Ideas Man

Like most men my age, the best ideas I have usually come while having a leisurely time on the toilet (it's amazing how the mind can drift from struggling with a crossword clue to designing a way of camouflaging ships to confuse Somalian pirates) or while talking in the saloon bar of The Anchor with my friends Brummie Dave and The O'Brien brothers, Dermot and Brendan.

Between us we formulate and workshop ideas until we have something meaningful that we can use, though sometimes we struggle to remember the idea the next evening and have to start all over again. Here are a few of our recent ideas that we can still recall:

Work To Your Strengths

Now The Anchor, like all good pubs, doesn't sell any kind of food other than pork scratchings and pickled eggs. But our local chippie, The Golden Fry, does a very passable Cod and Chips, but it does sell at the not inconsiderable sum of £4.80. That equates to 1.4 pints of Stella.

How do we get round this? We work to our strengths, that's how.

One of the locals in The Anchor is a miserable scouse misanthrope called Jim Walker. Now Jim, though he's not short of a few bob, is tighter than a camel's arse in a sandstorm and is always looking for a way to add to his fortune.

Luckily for Jim, he looks a lot older than he is and, probably down to quite a poor diet and spending much of his life on Merseyside, can easily pass for a 70 year old man (though he's not yet 50).

Well, The Golden Fry does a special Cod and Chips for £2.50 deal for pensioners. So, we send Scouse Jim round to buy them, who never gets asked his age because he looks so close to death, and he makes 50p per transaction into the bargain whilst we save £1.80 - over half a pint of Stella.

Everyone's a winner.

Ideas men.

Entertainment

We spend a lot of time in The Anchor, when there's no racing on, watching daytime television and we're frequently coming up with new ideas and formats for TV shows.

Here's one we're currently pitching to Tyne Tees, Granada and LWT:

A remake of 'Murder She Wrote'

Jessica Fletcher, to be played by Penelope Keith, now much older and suffering from advanced dementia, has relocated from Southern California to Bedfordshire, where she stands outside Luton Bus Garage swearing at passers-by and singing lewd interpretations of old Demis Roussos songs.

It's going to be called 'Arseholes She Shouted'

Economy - How to save the country £1.8 Trillion

Both of the O'Brien brothers were librarians, now medically retired due to extreme bouts of gout and indolence, and know a fair bit about the public sector

Now, in their opinion the average public sector worker skives off about 10 minutes a day through flexitime and fiddling their timesheets.

This equates to £1.8 trillion per annum and here's how:

  • 2.7 million public sector workers
  • £30k average annual wage
  • Total annual wage bill: £81,000,000,000
  • 220 working days per annum
  • 220 x 7.5 = 1650 working hours per annum
  • 1650 x 60 = 99000 working minutes per annum
  • £81,000,000,000/99000 = £818181 price per minute
  • 220 x 10 = 2200 minutes lost
  • 2200 x £818181 = £1,799,998,200
  • £1.8 Trillion savings if we eradicate timesheet fiddling in the public sector

So how can we do it?

Well, if we offshored the public sector HR function to the Cortez Drug Cartel from Guadalajara, so that instead of getting a bit of a telling off or a written warning if people fiddled their timesheets, the new HR Team would take a more punitive line.

It could go something like this.

The errant Public Sector worker would be bundled into the back of a car as they left their office or place of work. Then, taken to some woods on the outskirts of Harlow, where they'd be shot 27 times, their genitalia chopped off stuffed in their mouth, and a sign saying 'Mother F**king Flexitime Cheat Bastardo' hung around their neck, before their carcass was dumped outside their office. Word would soon get round and timesheet cheating would be a thing of the past.

Might sound a bit harsh, but £1.8 Trillion savings! You can't argue with that.