Minutes of a Meeting of The Witch Star Project on Saturday the 1st of April 2017 in Room 17 of The Lemon Tree Guest House in Russell Square, Brighton, BN1 2EE.

Attended by Martin Towers (in the chair) and Triple A.

Apologies for absence from Sean Al-Khwarizmi.

ITEM #38

Surprise, surprise!!! In all the months since this project management committee’s last meeting, not much – in fact, nothing at all – has been achieved. Anton had apparently been under investigation by various bodies for various reasons. Consequently he took an overdose of prescribed medications and spent six weeks in Merrydown Park. He’s now staying with relatives somewhere in Scotland but not answering his phone or replying to texts. So it’s just me (Martin Towers) and Trip constituting today’s meeting. I’m therefore voting to suspend this project and shall be scheduling no further meetings. Trip has however brought to this meeting a number of proposals from Alfie. One of them’s that this project should not be suspended. So, since Trip’s vote (on behalf of Alfie) cancels out mine and I – as of this evening – am resigning from this committee, it’s unclear where matters now stand.

ITEM #39

Otto said he couldn’t help us negotiate with local television or obtain any further information about advertising costs. Also, Trip says, we’ve been banned from Otto’s kebab shop, but we don’t know why.

We had invited Mr Al-Khwarizmi’s nephew Sean to attend this meeting. His secretary sent his apologies for not attending and invited us to read the following item from Sean’s booklet, How to Get into Bed with Television Advertising.

TV or Not TV?

The basic requirements for effective marketing communications remain:

1. A message or goal
2. A defined audience you want to reach.
3. A means of reaching that audience, repeatedly and with minimum wastage.
4. In an environment that suits your purpose.
5. Effective marketing material.

Pre digital, the paid for broadcast and print advertising mediums, TV and press, accounted for the largest proportion of mainstream consumer marketing budgets for a good reason: they met these requirements far better than any alternatives.

Commercial radio, bus shelter posters, billboard posters, cinema and a whole range of others were always secondary. They are still secondary but the difference is that the ‘primary’ mediums of TV and press have now become now secondary too.

Printed newspapers are in decline, perhaps terminal. I might still consume something called the FT or the Times or The Telegraph on a tablet, but I don’t consume the advertising as I would have done in the printed version. Most of it I simply avoid and the rest I can ignore. Now we can get whatever information we need from ‘unbiased’ and free sources on the internet, we don’t need press advertising for product information anymore.

Similarly for TV. In the mid 1970’s there was one terrestrial commercial TV channel in the UK – ITV. Everyone watched it regularly. Now, there are hundreds of commercial TV channels and audiences fragmented across them. But TV’s real problem for marketers is that increasingly, younger people don’t watch it at all anymore, ignoring it in favour of tablets and smart phones that give them access to TV programmes whenever and wherever they want them:

• On screens too small for effective advertising to share.
• Whilst mainly doing something else – going somewhere, being somewhere, talking or texting with someone.

Alternatively, the array of recording boxes now attachable to our TV’s provides the utility of fast forwarding through the messages of anyone foolish enough to advertise in the middle of our choices, stopping only when we get to the last programme sponsorship ident which alerts us to the imminent beginning of our viewing again. This ten seconds of TV which tells us that X programme is sponsored by Y brand thereby paradoxically becomes the most valuable commercial property on TV – its sole purpose, to punctuate the non-commercial content.

So it occurs to me that we’re on our own. We can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be relying on anyone’s help to achieve our project’s objectives. The truth is: We’re a company of fools and losers living on the borders of a civilized world whose polite society strives to avoid our advances. For most of the time we’re simply being ignored. But, when any of those well placed ladies and gentlemen must meet with us, then they’re all ever so polite. And they’ll also make promises. But then (once we’ve left the room, or they’ve made their escape) they’ll again continue ignoring our requests or suggestions, phone calls and messages. So it’s perfectly obvious to me that their politeness was actually a sickening form of passive aggression. And if they weren’t all so well practiced in that politeness then they’d probably all admit to their innermost and honest beliefs that this world would be a far prettier picture with the majority of us losers removed.

