Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Character-building

Watching some snooker player trying to conceal his annoyance as he snappily answers questions like "What's your favourite colour" in the BBC's attempt to convey the personalities of players makes me think about the marketability of memory competitions.

It's a regular complaint nowadays that there used to be "characters" in snooker, whereas now the players are all interchangeable, boring young men. This complaint is generally made by old men who forget that the old players were also boring. But I think "The Mentalists" showed that we could do a big feature about all the top memory athletes, sum up each of their personalities and quirks in a soundbite and make the general public genuinely interested in us. You know, Gunther's the German mastermind, Ed's 'the upper-class chap' (as someone I met in the street a while ago repeatedly described him), and I'm the working-class hero. Or maybe the weird nerd with the beard and hat, take your pick.

I bet I could describe the whole top twenty in the world in their own unique phrase, if I put my mind to it. But I don't think I will - I'd only end up offending everyone by using some harmless phrase like "the big fat idiot who can't remember anything".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or are you the man in the cape ?

Dai

Florian Dellé said...

Yeah, you are the Sith Imperator!

I think it's a fantastic idea to create Characters for the top athletes. You as the champion would be perfect to do it, because everybody already hates you as their biggest rival (just kiddin').

If you need a proper platform to announce these "Characters", you know how to find me. ;)