is what we were part of. In the second session we were given possible types of colours and design ideas and fonts that might be used and had the chance to 'vote' on these. Our vote is put towards the overall impression these things make on those running the focus groups and this is reported back to the owners. The owners, incidentally, are very hands-on people. Though the business has expanded a great deal from when it began in an old cheese factory in Temuka, near Timaru, and is now functioning nationwide, the owners still know exactly what's going on where, and will assist in an emergency, as they apparently did recently, when supplies of the cheese didn't make it to one of the Dunedin focus groups.  One of the owners made the trip to Dunedin (from Christchurch) specially, to make sure that we got the stuff.  And then did a survey of the supermarkets to see how things were going! (For those who don't know how far Dunedin is from Christchurch - on average it takes about five hours each way, if you don't get held up by traffic issues.) This is what's called having a heart for your company!

Having now 'discovered' the company, I'll be interested in keeping an eye out for the results of these focus groups (as will the rest of the people I shared this task with).  I'm pleased I decided to take the chance to get involved!

Tempest in a flat hat

It must be a year for the classics: I read Ivanhoe for the first time earlier this year, went onto Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, and am now reading Moby Dick.  I'd begun this years ago, and got about half way through it, I think, before I either abandoned it or got sidetracked by something else.  I vividly remembered the scene in which Ishmael goes overboard and seems to be abandoned in the unending sea.  Apart from that little else remained with me.   But someone on Twitter the other day (who says Twitter can't be intellectual?) said they'd thoroughly enjoyed it, and so I thought I'd give it another go.  I've got a copy somewhere, but I'm actually reading it on Kindle, as I have done with about half the books I've read this year.

However, between all the classics I've also managed to fit in some lighter reading, including Buster Keaton: tempest in a flat hat, by Edward mcPherson.  I came across a copy of this at the University Bookshop in their sale department.  Buster Keaton being an actor/director I admire hugely I couldn't resist getting the book.

It's both a biography and a synopsis of each of his movies.   Well, all the silent ones at least, and the early talkies.   I've only ever seen a few of Keaton's movies - I have The General and Steamboat Bill on DVD.  And I think I've seen The Navigator at some point, along with maybe one or two of the two-reelers he produced.  So my rating of his movies relies a great deal of what I've read about Keaton over the years.   McPherson has seen all the movies - crikey! - and is able not only to give the 'plots' (such as they are) but delineate some of the more amazing sequences, and show how these fitted into Keaton's approach to filmmaking overall.

I'd love to be in the position to see some of these old works; McPherson's enthusiasm rubs off all the time.   But beyond that his biographical information about Keaton is fascinating, from his growing-up with his family in vaudeville (he barely went to school at any point, which speaks volumes for learning in a different way), to his gradual slide into films along with his friend, Roscoe ('Fatty') Arbuckle, through the years in which he and his friends made movies at the drop of a hat, to the years when he was cast aside by the big studios, to his eventual comeback via repeat showings of his old films and his appearances on television, where he profitably spent his later years. (Chaplin and the like felt television was beneath them; Keaton just treated it as a kind of return to the old days of vaudeville.)

A tough little man (both physically and emotionally), he had the misfortune to marry the wrong woman - she treated him like dirt within a couple of years of marriage, though was never averse to his money.  He also made the mistake of believing that the big studios were where he should go to further his career.   The studios thought that movies should be churned out at the rate of one a week, and couldn't deal with his much more creative approach to filmmaking.  (When he and his team felt drained of new ideas, they'd go and play baseball for a couple of days, and come back refreshed and ready to move forward.)

Keaton had some tough times, but he was a survivor.   And I think his movies will survive as long, if not longer than Chaplin's.  The latter's sentimentality (which is almost Dickensian in tone) tends to reduce our sympathy towards them these days.  Keaton was never a sentimentalist; he might be chasing the girl but if he didn't get her it didn't always matter, and sometimes she turned out to be tougher than he was, and he no longer wanted her.  His films were about comedy, not romance.  Romance was merely a hook to hang the humour on.  And what humour: Keaton was a master of stunt  comedy, and was willing to risk his neck (and did, frequently) to get a joke on screen.  Chaplin, by contrast, worked on a much smaller scale.

Printer to Script to Plays to Television

Following the example of my daughter, who has to print out pages and pages of University material this year, we bought a Brother printer which prints at speed - but only uses black ink, no colour.  (But there is a cash back promise comes with it.)

No problem, we thought: we hardly ever use colour.  Of course the first two things I print out both have colour in them...  We haven't got rid of the printer that does do colour; if really necessary we can just hook up that printer and go for it.

One of the items I was printing was the script for Grimhilda! - the prompt needs a copy.  It was printed in record time.  Stageworks, the company that's producing the musical, has a wonderful lady called Jan who'll be doing the prompting.  She prompted for The Mousetrap, and very occasionally got herself accidentally seen by some members of the audience (if they were paying attention to what went on backstage) when the downstage door was opened just a little too far by one of the cast.  Or when, as one night, it opened by itself...

Jan also prompted for The Christmas Carol, which we did a couple of years ago.  Prompting is not a job I'd like to do.  It seems simple reading along in the script as the play progresses and hoping nobody will dry.  That's the easy part; it's when an actor skips a section and another actor has to follow, and the poor prompt isn't sure whether they'll catch up with what they've missed, or forget about it entirely.  That's what happened to me once, in The Magician's Nephew.  The young fellow playing Digby skipped a page or so of dialogue, and, because I was in the wrong place for the line he spoke, I went completely blank in a way I've never done before.   The prompt was on the opposite side of the stage, and was prompting like billyo, but for some reason I couldn't pick up what he was saying - there was what seemed to me to be an eternal pause before we managed to find our own way back to native soil.

