What a surprise — we don't all of us want to stay at home and watch football
CHRISTOPHER F ILDES
Auberon Waugh explained digital television to me. This was the new kind, he said, which could be operated with your fingers, as opposed to the old sets which you pedalled with your feet. I could see that this would be an improvement but never got round to investing in it. In this I was outpaced by Granada and Carlton, the broadcasters, who set up ITV Digital to screen football matches played by second-order clubs, and soon found that this venture was losing more money than they could afford or shake a stick at. Apparently we did not all stay at home to watch Barchester Rovers play Silverbridge Stanley (0-1: Slope, o.g.). In the end, the two sponsors put ITV Digital into administration, much to the dismay of the clubs, which, deprived of their fees, might themselves have to go out of business. Cable television has its troubles, too. It comes to you, or it could, by courtesy of NTL, an elusive mid-Atlantic company whose share price once made Barclay Knapp, its promoter, a billionaire. These shares now change hands for a few cents, and its creditors, just like Marconi's, may find that they end up as owners. Kirch, the German media group, is struggling to keep its bankers at bay. It seems to have overpaid for the rights to televise the World Cup and Formula One, the travelling circus of racing cars. Can the Germans have wearied of watching them go round and round? So much for the new world of communication brought to us by the new technology. Supply has expanded faster than demand possibly could, and it will take a long time for the footsloggers to catch up. We now have enough fibre-optic cable to reach to the moon, but even there I could do without ITV's match of the lunar day.
Boot money
FOOTBALL has long had its place in my Bad Investment Guide. Other people's hobbies are insecure homes for your money, and so are assets that walk about, or walk out. Manchester United came to be valued at £1 billion, which shook me, but the price has come tumbling back down again, and other clubs have fared worse. The idea persists that football is brimming with money, but the game's richest rewards go to the performers and not to the owners, just as they do in the City, which has or had its own share of second-order clubs. It is now being asked to finance the redevelopment of Wembley Stadium, in the belief that this rich game can somehow support it, though how the sums can be made to add up the banks on the case have not yet been able to say. Lending upwards of £400 million to finance a football ground for occasional use, inconveniently located in an urban N.varzone, is not my notion of triple-A banking. 1 would build on a greenfield site somewhere near Meriden (in the geographical centre of England, with good links by rail, road and air, and a strong catchment area) and use it for everything. In the next phase of my project I would move the Grand National there and, after that, the Boat Race.
According to plan
IT was towards the end of the last century that I nominated the Queen Mother as tax planner of the year. There was a silly fuss at the time about the overdraft she was supposed to have run up at Coutts. This, I said, would not worry her bank or its new chairman, Lord Home, in the slightest: 'It is sensible for a 98-year-old to finance herself by borrowing, rather than by selling assets, being caught for capital gains tax, selling more assets to pay the tax, and so on. Her overdraft can then be secured on these assets, and offset against them when estate duty finally has to be paid.' This strategy has now come to fruition, and the only loser is the tax office. In this way, as in so many, an example to us all.
Spiky original
THE Financial Serstices Act, says John Nott, was clumsy and needless: It would never have got through me at Trade.' The only thing worse than this Act. I forecast, would be its successor. In the City. just as in government. Sir John was a spiky original, as his memoirs bear out (Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, Politico's, £20). He can find a good word to say for 'Deadly' Ernest Saunders of Guinness. He would make insider trading a civil, not a criminal, offence. (Few prosecutions, as he says, stick.) Under his chairmanship, Lazards stood out from the rush into investment banking, which was to cost most of the merchant banks their independence. Money, he says, is a corrupting influence on advice: 'The internet bubble has already revealed the lack of quality control being exercised by the big investment banks,' To pay for all their expensive people, they are obliged to overtrade in the markets. That way, says Sir John, lies disaster: 'Mark my words.' Read them, too.
Only joking
APRIL fool, says Werner Seifert. No, Deutsche Borse is not planning to bid for the London Stock Exchange. Its denizens marked the Exchange's shares up, all the same, just in case he had another joke up his sleeve and the laugh was on them. Their chairman, Don Cruickshank, would be awkwardly placed to fend off such a bid. His first act was to recommend the Exchange to come over with its hands up, merge with Deutsche Borse and put Mr Seifert in charge. (He himself would be non-executive chairman, on a three-day week, for a suitable salary.) The denizens threw this deal out, and Mr Cruickshank went on to mount a bid of his own, for Liffe, the financial futures exchange, missing what must have looked like an open goal. If Mr Seifert turns serious, the Exchange is going to need a new chairman.
Freshly squeezed
NEW from npower, which was called National Power until the rebadgers got at it: juice. Plug your telly in, npower urges, at no extra charge. Juice, it explains, is clean and green and friendly and generated by windfarms at sea. How clever of npower to get juice all the way down the wire to your house without mixing it up with plain run-of-the-mill electricity, which might have been generated by coal or even by nuclear power. Who would have thought it? You'll notice the difference in the nice warm cosy feeling juice gives you. Sanctimonious couch potatoes should sign for it now.
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