Scene: The Today Programme Studio, sometime after half past seven on Saturday 16th August 2014.
Jimbo (smugly): It’s sixteen minutes to eight and I’m James Knock-Care-Tea. Actually, it’s sixteen and a bit minutes to eight but you know what we say here in the Today studio: close enough is good enough in horseshoes, hand grenades and time signals. So, there you go. Now it really is sixteen minutes to eight – and I really am James Knock-Care-Tea. (chuckles) You can tell I’m the real McCoy because I’m already rambling, and we’re not yet half way through the programme. But I digress. We were all struck this last week, that is the week that’s just gone by, by the tragic untimely death…
For a man with a name that sounds like a vintage Italian motorcycle, Peretti runs pretty smooth. The creator of The Men Who… documentaries – The Men Who Made Us Fat (about the food industry), The Men Who Made Us Thin (about the weight loss industry) and the surely inevitable but yet to come The Men Who Made Us Fart (about fashionable diets) – recently presented his latest mini-series, The Men Who Made Us Spend, about marketing. Tooling around the globe in vest and V-neck (how about The Men Who Made Us Shirtless, about bankers?), Peretti kicked off by exposing the hidden suicide pact engineered into products to ensure they go pop before their time, and we buy a new one. First up was Osram, who a hundred years ago put the blow back into bulbs, thus ensuring that when the lights went out for the consumer, the profits went up for the manufacturer. More recently, we have the doomsday counters hidden in printer consumables that announce game over even when there is still plenty ink in the cartridge. A picture emerged of a world where cynical industries push kamikaze products on gullible punters to keep the manufacturers in profit. Had Oscar Wilde been in the manufacturing line, he would have known what to say. Either the product goes, or I go.