However, Trip would like to disassociate himself from those (my own, above) opinions. He says it’s like the song says in that Samsung ad, “You’ve got to give the people what they want”. So – I’d ask – would that be an exploding phone? Apparently not …

ITEM #40

Trip wishes for the following proposal to be considered by this committee.

Trip states that no one but him seems to have noticed that ten shops along the left of Western Road (in the direction of Hove, between Churchill Square and Palmeira Square) have all been abandoned and boarded-up now for at least ten years. And, according to local activist William Bones, seven of those buildings are owned by a property developer who’s waiting to make a big enough profit. Trip adds that two premises are being used as accommodation & workshops for illegal immigrants who are being kept in slavery, producing fake Chanel handbags that one of Trip’s associates has been selling on the corner of Sydney Street in the North Laine; and at least one boarded-up shop is actually being used as a cannabis factory.

So, to take advantage of that aforementioned situation, Trip says he’s applied to a lettings agency to open one of those shops as a temporary -six weeks only- pop-up emporium. And then what he needs to do quickly is attract lots of attention to get lots of people into that shop buying lots of things. And, to that end, he’s going to call his shop ‘Crack Cocaine’ though (to delay any attempt by the police or the council to close his shop before it’s even opened) he’s been spelling that name – on all the application forms – with k’s instead of c’s. This, he says, has produced an added benefit: All the items in his shop can now be labelled ‘Sold by the KKK’. And, if all of that wasn’t going to be so outrageously offensive and attention grabbing enough, when I asked what his shop would be selling, Trip said, “Mostly Jimmy Savile memorabilia: Wigs; autographed posters; DVDs: That sort of thing.” Apparently there are BBC executives who regularly have difficulties when it comes to rebroadcasting old, 1970s episodes of Top of the Pops since it’s not easy to cleanly edit-out appearances by various, infamous paedophile DJ’s and pop stars. For example, there’s a particularly rare episode in which Jimmy Savile is enthusiastically introducing Gary Glitter singing ‘Do you want to be in my gang?’ Trip says he’s ordered two hundred copies of that DVD from an outlet in mainland China.

This committee will consider Trip’s proposal at our next meeting.

ITEM #41

Alfie has put us in touch with his imaginary lawyer, Ygor Bedmitz. So when this committee fails to meet existing commitments, to that service all subsequent considerations could be directed.

ITEM #42

Alfie has pointed out that Joe Fuller, the editor of Latest7 (local TV’s listing magazine – on page three in issue 818, on February 28th, 2017) says it was music to his ears when he heard this year’s Brighton Festival guest artistic director, Kate Tempest arguing that “art should be social and a part of life.”

Alfie says we should get to one of Ms Tempest’s gigs. He says there’s a scheme (called Pay-It-Forward) for people like us who can’t normally afford tickets. He says we need to ask Sharon Watney to access this scheme on our behalf. Unfortunately, it seems Alfie doesn’t know Sharon’s not been visiting us since what happened to his sister, Wendy.

According to Trip, Alfie has lots of other ideas (such as visiting certain Brighton Festival events; producing short films; etc). Unfortunately, we were informed yesterday by a nurse during our thwarted attempt to visit, “Alfie’s not well enough at the moment” to discuss these matters any further.

By the way: Earlier, we were looking at these portraits of Alfie, hanging on the wall in Wendy’s room:

alfie 1 & 2

The one on the left was painted by Timothy Sackville-West in 1985; and the one on the right by Christian S. in 2013. And it seemed to us that Alfie doesn’t appear to have aged much during those intervening years.

ITEM #43

The chairman of this meeting – having been forced by a Welfare Benefits Commission adviser to accept unpaid work as a toilet cleaner – must now leave for his evening shift servicing West Street’s English Language Centre.

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