Not surprisingly, the result was a pair of publications doomed to instant dispatch to the nearest re-cycling plant.
Free is the new way to success in magazines, Alan Sugar had assured his hopefuls – no cover price and totally reliant on advertising revenue.
“Understand your readers” echoed Shortlist’s Mike Soutar, King of the Frees. So off they went into focus group mode.
Choosing to aim at the prosperous over-60s, one team went and talked to middle-aged members of a bowling club. Planning an upmarket lads’ magazine, their rivals spent time with middle-class members of a rugby club.
Unfortunately, neither team bothered to listen to what they were told.
“Don’t emphasise age – the 60s of today still think we’re 30,” said one bowler. “Give us fun,” said another. “No knitting patterns,” insisted a lady bowler.
The result: a magazine entitled Hip Replacement with a cover design reminiscent of vintage Woman’s Weekly, featuring a buxom matron wearing what looked like a full-length woollen cardigan and held in the desperate embrace of a Gene Kelly lookalike (perhaps appropriately, Gene’s been dead all of 15 years).
Over at the rugby club, the chaps wanted something more restrained than existing lads’ mags - more professional, more about careers and finance (“more boring” was one aside).
The result: a magazine entitled Covered featuring a bikini clad pin-up partially covered within a man’s jacket, sporting career girl spectacles, talking on a mobile phone and wearing the kind of yellow hard hat so familiar on building sites.
The total effect is of an edition of Construction News guest edited by Austin Powers.
Mike Soutar might have added: “Visualise your advertisers”. Neither team went so far and met a largely blank reception when they made their presentations to advertising agencies and media buyers.
Covered was told that advertisers regarded lads’ mags as a market in decline and wanting for new ideas. Hip Replacement heard that they had identified a potentially lucrative market but there was the heavy sound of hearts sinking and jaws dropping when media buyers were confronted with such a title and coverlines offering “Ensure to Insure”.
In vain, the latter team explained that the title was meant to be a light-hearted play on words, with the emphasis on Hip – something of an upbeat reminder of the all-action hippie era.
But back in the boardroom, Alan Sugar was having none of that, insisting that readers would not distinguish between the two words. He pointed out that the sub-title of “Out with the old, in with the new” implied that having had one hip replaced it was time to have the other done.
“Perhaps we lost the sense of irony”, admitted one of the team.
As himself a member of the over-60s target audience, the technology tycoon was particularly incensed by a proposed feature entitled “How to make a phone call”.
“Bad! Bad!” he cried. “So condescending.”
Surprisingly for a publication aimed at a very different age group, Covered made no effort to introduce a digital dimension - no ideas for a website, no interactive elements, no apps. Although dismissing the features on Stag Stories, Top Rated Games, Quick Food and Sporting Highlights as “the same old formula” he warmed to the promise of “How to make £1,000 in a day” and declared them the winning magazine.
Their somewhat incongruous prize was a course of lessons at a fencing academy (presumably to acquire a more elegant form of the back-stabbing of fellow competitors that is an essential requirement of the programme).
Scapegoat for the dismal failure of Hip Replacement was Glen Ward, the self-professed barrow boy made good who his lordship likened to a Del Boy character thinking Only Fools and Horses was a business model. So off he went into the night.
The whole exercise was pure fantasy. But the producers of Have I Got New for You will be regretting that nothing came to reality thus denying the closing minutes of the programme all the fun of examining the contents of Hip Replacement magazine.
Perhaps followed the next week by comedienne Jennie Eclair’s suggestion of a companion title, Colostomy Bag magazine.
