Bunhill: Skins only get shirty in adverts

INTRODUCING the all-new British male: he's shaved his head and he drinks lager.

Sounds familiar, of course, but the style gurus have stolen the skinhead's clothes, taken them to the mass market and changed Cool Britannia into Who You Lookin' At Britannia. According to Ben Sherman, whose latest billboard advert features a cross-cropped teenager and a pit-bull terrier over the slogan "Separated at Birth", you don't have to be violent to be a skinhead (though it probably helps).

"The skinhead now goes across every fashion, every style, across every social class," says David Meikle of Ben Sherman's ad agency, Grey Advertising. "What this advertising does is to take out the political association and replace it with a style association through humour and irony." And you can see his point because, these days, inside every well-heeled bonce there's a skinhead waiting to get out. The figures prove the point: in the financial year to June 1997, Sherman Cooper, the owner of the brand, posted a pre-tax profit of pounds 6.5m, up from pounds 1.5m the previous year.

The reason is that fashion knows now knows boundaries: people will wear any item that asserts their individuality and boot out the attitude. Opera or theatre, you can't move for shaved heads, and every function where black tie used to be de rigueur now makes crombies and Ben Shermans mandatory.

Market research into how unreconstructed skinheads feel about everyone else muscling into their sub-culture is thin on the ground and will probably never be risked, but we can rely on one thing when the World Cup kicks off this summer: the post-modernist skinhead will be misunderstood and mercilessly beaten by the local gendarmerie.

HER MAJESTY'S servants at Customs & Excise write proudly to tell us of a huge drugs haul - 20 kilos of cocaine concealed in a consignment of sliced mushrooms. We are informed that the catch has an estimated street value of pounds 1.5m - though I hope that figure's for the drugs and not the vegetables, otherwise I'm staying clear of illicit cauliflowers. Either way, you have to wonder why the smugglers should have chosen this vegetable to hide controlled drugs in; even those pillars of the establishment at Customs & Excise have heard of magic mushrooms.

Telly's all the rage

THE UNOBTRUSIVE TV set - there's a vision that still eludes even the most ingenious interior designers.

So you want to make it clear that the cathode ray tube isn't the dominant feature of your living-room even though the pictures on the mantelpiece don't appear in any listings sections and you're unlikely to discuss which Impressionist painting you should look at tonight. You can do something about that, of course: buy a portable and place it on the bookcase, then run the wires up through a hole in the shelf and you'll hardly notice the set's there.

Then try to turn it round to get at the connections when you have to reprogramme the video and reset the channels. That's what I had to do after the Channel 5 retuning man came round; I still haven't got the stations right and I still can't get Channel 5.

And this is where Cambridge Display Technology comes in, because it has developed a prototype plastic monitor just 2mm thick which it claims will be light enough to hang on your wall and unobtrusive enough to blend into the surroundings. Existing flat-screen systems, it says, suffer from blurred pictures and restricted viewing angles. But the new technology, based on light-emitting plastic, will deliver enhanced quality at a lower price.

Mark Gostick, the marketing director of Cambridge Display Technology, says the company hopes to have some models on the market within three years, starting with desktop and notebook computers and then moving on to TVs. There is a big potential market, he says, for machines that are less bulky and intrusive.

However, while the innovation is hard to fault, it will require a change in attitude among viewers. Some TV programmes incite violent passions and require what Robin Cook would call a "proportionate response". One of the most memorable outbursts came during the Sex Pistols' expletive- laden TV interview with Bill Grundy in 1976, when one male viewer felt obliged to stick his fist through the screen to protect his children from bad language. Exposure to swear words would have offended their sensibilities, of course; the flying shards of glass just flew straight over their heads.

The point is that during, say, Question Time or a football match, crouching down in front of a robust glass screen and hurling abuse at it is the most natural thing in the world. Go up to a wall-mounted plastic screen, on the other hand, and shout Oi! Olga Maitland, No! and frankly you'll feel a bit of a berk.

That's all in the future, however. In the meantime I wonder which I'll get first - a plastic monitor or Channel 5.

FOLLOWING the recent stories of million-pound City bonuses, those of us on more modest stipends can take comfort in the philosophical stance of Steven Wright, the American comedian. "You can't have everything," he reasons. "Where would you put it?"

Meanwhile, if you wonder at the fevered speculation over interest rates, take heart from the words of another US comedian, Will Rogers: "An economist's guess is liable to be just as good as anybody else's."

These words of wisdom are among many contained in the Ultimate Book of Business Quotations, which features a collection of "wise, hilarious, fatuous and pointless aphorisms from some of the world's most brilliant, thoughtful and self-serving business minds". Here's a few more quotations.

Dale Carnegie, author of How to Make Friends and Influence People, on grasping opportunities: "When fate hands us a lemon, let us try to make lemonade." And writer Brendan Behan on marketing and the media: "There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary."

Peter Drucker, the author and consultant, on the misuse of marketing: "It has become too fashionable. A grave-digger remains a grave-digger even when called a mortician. Only the cost of burial goes up."

And Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, the novelist, on better ways to communicate (although he died in 1933, he must have foreseen the coming of management speak): "Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible."

If you want some ammunition for the next business meeting, the Ultimate Book of Business Quotations is published by Capstone at pounds 9.99.