Simon Fuller Spices Things Up

Simon Fuller... Name ring a bell? How about if I mention the Spice Girls? No? Well, let me put you out of your misery (although I'm probably partly to blame for that misery by mentioning the Spice Girls in the first place)...

Simon Fuller is '19 Entertainment' and the man responsible for the Spice Girls and S Club 7 (I personally think it's very big of him to own up to that...) and he is also the man now responsible for bringing stacks of clever yooftastic funtainment to Honda Racing.

Quite who at Honda had the great idea of bringing in Fuller I don't know, though it has all the hallmarks of a particularly punchable marketing executive - and why it's so crucial when they should be concentrating on not weeing away their race weekends is simply beyond me.

Nonetheless there he is, ready to help bring modern showbiz tricks into the biggest showbiz sport in the world. Who knows, maybe his pop and entertainment formats can bring a new dimension to the way F1 is presented and to the way it appeals to audiences...

He could pull together shows like "Jenson's Deal or No Deal" where a panel have to guess how many of the boxes in front of them contain contracts between Jenson Button and any number of different teams (and whether any of them are worth the paper they're written on).

Or a special "Pimp My F1 Ride" where teams compete to build a more or less viable car from a 4-year old chassis with the aim of making it look utterly cool, so long as it still goes at least one lap per lap slower than everybody else.

I'd quite like to see a special F1 edition of Antiques Roadshow where a bunch of experts inspect Max Mosley and tell him he's worthless, (old gags, always the best...) or a variation on The Apprentice, where Mike Gascoyne goes round teams, helping them build better cars and repeatedly gets thrown out with the words "You're fired!"

Best of all they could do their own lottery show where random events and the fickle finger of fate conspire to... Oh, hang on, that's called Qualifying isn't it.

The Fuller/Honda relationship, and the Ron Dennis "More Fun!" statements both smack a bit of desperation; like some government initiative, or a lame geography teacher who wants to be loved.

Truth be told, F1 honestly doesn't need that (although the idea of an F1 version of Fuller's Pop Idol format would be good if only for seeing Ant Davidson cream a whole bunch of mediocrities from the 2006 grid). On the whole though, if the sport is good then everything else will follow.

And if it isn't good then no amount of superficial tarting like this is going to help.