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Focus on a proper job
Monday 3 November 2008

<p>TELEVISION dramas, so some acute observer of the contemporary scene was suggesting a few days ago, are switching students off proper jobs. Should we be even remotely surprised? A few years ago, All Creatures Great and Small, which was decent enough television &mdash; despite a fixation with the wrong end of cattle &mdash; had them piling into veterinary colleges to such an extent that the qualifications required soon exceeded those demanded by Oxford or Cambridge.</p>
<p>Nowadays, such is the volume of encouraging propaganda surging through the airwaves devoted to criminology and pathology that the little ghouls are all wanting to be either dissecting bodies, or poured into those white plastic boiler suits and masks that are always encountered around murder scenes while they search for DNA. They are queuing up to study forensic science at universities, even though there must be somewhat limited job prospects. I mean, we cannot surely be as criminal as all that? Really, somebody should be honest enough to tell them that it is about as pointless as media studies and sociology.</p>
<p>Police TV dramas were once regarded as important recruiting vehicles for what we used to call the Force, but I guess the kids have wised up to all the verbal violence from superiors that is demanded by the viewers, and if they can read, they learn about the way the poor old cop is submerged in paperwork while being beaten up by drunks. So television may not be the great recruiting sergeant it once was.</p>
<p>I was also mildly encouraged at the thought expressed by one expert recently, that the bloodshed in the financial services might just dissuade young people from wanting to follow their dream following the cash in the City.</p>
<p>Turn on the TV news these days and there is a picture of harassed-looking people sitting before multiple crimson-coloured screens in City dealing rooms, yelling into telephones and being very worried by the state of the financial world. For the life of me, I never understood the attraction of such a wholly unhealthy life, where enormous rewards had been attracting some of the cleverest science and engineering graduates for years, devising the complex financial instruments which, we now realise, have been the ruin ofus all.</p>
<p>Perhaps now they will be able to focus on science and engineering, treat the financial services&rsquo; and bankers&rsquo; milk rounds at university with the utter contempt they deserve and do something rather more worthwhile with their lives. If the financial meltdown as portrayed to the impressionable young is to mean anything, the sheer pointlessness and futility of a life serving computers and mucking about with other people&rsquo;s money in an investment bank ought to register. But now that a career in financial services has been effectively closed off by multiple nationalisations of banks, my worry is that the other great message of screen-based propaganda will have them all wanting to become environmentalists.</p>
<p>There is, perhaps, a serious point that has been made by prominent engineers for many years, as they have watched their talented young swallowed up by the money men. There is a desperate need to revitalise science and engineering, and if financial services are to go down, then it is more important than ever if we are not to descend to third-world status.</p>
<p>You might say that if engineering and manufacturing really wanted to attract the best people they would pay for them. It is a fair point, but the truth is that the financial services sector became ridiculously unbalanced in the rewards it presented. Why should there be any rational sense of rewards when it was all other people&rsquo;s money on offer? But maybe the sector will learn a little humility, as the pain now begins to really bite.</p>
<p>In our struggling shipping industry, where there is a desperate need to attract bright youth, there has been a sort of fervent hope that some TV drama or documentary showing seagoing in a favourable light might emerge. I haven&rsquo;t seen it, being located in England, but there are, we hear, very good reports about a Scottish Television series called The Merchant Navy, which is attracting a large number of viewers. </p>
<p>Moreover, it is said to be responsible for a larger number of inquiries than usual at Scottish maritime colleges and shipping companies. One can only wish them well, as it is a job that is worthwhile, indeed essential, and one with prospects. True, there are shipping companies that young people should not touch with a bargepole, but that is the case in every career. It would be nice if STV could export its programme over the border, although the chances of it being seen among all the far more important &lsquo;reality&rsquo; shows and dramas, featuring sexy looking forensic scientists wading around in the gore, would seem remote.</p>
<p>The one TV drama/documentary I found absolutely unmissable was Trawlermen, which featured the real life adventures of a number of Peterhead boats. Here was brilliant filming, a real sense of the power of the sea and man&rsquo;s eternal battle with this ferocious element. It also offered a realistic commentary about a whole range of fishing related issues, from the iniquitous Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union, which has been largely responsible for the destruction of British fishing, to the wicked waste of bycatches.</p>
<p>But it also showed a great deal of seamanship, an entrepreneurial spirit that is clearly still alive and well on the Buchan coast. The fact that you could show such gripping, red-blooded television unaccompanied by the filthy language deemed compulsory in so much else we see on the box, said a lot for the way these people were brought up.</p>
<p>I daresay that there may not be a sudden rush of school leavers into the Peterhead fishing fleet as a result of this programme, but perhaps this was not the point. I thought that this programme deserved an award.</p>
<p>And talking of awards, the Wettern and Mountbatten Awards, which are designed to encourage maritime journalism and other media have come around again. The Wettern itself was a prize that was worth having, not perhaps at the same level as the Booker, but a recognition of some talent that was being used to represent our maritime world in print media.</p>
<p>This year, I am delighted to report that the Wettern itself, named after the late naval correspondent and hammer of the government, Desmond Wettern, was won by Julian Bray, until very recently editor of this newspaper. He is a worthy winner, who has done a good deal to shake the industry out of its complacency and persuade it to take a higher profile in a number of areas where it traditionally liked to lie low. He has also used this newspaper with a surgical precision and shown that you do not have to have a mass market appeal to exercise a certain degree of influence in the world.</p>
<p>But Bray will be the first to admit that the aim of the Wettern Awards &mdash; to persuade mainstream editors to be rather more interested in the maritime world &mdash; has not really been effective. It makes ripples, rather than waves, which is a pity when it is considered how important that this industry is. No major broadsheet employs a specialist shipping reporter, and sometimes even the transport desk, which covers every mode and spends most of its time commenting on railway fares and motorway congestion, is tenanted by transients, rather than specialists.</p>
<p>A few years ago, Reuters decided that there was room for a closer look at shipping and hired some shipping reporters, but the phase sadly did not last long. Some suggest that the paucity of public companies in the shipping world discourages any discussion, notably in the City pages where some desperate reporter must conjure hundreds of words each day about share price movements &mdash; no problem in today&rsquo;s market.</p>
<p>And paradoxically, the serious downturn over the last couple of months that is laying waste to the share value of these new public companies, which at least were being commented on, will see shipping&nbsp; confined to the wastelands again. As US investors angrily demand their money back and look for somebody to sue, shipping will be forgotten. It will become, once again, the subject of press interest only when our ships sink and coasts are polluted. Some people say that ships, or at least the ownership of them, are best kept out of the capital markets, and history informs us that the relationship has not been a happy one.</p>
<p>But there again, the sheer drama of shipping is surely rather televisual? Look, for example, at its volatility &mdash; a ship earning $130,000 per day six months ago being offered $5,000 last week, ought to be just the sort of thing to galvanise the TV airwaves. Why portray financial dealing rooms with its hysterical inhabitants, when you could be showing the face of a genuine shipowner who has just realised that the ship he bought for $120m in January is worth little more than scrap value, (not that anyone wants any scrap) and nobody wants to charter it? </p>
<p>Prefaced by a warning for viewers, perhaps, about the strong language.</p>
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