Many critics have suggested that Dorothea Tanning's seminal The Friend's Room (1950-52) was conceived after a spell of profound melancholy that began when the artist narrowly missed a bargain purchase of a WiFi Dongle on BidUp.tv. The painting now serves as a profound reminder of why it can be dangerous to wait too long for the prices to decrease.
I know that I am not alone in my perverse fascination with Price Drop TV. It often puts me in mind of the butcher that used to set up his stall in Sutton market when I was a child. Through sheer charisma, showmanship and business acumen, that fat, cockney slaphead had the town eating out of his palm as he feigned last-minute price-cuts right before our very eyes. Think Al Murray with a cleaver.
I would often stop and watch this weekend high-street ritual, but I didn't realise what a special gift that man had until much later. He had a huge crowd gathered round him... eagerly waiting their turn to buy meat. In a town that sheepishly stares at the ground and shuffles past whilst buskers do their best to give away music.
Fast forward fifteen years and we have digital butchers punting digital meat. I am referring to Price Drop TV - a channel which follows a similar formula to QVC, but with an important twist; an obnoxious twit peddles a seemingly random selection of tack whilst the price gets lower the longer stocks last.
As a teacher, I feel a strange affinity for the washed-up redcoats that find themselves presenting Price Drop. Both jobs essentially involve a large amount of improv built around getting a group of people to do what you want. In my case, that would be doing work which in some way improves pupils' grasp of the English language, whereas with Price Drop that involves getting people to buy porcelain dolls and pepper grinders.
As any teacher will tell you though, any job which involves that much unscripted communication can leave us psychologically very vulnerable. We can't help it - our innermost thoughts and opinions have a habit of manifesting one way or another in the lessons we deliver. This is certainly the case with the monologues which we witness slewing from the soul-less faces of the Price Drop tat-peddlers.
Amidst the thinly veiled rhetorical fallacies and the baffling non-sequiturs, there is a very poorly hidden love rivalry on set at Price Drop TV. A truly riveting love-joust based around Far Mani, Paul Evers and the home-shopping personality that launched a thousand ships, Tori Campbell.
Now, Far Mani is objectively an awful salesman. He stops in the middle of sentences, he shouts, he says things like 'Lambretta are part of that whole mod culture that was knocking about around the same time as Paul Weller and Oasis'. He also fails to understand the way to make a Price Drop work. So, Far, read this and learn:
Step 1: Build up how amazing a product is.
Step 2: Get the audience used to the idea of the RRP as being not only fair, but a bit of a bargain.
Step 3: Feign surprise, maybe even a bit of disgust, when you then cut that price in half, allowing the audience to get away with a double bargain.
Step 4: Repeat.
That's it, Far. That is literally it. The world's most inept rhetorician could sell a set of Egyptian wool towels faster than you.
Objectively, Paul Evers is a much better salesman. He's a bit funny, he's calm, he doesn't have that desperate 'please buy my shit or I'll lose my job!' look in his eye and he clearly has a decent rapport with the rest of the crew; his weird bits of banter with the camera man and the music-guy are actually pretty entertaining. Imagine a British Jim Carrey who hasn't been to sleep in about three weeks.
Both of these salesmen have one tragic common factor however - an unrequited yearning for Tori Campbell. They would never dare to say as such, but it is there, plain as day. Tori is the glamour of the show... every five minutes or so the cameras will cut to a shot of her playing with one of the products that the viewer will be bidding for later.
Far and Paul cannot leave her alone.
Every other sentence is one reference or another to Tori. 'Tori, what do you think of these towels?' 'Tori, have you ever seen a crystal bowl as lovely as this?' 'Tori, do you have a hoover at home?' She's not even on camera. And as if to cover their tracks, they keep referring to her boyfriend. 'Oh Tori, you've got a feller haven't you?' 'Tori, does your boyfriend realise how lucky he is? Does he Tori? Tori!'
And there we have the Petrarchan lover of 2011.
Obviously this is by no means unique to home shopping channels. Falling for your colleagues is what makes us human. Over a long enough time-scale, any job becomes tedious and stressful enough that we must turn to our co-workers for some sense of sexual intrigue. To have all this played out before a live audience, under the tragic premise of selling mechanised whisks and cut price aftershave... if you think you can conceive of a better way to spend New Years' Eve then you're deluded.
Wishing you all a prosperous 2011
Phil Brown
