Exam revision - the search continues

Sir David Attenborough has been given one of his most difficult assignments - to capture on film for the first time a teenager in the act of revising for his A-level examinations.

His team (for Attenborough relies on other people to do the camera work) called the Donkins of Woking in early January to arrange a stakeout. A cameraman called Rod, set up his hide in the bedroom wardrobe of our 17-year-old son, George.

The first week passed uneventfully as Rod recorded hour upon hour of George, leaning back in front of his X-Box 360 playing Call of Duty. Sometimes he was joined by an older brother and they alternated play while one sat out the downtime on George's bed.

More footage was recorded of George on Facebook, George on YouTube, George instant-messaging friends, George texting messages on his mobile phone and George eating cereal piled high in bowls.

There was occasional film of George involved in angry exchanges with a parent, and George stamping around his room, pleading, often without success, for use of the car.

But footage of the revision remains elusive. After two weeks Rod has been relieved by another cameraman, Ron who seems equally dedicated to the cause.

Teams of studio producers have been scrutinising hours and days of footage for the slightest sign - there was a squeal of excitement when George was seen to log on to his school web site (checking the school closure notice after heavy snow), but so far, nothing.....

Hitler - all the rage

What if Pontius Pilate had betrayed a speech impediment? What if insurgency movements had been organised like trade unions? What if parish councillors turned out to be mass murders?

Parody has always superimposed the farcical on institutional understanding. The Nazis were prime targets. Think of the Lambeth Walk during the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator and Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler, not to mention his Hitler Rap.

But rarely has one scene from a film attracted so much attention from the send-up artists than the sequence in Downfall (Der Untergang) when Bruno Ganz enacts one of Hitler's infamous rages during his final days in the Berlin bunker.

YouTube is positively littered with Downfall parodies or mash-ups. A whole string of them are devoted to football results from Tottenham v Arsenal to this latest one on Manchester City.

Part of the scene's appeal is the rant, conveniently in German (for all but German speakers), lending itself to the use of subtitles. But the supporting cast enable the parody-makers to construct a series of excuses for whatever performance is being discussed.

The Downfall mashup has become so ubiquitous there seems no end to the scenarios that can be applied to the scene. Sometimes, however, the film rights owner asks YouTube to remove a parody. But even these requests have been parodied. There are too many of these clips (most of dubious quality) to list here but here are just a few:

Hitler complains about the British National Party leak.
Hitler gets banned from X-Box live.
Hitler can't find Wally.
Hitler is upset that he can't use Twitter.

It makes one wonder what Hitler might have had to say about it all?

And Winston Churchill? Well he didn't need to say anything says Orson Welles.

Quantum of Frolics

OK, tons of action, Parkour, flying roof tiles, even a stylish martini, but is Quantum of Solace the Bond we all know and love?

It had lots of good stuff, great locations and bags of atmosphere. I loved the opera scene. But what the hell was it about?

George and Rob have drawn up a seven-point checklist for future Bond productions and looking at this amusing YouTube mash-up they are not alone in their bewilderment:

1. The planet needs to be threatened by some kind of mega death ray. In this one the greedy villain is threatening us with a water shortage at the risk of doubling our utility bills. We've had something like that already this year for real.

2. Where has the witty quip gone after someone is dispatched? The new Bond hardly says anything.

3. Gadgets: where have they gone? What have they done to Q?

4. What has happened to the physically deformed villains with horrific scars, burns, etc?

5. Why can't Bond keep himself reasonably clean? His shirts look like a "before" scene in a Persil ad - blood, sweat, grime, all kinds of difficult stains.

6. Iconic Bond music must be before, during and at the end of the film.

7. For goodness sake he has to get the girl.

"We appreciate that you are trying to make Bond more realistic and believable," say the boys. "But please don't! James Bond is not a hardened killer; he is a warm character who is both comical and light hearted. We don't want Bond to be serious and completely realistic; we already have someone doing that in films. He's called Jason Bourne. James Bond is supposed to be far fetched and fun, not realistic and terrifyingly ruthless. Sort it out!"

Laughing baby

I had to see for myself what amused the Queen and 63m others. I see from the geekProject website (very much what it says on the tin) that the baby boy's name is William. I see also that the funny noises are an attempt to impersonate a microwave oven.

As someone commented on the Youtube web site, it's a pity he didn't have a rusk-company sponsored bib with pay-per-click advertising.

Poor lad. All this attention means that Fleet Street's finest are about to descend on his doorstep.

Super Tuesday in Epsom

Super Tuesday, they called it in the US. Well it was pretty good over here too, finishing my fishing column just in time for a few pancakes before we drove over to Epsom to see Michael McIntyre at the playhouse.

I love pancake Tuesday. For a great recipe read this. Pancake eating is quite a social arrangement with people leaving the table in relays to prepare the next pancake. George was in charge last night. His style is to flip the pancake while I'm more of a tosser. That's what my friends tell me anyway.

