Would you pay £45 for a celebratory to endorse what you’re selling?

Breaking this down here, this is £45 for a 1 minute recording of someone reasonably well known on a national scale talking about your product.

If you want my answer, it would be NO! Resoundingly so.

First and foremost, budgets are already tight to get anything done to any decent standard, secondly it’s a rip off, and the fact that celebrities stoop so low as to charging a fortune for a minute or so of their time to talk about you or wish your family member Happy Birthday is a bit tacky, desperate and quite frankly an abuse of status.

I apologise if this comes across as very strongly opinionated, but in terms of ethical value, this kind of stuff grates me and doesn’t sit well at all.

If you’ve done something with integrity, authenticity, professionalism, clarity of intent and quality, you do not need to pay hard earned money for a minute of someone’s time to use their status to sell you.

I think back on my time being so emotionally invested in Game of Thrones and how the season kind of get crushed under it’s own weight by the final season.

To be honest, the show felt like it was on a somewhat downward trajectory when Twyin Lannister snuffed it at the end of season 4. The greater moments became spectacle until that’s all it was predominantly about for season 8.

There’s the evaluations, the uproars, the petitions, the sly suggestions of disapproval from the cast and there’s no denying the fact, that seeing an end to a TV series that has lasted so long is always going to be difficult.

And it seems like every armchair critic out there has never been more vocal or self entitled for that matter.

The Line of Duty season finished yesterday, and it was an enjoyable if somewhat underwhelming closing out. There’s definitely worse endings, but the uproar was insane! People do get attached.

Either way, there are plenty of other series to watch and enjoy, and part of the fun can be imagining your own ending and how you would do things differently.

I rather liked spending a night of insomnia reimagining the tactics of the long night in Winterfell for instance.

Above anything else though, creators and performers deserve more than being tagged and trolled by those who’ve never attempted to write anything themselves other than criticism.

100 years from now, when Historians study the pandemic, there will undoubtedly be the analysis of how countries managed it and the fact that those who were led by women had a significantly lower mortality rate whilst many countries led by men, particularly those who had been peddling the trends of populism, had a higher death rate.

Of course there are a multitude of other reasons, including ageing populations, population density etc. but there is pattern where men who have had a dubious relationship with truth and facts, have led to tragic consequences.

It seems embedded in the culture here in the U.K. that is much more a sign of strength to stand by your viewpoint and double down on it than change your mind. It is pathological in many of our leaders that you can’t be seen to be wrong.

This has had toxic results.

Moving forward, we need to change the culture to shift in a way where changing position on something as more information comes to light is part of being human and is a desirable value.

We also need education to encourage students to leap from the safety net to be wrong so they can learn to be right.

There’s no point having a mind if you can’t change it.