Old Tin Roof

A little bit of me, and everything else

Shouldn’t we be supporting British?

British Telecom’s lat­est radio and tele­vi­sion advert for their prod­uct BT Infin­ity fea­tures a lovely song called Cor­ner, by a ‘ris­ing US star’; Allie Moss. I wouldn’t have known about the musi­cian if today I’d not heard the full radio advert which is pro­mot­ing a spe­cial per­for­mance she’s putting on soon.

Grrrr…

A part of me was slightly ran­kled enough to tweet that I was unim­pressed that BT were sup­port­ing a ris­ing US artist, when I would have thought it more appro­pri­ate to sup­port ris­ing British tal­ent.  After all, BT stands for British Tele­com, right?

A good friend Rich Knowles, who works for BT, joined in the dis­cus­sion (that I’d only had with myself at this point) and men­tioned that the tune was “a ‘good’ song. And BT works in over 170+ coun­tries” (I’ll get to his Daily Mail com­ment in a moment.)

I already thought the tune was good (if not a lit­tle rem­i­nis­cent of recent tech­nol­ogy adverts like Sony, O2, Orange, Voda­fone, and T-Mobile have used), so the point about being a ‘good’ song was cool.

What I find hard to under­stand is why, when specif­i­cally tar­get­ing a UK audi­ence, BT chose to use a for­eign artist. Surely there are plenty of British musi­cians pro­duc­ing great qual­ity tunes that could have suited the advert just as equally?

It’s not about race or creed

At this point I’ve got to rebut Rich’s com­ment about being ‘Daily Mail’ about it (and Rich if you read this, please don’t take this bit per­son­ally, you just touched a nerve, I still love you mate!).

It seems we’ve slipped into a era where any pos­si­ble chance there is to make some­one feel bad about their opin­ion when it comes to the men­tion of ‘Johnny For­eigner’, that any­one who wants to improve British pride or see British tal­ent get pushed to the front at every oppor­tu­nity is branded some kind of right-wing, BNP sup­port­ing, Daily Mail reader (of which I am none, thank you very much!).

How did it get to be like this?  When did it become such a bad thing being proud of our nation? Have we got to a point where the thought of being proud of your nation has been cap­tured by the nut­ters like Nick Grif­fin, or the Daily “we’re not racist, but it’s the immi­grants fault” Mail, so we’re fright­ened to say so?

More impor­tantly how do we go about re-capturing it and mak­ing it some­thing worth­while again?

I’m not the first to fly the flag on St. George’s day (another note about that will be com­ing soon), but I do like being British, sup­port­ing British where I can, and hope­fully see­ing the coun­try doing well enough to feel proud.

Yes, BT is a global com­pany, but it started as British Tele­com. If they can’t push their ad agen­cies to use British tal­ent when tar­get­ing the Brits, then why should any other global com­pany care when they’re ped­dling their wares here?