You may have seen McIntyre on TV last year when he appeared Live at the Appollo - the full performance is spread over three clips. If you haven't caught any of his stage performances so far you might try to get a ticket for one of the shows in his new tour. I think he's one the most talented young comedians in the UK - the south's answer to Peter Kay.

His best known routine (featured in the Youtube clips) is where he demonstrates a more efficient way of walking, skipping from A to B with synchronised arms. But it wasn't part of last night's show until he asked for questions from the audience at the end. "Do the skipping" shouted one bloke. So McIntyre obliged and it was only then that I realised his act was unknown to most of those there.

He's southern and talks with a posh accent - not the usual ingredients for gritty live comedy - but his humour is sharply framed from observations of daily life such as rail commuting and motorway driving. They're not just observations of human behaviour either. He puts our unspoken but recognisable thoughts in to words.

He's a genuinely funny man who knows how to work an audience and whose performance is as yet uncluterred by the intrusions of stardom. If he can maintain that common touch he's going to be a big name. Too much TV exposure, of course, can drain the creativity in this kind of work, condemning talent to a future of well-paid panel games such as QI and Have I got News For You.

Perhaps this is the pattern of comedy success - come up the hard way, playing the halls, before enjoying the easier pickings of TV where your talent, in time, begins to go in odd directions (a sure sign when you start doing travel programmes)and you must make way for the next hungry young thing. Either that, or you can be Ken Dodd.

Money down the tube?

I spend most of my working hours these days, writing, thinking and speaking about work. But for many years at the Financial Times I worked on corporate investigations. In fact it would be true to say that I joined the newspaper with something of a jaundiced attitude towards the City.

Late in 1987 when I joined the editorial, the City had been indulging itself in a financial feeding frenzy that ended on Black Monday, October 19, when stock markets crashed around the world. By the end of the month the value of UK shares had fallen by more than a quarter.

This was the age of the yuppie (young urban professional), parodied by the comedian Harry Enfield with his character "Loadsamoney" who would brandish bundles of money to advertise his obnoxious behaviour.

Whether or not my attitude was justified is a matter of debate but any illusion that the City was populated solely by gentlemen brokers working to the principal that "my word is my bond" was destroyed by the subsequent scandals at Lloyds, Homes Assured, BCCI, Polly Peck and the Maxwell Corporation.

This was the era when the City discovered one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history - a cure for Alzheimer's disease. The treatment involved a lengthy trial for insider trading. Little wonder, then, that Ernest Saunders, the former chief executive of Guinness, is the only living beneficiary of this sophisticated remedy. He had shaken off the symptoms of "pre-senile dementia" after serving just 10 months of a prison sentence that had been reduced from five to two-and-a-half years by the time of his release from Ford open prison.

So why should I mention any of this now? Well I'm wondering as we enter the closing years of the decade just who among the current stars in the corporate firmament are going to transform their businesses in to imploding black holes in to which shareholders' investments, pension funds and undeserved reputations will disappear? We can only imagine the flurry of headlines, political recriminations and told-you-so columns penned by those same supine dogs who always fail to bark.

I have one or two ideas but why not do your own spotting? Watch out for those companies that have risen from nowhere, particularly where the chief executive is perceived to possess the Midas touch. Look at the ultimate ownership and evidence of offshore registration or financing.

Is there an elaborate corporate structure with obscure shell companies? If so, ask yourself why it exists and beware the silver tongues who justify such arrangements in the name of tax efficiency. It is no co-incidence that many tax havens are also noted for their secrecy.

Another feature of the markets in the coming year or two may be the fall out from the most recent manifestation of the kind of irrational exuberance that characterised the dot com boom at the end of the 1990s.

There's a new twist this time. On the last occasion the internet business was novel and untried. People threw money at ventures that spent millions trying to grab market share on the strength of their marketing spend rather than on the quality of their service.

This time companies are buying businesses that have grabbed apparent market share (but not earnings). I'm thinking here of ITV's £120m acquisition of Friends Reunited and Google's $1.65bn purchase of YouTube.

I'm wondering whether either of these acquisitions will amount to anything more than a money sponge. Both Friends Reunited and YouTube are communities of interest. But are they great businesses? Do their communities represent a market in any real sense any more than the membership of the Boy Scouts, The Women's' Institute and the Church of England?

Millions of people choose to go to church every Sunday, but their church membership and church going habit does not amount to a commercial enterprise. Why should the behaviour of those who post on YouTube be perceived any differently?

Good luck to the founders of YouTube and Friends Reunited. You have found your place in the sun. I hope that the purchasers of your businesses find lucrative markets among those researching their family trees and those tracing old school friends. But I doubt that they will. People have traced their old school mates and moved on. Interest in family trees will wane.

The problem for YouTube meanwhile is its ubiquity. The internet population is a fickle community that moves locust-like from trend to trend. In their own ways these sites have proved remarkable, transformational communities, phenomena of their time. But are they built to last? Let's wait and see.