Entertainment For Lively Minds
A design for life? More like a complete lack of any clue at all.
Has anyone else endured the 60 minutes of jaw-droppingly embarrassing television called Design For Life that the BBC is airing weekly at present?
Phillippe Starck's been lumbered with his own mutant hybride version of The Apprentice, in which 12 'Design Students' compete for a six-month placement at his design agency.
Oh dear.
What have they been doing before they came to play in Paris?
They do a very good impression of being a vacuous group of woolly-thinking lazy good-for-nothings who stare at plates all day or stroll aimlessly about the streets with a film crew in order to come up with 'design concepts' which can be illustrated by sketching a square on a piece of paper and mumbling incoherently.
These people include an 'unemployed retail worker' (a.k.a. shelf-stacker?), a 'Brand Manager' and a 'College Lecturer'. Good grief. Given this must have been filmed a while back, have any of these wasters actually been allowed back into the country? If so, why?
Why are we giving les mangeurs de fromage this blatant excuse to mock our educational institutions? More to the point, why are any of us watching it?
Oh shit. It's only me isn't it?
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A shelf stacker by another name...
Is an Ambient Replenishment Colleague!
Old Phillippe
doesn't come across as the most inspiring or engaging of mentors
*puts hand up too*
Look at this - we're an army of viewers.
You're right, some of them really are quite dozy, and not always in a particularly endearing way.
I'm afraid Philippe Starck comes across as l'fanny petite too, as they probably don't say in France.
Philippe Starck
il péte plus haut que son cul, as they do say in some places in France
Me too.
I only saw some of the first programme, where people sat around making blindingly obvious, infant school level comments about products they'd brought in. Only one bloke was praised, because he noticed that his product looked a bit like a knob.
The DesignerSirAlan bloke just reminds me of philosopher-in-residence from "The Day Today", Jacques 'Jacques' Liverot ("When I drive my car, I am not driving. I am participating in a conspiracy called 'traffic'. I will walk...")
Thankfully, no
but I did have the misfortune to view the glassy eyed sedated chin drool that is the 1 Show, once.
Hey..
It's got Christine Bleakley on it. She makes me drool.
Why is Phillipe Starck held up as a design genius? The thing he seems to be famous for a a funny lemon-squeezer which is somewhat ironic because it's shit at juicing lemons and what little it does extract goes all over the worktop rather than into the desired receptacle. But it does look pretty and shifted lots of units at about £90 a pop a few years back.
The Alessi Juicy Salif.
We've got one, and it works really well as long as the operator uses a little common sense. It's good looking and easy to clean too. It was a wedding pressie. They are £36 on Amazon by the way.
I've been watching this too
and Phillipe Starck is completely bonkers. All those young designers are at a complete loss with his 'briefs', which are so broad as to be totally baffling.
Glad that knob Nabel went last week, but I couldn't care less who wins. I just dream of living in a Paris mews house while watching.
But the vague, open brief is inevitable, isn't it?
Unless he wants to spoon-feed the little blighters.
If he just said, 'Geev me ze design you 'ave for a noo forme urv can openeur. Eet murst be ecolurgical, and eet murst 'ave PASSION!' we'd be subjected to 12 muppet designs for can openers made of recycled car parts or something.
Instead, he's giving them licence to be free-thinking and to come up with something really unique. Which they don't seem capable of.
They're caught in the headlights of originality, as if they're scared that someone else will come up with a proposal that will make their own look very silly, but without being able to formulate their own in the first place.
'Well, I suppose, like, if I sit around staring out the window for long enough, like, I'll have one of those moments of inspiration all great designers have. Like that time I just knew what the next line of lyrics was going to be in that, like, White Stripes song, when we sat around listening to all their albums after a nineteen hour binge on, like, Red Bull, cheap vodka and that manky speed we used to buy from the bloke who, like, lived upstairs.'
They don't have the balls to just go for something practical and tangible, nailing their colours to the mast in the process. There's a constant hedging of bets going on, resulting in an inspirational reductio ad absurdam.
At least that dick who designed the 'Tunnel Of Infinity' or whatever it was in 30 seconds flat while lounging around spouting cobblers gave us all a laugh at his ludicrous levels of self belief and overall olympian knob factor. In fact, it'd be a much better television programme if they were ALL like him!