I always admire actors who do weekly television series, especially those who get long speeches that they've got to have memorised within a couple of days and be able to say with the utmost conviction.  I'm a slow learner, comparatively, and like to feel my way into lines so that by the time I'm on stage with them I feel utterly confident.

Which reminds me, for some reason, of last week's Doc Martin episode, and the uncongenial Doc's remarks to the funeral director's son who was taking supplements of various kinds in order to make himself stronger and bigger (and more attractive to the ladies).  He was also having cod liver oil (which made him unattractive to the ladies - one of them telling him to stay 'over there, your breath stinks.')   He was also tanning himself, and the cellar in which he was doing this was not only full of muscle-building supplements, but tanning supplies.  Doc Martin stormed in there, barely managing to avoid hitting his head on the very low beams, and verbally set the place alight, giving the funeral director himself an earful for letting his son go through all this nonsense - and bringing on him some obscure medical problem in the process.

People on these medical dramas/comedies never have plain ordinary illnesses.  You wonder where the writers dig up all the peculiar problems that beset the characters.   I understand that variety is the spice of life on television, but some of the illnesses are just plain ridiculous - though not to the characters, obviously!

Archer's Goon

Continuing on with my Diana Wynne Jones phase, but having put aside the Dalemark series, of which I read the first and began the second only to find them all a bit gloomy, I've just finished Archer's Goon.  This is a neatly plotted story with a major red herring running through it for about the first two-thirds.   It also has a superb character in the concisely-spoken Goon.   It's hard to convey the way he speaks in an extract, so I'm not going to try.  Suffice to say he's one of Wynne Jones' more delightful and quirky creations. 

The Sykes are a fairly straightforward family into which the Goon suddenly interposes himself, his long legs seeming to take up most of the kitchen where he insists on sitting until Quentin (the family father) produces his 'two thousand'.   The two thousand aren't pounds or dollars, but words, and why they've been requested is a mystery that takes most of the book to solve.   Quentin's been producing them every few months after a bout of writer's block several years ago, but the words have nothing to do with writer's block. 

The other members of the family are Howard, who seems a straightforward boy on the surface but is anything but, as we eventually discover; Awful, his sister, nicknamed thus because of her propensity to scream very loudly when anything upsets her, and a young layd with an enjoyment of nastiness; and Catriona, the mother, who is the only one initially who can put the Goon in his place.   There's also Fifi, the student who's staying with them.   Fifi's role in the story seems minor at first, but she's the catalyst for some rather serious stuff later.

When I say 'serious' however, it's not to imply that this is a serious book.  It's as good-humoured and witty as Howl's Flying Castle, though equally full of strange and scary people.  Wynne Jones obviously had a thoroughly enjoyable time writing this book, and it shows through on every page.   (She doesn't seem to have had quite so enjoyable a time in working with a scriptwriter on the television version, but admitted that scriptwriting is not her field.  There's a very detailed writing-up of the television series which points out its high and low points - and gives away all the plot.  Don't read it before you've read the book.)

The things you find on the Net

The other day, for no particular reason, I came across a thesis, entitled Images of Salvation: a study in theology, poetry and rhetoric, written by Gregory Brian Smith. And the reason I found it is that it references my old webpage at Geocities. The reference is connected to a picture of Les Murray, the Australian poet, and makes it seem as though the picture is mine.

However, when you click on the link provided, you find that it no longer goes anywhere, probably because geocities was taken over by Yahoo, and the Athens/Forum address system has been abandoned in favour of this less complicated link. I've tried to download the thesis a couple of times, but on my home computer at least, it gets stuck before it's finished loading.

However, on my old homepage you can see the picture of Les Murray that Smith references. The photo appears to have come from Duffy and Snellgrove's website, where it's featured on the page that discusses Murray, and has recordings of him reading his work. Thus is repaired the link on Mr Smith's page.

Now, driving your RV (which I have discovered means 'recreational vehicle' and can apply to anything from a live-in bus to a skateboard) across to the Continent in a fashion that shows that the next bit has nothing to do with the first - no matter how hard I might try to pin them together - and head towards Turkey, where a gameshow called Penitents Compete (or Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor in Turkish) has a Muslim Imam, a Greek Orthodox priest, a Rabbi and a Buddhist monk attempting to convert atheists to one or other of their religions.

If it sounds like a joke, it ain't. The prize is a pilgrimage to the holy place of either Mecca, Jerusalem or Tibet, depending on which religion the contestant decides to convert to. The contestants pit their unbelief against the belief of the religious regulars, and the latter will attempt to convert at least one in ten of the contestants who appear.

Does it sound in the slightest bit crass? I'd say ultra-crass would cover it. "The makers of "Penitents Compete" are unrepentant and reject claims that the show, scheduled to begin broadcasting in September, will cheapen religion." No, of course it won't cheapen religion. (Religious people are perfectly capable of cheapening religion on their own, without any help from gameshow production companies.) All it cheapens - further - is the extraordinary world of television, which its (generally-credited) inventor, John Baird Logie (looking grumpy at left) is said to have thought would bring education to the masses. His son, Malcolm Baird, Malcolm Baird said in an interview that had his father known how TV would turn out in sixty years time, he would have dropped it and turned to other inventions.