Be Excellent To Each Other

Sir Alan says buy British and proudly boasts how he builds his Viglen computers in the UK:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/money/backingbritishbusiness/article1834137.ece

But talk of dumping Far East goods in the UK? Buy British? Has he forgotten?

[picture goes wavey. Apprentice theme plays. A bearded man is sitting in a waiting room. There is a man dressed as a woman sitting at a desk. It appears to be Dudley in a miniskirt. Next to him is a GX4000. It starts ringing. Camera zooms in and out of the Amstrad logo on the console. Dudley picks up the GX4000.]

Dudley: Yes Sir Chinny, GX4000's at £19.99 each and you only have 174,000 remaining. I see.....

[Dudley puts down the GX4000]

Dudley (in high pitched voice]: Sir Chinny will see you now.

[Scene cuts to the board room. Chinny is sitting in a specially built up chair. Grim.. sits to his right in a smart suit, Craster sits to his left wearing an ill fitting womans wig and a pair of fake comedy breasts. There is a knock at the door]

Chinny: Come in.

[Sir Alan Enters]

Chinny: Sit down.

Sir Alan: Thank you Sir Chinny.

Chinny: Don't give me that flim flam, you'll speak when you are spoken to. Now, I sent you out to write an article to help boost British business. Craster, how did he do?

Craster (in high pitched voice): Well Sir Alan wrote an article for The Sun saying that people should buy British and that he builds all his computers in the UK.

[pause]

Chinny (stroking beard): I see..... And it didn't occur to you that this might make you look like a plonker?

Sir Alan: Why?

Chinny: Because nobody knows or cares who Viglen are because they sell less machines that bloody Acorn! Yet the company who made you all your money spent 10 years building their machines in Korea. Millions of them!

Sir Alan: But...but... we built the Spectrum in the UK.

Grim..: But they weren't as reliable were they? The dealer surveys I have here from 1989 show that the Korean built CPC was thought to be twice as reliable as the Scottish built Spectrums.

Sir Alan: Yes, but....

Chinny: What do you have to say?

Sir Alan: Well I don't like to talk about the 80's.

Craster (adjusting breasts): I bet you don't. Isn't it true that in the 80's you donated huge amounts of money to the Tory party, but now pretend that you supported Labour all along?

Sir Alan: Er......

Chinny (waving The Sun around): But what really galls me, what really galls me is the bit in here where you start complaining that British manufacturers can't get into the French market.

Sir Alan: That's right. They won't buy my Viglen computers.

Chinny: But yet they bought your Korean built CPC's by the bucketload making you the dominant computer manufacturer in France for the best part of 7 years. It was yours to lose!

Sir Alan: Yes, but things change.

Chinny: Thing change sunshine. What happened was you took your eye off the ball and all the punters who bought CPC's, Spectrums, PCW's and your PC's pissed off elsewhere as you offered no upgrade route. You pissed away your own market.

Sir Alan: But we had problems with the hard drives.....

Grim..: You thought everyone wanted PC's to play games on. Probably correct, but not in 1991. What people wanted was a 16 bit CPC or Spectrum no later than Christmas 1988.

Chinny: That's enough. I've made my decision. Sir Alan, you were a great businessman who made alot of money. But when lecturing people on what to do, you should perhaps keep in mind your own past actions instead of acting like things never happened. You were as cosy with Thatcher as you are with Brown, and you made a fortune not only making your goods in Korea but also buying cheap goods in the Far East and then dumping them on the UK actually driving the UK manufacturers out of business.

Sir Alan: But times were different....

Chinny: Let me continue! This makes you a hypocrite and for me that's the worst kind of person to be. Sir Alan, with much regret, you are fired.

[Sir Alan walks out. Music plays]

I'd imagine it's better for the UK economy to buy something that is designed in the UK and built in Taiwan then something that is built in the UK but designed in Germany. I bet for your average MP3 player / DVD Player / Suit / fancy knick-knack, the matgin on manufacturing is pretty small. The people that hold the actual rights is where the money goes, surely? As well as the shop and the wholesalers and the distributors. Little Johnny Factory Guy gets next to nothing.

Hang on - am I Karren Brady? I met her last week - she's immensely irritating.

No response necessary.

Oh.

Building it is 6 British people employed though, whereas designing it would be 1 British person employed.

But you'd get more tax of the rich designer bloke.

Actually, you might get more off the factory guys. They'll only spend their money on fags and booze, whilst the designer is buying lattés and muffins.

You missed the bit where I ride through the window on a motorcycle, and smack Sir Alan around the chops with a crappy Amstrad Sky+ box that has forced me to format the hard drive and lose all my saved programs yet again.

The designer is probably clever enough to avoid paying tax anyway.

I've emailed him via The Sun saying "Oy, 6 million computers made in Korea have a problem with what you wrote in your article". Or words to that effect.

I'm sure, even as we speak, someone is printing your email off and is about to run into his boardroom, waving around, shouting "Sir Alan! A man on the Internet says you are wrong!"

Sir Alan, who nobody had given a toss about for well over a decade, cares that you disagree. Perhaps he'll post one of those hilarious Sir Alan-o-matics to you, and when you take it out of the box the finger will pop out and poke you in the eye. And then it will try play its tape of 'You're fired' only the tape will seize, the motor will overheat and it'll burst into flames.

Well we'll know about it if they do. They probably have an Amstrad DMP2000 printer so everyone within 60 miles of Brentwood will have to suffer from 3 days of terrible noise while the printer does it's stuff.

He might just sent me a GX4000 with a letter telling me where to stick it (under the telly - Ed).

i also usually only buy stuff from my country, which besides all the reasons involved (being second cheaper behind the crappy spanish stuff and having good quality) is better for the environment.

Even if Viglens are assembled in the UK, you can bet your last penny every single component was made in China or Taiwan. Japan at a push.

Heh, you had an Amstrad answering machine too?

Yay, I was in the story!

"Sir Alan! This frigging Amstrad Emailer is knackered again! Why won't you let me use a computer connected to the internet like a normal person? Everyone else's PA gets to use a computer", surely?

FTFY