I’ve always felt that as a Cherwell culture reviewer, it’s been solemnly incumbent on me to safeguard the students of Oxford from corrupting sleaze. Obviously then, I had a duty to review Shed Simove’s Ideas Man – the blurb markets him as a guy who, amongst other things, invented ‘Clitoris Allsorts’ sweets, which instantly set my smut-sense a-tingling.
But I can tell you now that no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t find any trace of sordid sexploitation and unmitigated filth I’d been eagerly anticipating protecting you all from. In fact, I thought I’d opened the wrong book.
Simove doesn’t sound anything like the cynical, witty Channel 4 producer I’d envisioned, but instead sounds boyishly earnest and enthusiastic as he talks about all his wacky product ideas and his attempts at getting them made.
Some of them, like the ‘Control-A-Man/Woman’ gag remote, turned out well. Others less so, like the national fuss over him going undercover as a 16 year-old for a TV documentary. With the occasional photo, sketch and newspaper clipping, it’s a bit like looking at a scrapbook of memories.
They are all pretty amusing memories on the whole, though they stop short of being as ‘hilarious’ as the blurb breathlessly says. Some of the product ideas are cute or gross in a funny way, like the ‘Pubik’s Cube’, or celebrity trading cards, or his idea to trademark the phrase ‘The Trademark Office Has No Sense of Humour’TM, which he did after exasperatedly failing to convince them to register the clitoral sweets.
But because of his rather pedestrian style the prose seldom reaches laugh-out-loud levels. It can even get a little tedious if you read it all at once. Simove gets an idea, works on it, gets rejected, then possibly succeeds. Rinse and repeat. In this sense Ideas Man is marketed as an inspirational story about a guy who never gives up, though I’m not convinced.
It’s certainly more useful than your average self-help book, and great if you want an example of the kind of grit and resourcefulness you need when peddling your ideas to people. But the fact that the ideas are about stuff like ‘Butt Plugs’ undercuts the inspirational potential just a little, I think.
Also Simove’s relentless can-do attitude can grate a little, especially in preachy moments where he talks about a lesson he’s learned or tries to impart some banal motivational wisdom.
Still, Ideas Man is an easy read. If anything, it offers the heartening insight that the sleek machine of mass commercialism isn’t just a capitalist ploy; there actually are people like Simove who are passionate about coming up with ‘Door Nobs’ and ‘Designer Beavers’. Whether that terrifies or inspires is entirely up to you.
