UR TV CAST

Incepta also raised the profile of its board last week by naming Francis Maude, a minister in the Thatcher government, as chairman designate.Yet the challenges aren’t over. The industry is facing a period of transformation with the creation of ITV plc, while over in pay-TV, offerings such as BSkyB’s Sky Plus allow viewers to skip advert breaks altogether.As a result, says Nichols, the emphasis has shifted away from “above the line” marketing – ads, in other words – to a more subtle approach. As Nichols says: “We have gone through a recession, the worst for 40 or 50 years, and it’s been bloody tough.” What was needed was someone to keep hold of the financial reins, not a creative guru.The group is now gearing up for recovery, and 2004 promises to be a better year for the sector as whole. He then spent several years as Incepta’s finance director before landing the top job in 2001.
Yet an accountancy background probably helped during the advertising downturn. Hailing from Newcastle (and still a devoted fan of the football team), he trained as an accountant at Price Water- house before leaving for one of his clients, gas group BG. Richard Nichols, the 38-year-old chief executive of marketing and PR group Incepta, is not your average media darling.

Otherwise these respectable married ladies could be managing little shops somewhere off Sloane Avenue.Peter sru.co.uk. But Trinny’s marvellously driven and bossy and it’s all a splendid bit of career development. They give the bemused creature a big jar of Nescaf?It’s the mark of the beast: they’re obviously coming back to claim her (with a special jar, you get the chance to win a £10,000 shopping spree with Trinny and Susannah, you lucky people). The idea is that Nescaf?ulls you together; it’s the quintessential daytime TV product. And the strapline – clunk, click, fmcg – is “start the day with great taste”.Mitfordian scholars will argue for years who is the grander Insiders say the Constantines are positively ancient.

She’s set up for that moment when they’re striding off in slo-mo, down a high street, around a shopping mall, somewhere the common people go, to size them up. They’re Burke and Hare, they’re the undead, it’s Interview with the Vampire, ladies’ night. Trinny is wearing a curious sort of ’30s knitted silver skullcap and a long scarf. Susannah’s got a big red bag.They alight on a startled young median mainstream mum, shorter than them, of course (in the ’30s, physiologists used to attribute an average 3 to 5 inches variation in height in men to extreme class differences). A big mug full of original Nescaf? soluble solids of pure coffee made by a kind of evaporation and condensation process – and she’s choosing the right things, zipping up her long boots and reconfiguring her Chelsea streaks. “Susannah, step away from that outfit and put the kettle on,” she commands.And it brings Susannah to her senses. And she fixes on something pinkly patterned and ineffably wrong – something definitely not to wear.And there’s Trinny across the room, completely groomed, dressed in the sort of grey suit the elegant long-widowed headmistress of a demanding Swiss finishing school might wear.

Do Trinny and Susannah cohabit? You don’t know what to think, do you, with all that studied stuff about their victims’ tits and arses and all those faintly dominatrix spreads? I raise this question purely because the new Nescaf?ommercial will have put it on the nation’s lips.
There’s Susannah – the softer, plumper, more rumpled partner – in her pink pyjamas, hair mussed, scratching her bottom as she searches her huge back-lit wardrobe for something nice for a supermarket sweep. It would live up to the ambitions of Johnny Depp the actor only if Sparrow turned out to be the bastard son of some nobleman who led his scoundrel band into operetta – Pirates of Penzance, anyone?. Though he works hard, it’s not clear that many of his forthcoming projects will be mainstream: he is in Secret Window, directed by screenwriter David Koepp; he plays J M Barrie in the very intriguing J M Barrie’s Neverland; he is going to play Willy Wonka in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; there is another chapter from the life of Hunter Thompson, The Rum Diary; and a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean where, I’d hope, that we learn a lot more about Jack Sparrow. After he had worked with Brando, Depp even volunteered to set up, write and direct a picture that would give Brando all the freedom he claimed was being denied by Hollywood.