Current mood: WOOF WOOF!!!
Category: WOOF WOOF!!! Goals, Plans, Hopes
A year or so back, I went in the audience to watch the making of a TV show called Fortune, Million Pound Giveaway
Presented by daytime TV favourite, Richard Madeley, this program featured a bunch of celebrities including Crystal Palace Football Club Chairman Simon Jordan, Mobo Awards Founder Kanya King & world famous multi-faceted phillanderer Jeffrey Archer.
The idea was that between them, these folk donated £1,000,000 of their OWN money to poor and deprived folk by way of a TV program.
To get ahold of this money, the poor and deprived folk had to come into the TV studio to pitch their case to covince enough of the panel, that they deserved a slice of the cash....
It was exactly the kind of behaviour that Jesus James Christ apparently rattled on about when he’d talk about not blowing trumpets to publicise one’s charitable giving - and because it was so extreme and such an overt example of such unchristian behaviour, it was quite fascinating to watch...
So who got the cash??
Well, the emphasis was on youth group projects or individual kids situations, and some of the pitches almost made me and half the rest of the audience cry.
Yes boss, there were some folk with unimaginably hard lives, trooping in to pitch their ideas and hard luck stories, together with the few harmless idiots (for comedy value) and some of the stories made you want to die...
So touching were they, that at times, I completely envied the moneyed types ability to believe they were in the process of alleviating the suffering - if only to be on the recieving end of that kind of an ego and power trip....
But of course being a normal person, I had to make do with applauding the benefactors at the end of each pitch and choking a tear for the hard luck stories when the benefactors decided which ones were worthy and which ones weren’t....
I found the most interesting parts of this program to be the bits inbetween the pitches - the breaks, when the cameras weren’t running and you could take a good look at the natural body language of the celebrity chariateers and a better look into their eyes.
Yes boss, I spent a good portion of the time trying to get eye contact with each of them (Kanya King in particular), so as to have a look in through that particular window of the soul to try and see what they were really about...
Now, though at times it might seem to be that way, I’m not so cynical that I believe all wealthy types to be evil fucks purely because they have money.
There are plenty of alright rich people, in fact from what little I saw, I found most of the charity gods on display on Fortune to be reasonably regular folk who’ve been very successful and made loads of cash and are now not totally sure what to do with it and the responability they feel this money conveys (Except Jeffrey Archer - he was definately on a PR drive to repair his prison marred reputation)...
I liked Simon Jordan before, during and after. A self confessed pervert, he prides himself on bluntness and it’s paid dividends making him very rich. He strikes me as being the type who enjoys life and doesn’t give too much of a boo-hoo about what anyone else thinks about how he comports himself or his affairs....
Jaqueline Gold founder boss of lingerie and sex toy chain Ann Summers (so who in the hell is Ann Summers then??) had the kind of calm and containedness you expect from a glorified porn baron. Content and intelligent, she was a very smooth character indeed - very accomplished and very shrewd..
Jeffrey Archer (not to be confused with Vincent Van Gogh)
Yes boss, Mr Archer generally amuses me. He’s the archetypal self obsessed easily caught, unclever, politican - he’s good entertainment, a well trained buffoon...
He, like most of the entrepreneurs, had pulled himself up into that position through hard work and dedicated pursuit of cash, and I had the impression he very much liked the position and the authority it gave him.
Shit, he started handing his phone number out to some of the folk he gave his wealth too and talked knowledgeably about the specifics of some of their African efforts.
I started to imagine him riding on a British Raj Chariot waving at the crowds he’d magnanimously helped on the way to the naming ceremony of The Duncan Bannantyne Institute. He really had that benevolent and rich patrician figure about him - an assurance of his mission and his importance in the world!!
The highlight of the evening (at least as far as I was concerned) was Mobo award founder and organiser Kanya King.
Anyway, the bottom line with these 2 or 3 blogs is that I don’t buy this argument that after you’ve got your cash, you then play god and try and save the whole or various aspects of the world...
For one, I simply don’t understand the idea of earning loads of money as an aim in life in the first place, nor the idea that a life can be made satisfying by doing deals and deals alone.
Essentially, I don’t understand why people do it or what they think they are gonna get or achieve except a different set of problems to those they have being poor.
Yes boss, it’s my guess that at least 2 or 3 of the panel were sitting there knowing that though the cash was sorted they still hadn’t quite got what they wanted and needed from life..
You get entrepreneurs like Bannantyne who have spent their life doing deals in products they have absolutely no interest in or regard for, simply because they can make money by doing these deals. They see money and they invest money to make it bigger for it’s sake and it’s sake alone...
They then get this huge fucking wedge of cash and don’t have any better ideas as to what to do with it other than to make a big show of being generous with it, not purely because they’re raging egotists, but because they have no better ideas or good skills in simply wasting it..
Rather than creating yourself these kind of problems, I reckon it’s far better to have a little fun and to try and do something that inspires people or do something that makes you buzz and quake for no reason at all....
Do something utterly pointless and banal. Do something you have no idea about. Don’t ever do something purely because it makes money EVER..
Do something you love AND TO HELL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES!!!
Of course even if you follow that path you can get lucky and end up with an excess of cash that you can’t or don’t want to spend, but then the least you can do is to do something spectacular and imaginative with it
Don’t give it middle ranking charity administrators to buy Volvos with and don’t snort it all - DO SOMETHING INTERESTING WITH IT!!!!
Do something bizarre or peculiar:
Build a tower in the desert out of sugar, blast yourself into space with a harp and try and sit on a cloud, see if it’s possible to glue a few masterpieces together into a collage, buy a building and keep knocking it down and rebuilding it until you run out of cash, buy a country and make yourself KING!!
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