Planet QVC: Lights, camera, shopping!

The TV shopping channel QVC is a $7bn global phenomenon, with seven million viewers in the UK alone. Now they're looking for new presenters. But would John Walsh have what it takes? Portraits by David Sandison

Switch on the QVC shopping channel at almost any time of day or night and you'll find mostly the same thing: a lady of pleasant looks and mild demeanour sitting in a simple, inoffensive TV setting, holding up an object of everyday domestic usage and explaining, with expressive hand gestures, how it works. A vertical on-screen panel will explain that the device on offer is, in fact, a Remington Nano Gold Wet 2 Dry Hair Straightener, originally costing £43 but available, via your TV, for only £38.50. A horizontal panel will offer the phone number of a call centre where you can purchase the object. You laugh at the ludicrous spectacle of a 30-second commercial extended to five minutes. But after exactly one minute and 45 seconds of the soothing, anodyne sales pitch, it will seem to you like a perfectly reasonable proposition to ring up and buy one right now ...

QVC never sleeps. It's on 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. Insomniacs, post-pub armchair slumpers, midnight ramblers and dawn-risers, should they be near a television, can find themselves with the chance to purchase the hair-straightener, or one of a thousand other such attractive objects. But why (in God's name) would you want to buy a hair-straightening device at midnight or four o'clock in the morning, or five in the afternoon? Answering that question has made QVC a fortune in the past 14 years. The answer seems to be: because of the lady with the pleasant looks and mild

demeanour, sitting centre-screen putting the Remington barnet-adjuster through its paces.

QVC presenters aren't ordinary people, the company logic runs. They're not like actors who appear in TV commercials. They're not like salesmen, who come to your door with tea-towels and chamois leathers. QVC presenters are your friends, your allies in the treacherous world of consumerism. They tell you how things work. They point out how to use this vacuum cleaner or rub in this eye cream. They ask questions of the manufacturers in a way you wouldn't dream of doing because you are shy and reluctant to make a fuss. They'll demand to know how it works, who the manufacturer is, what this button does and what the device can't do. They will grill the hapless executive from the manufacturing company until they're satisfied. And during the inquisition, all over the country, thousands of people will ring up and buy stuff that, barely an hour earlier, they had no need of, or even interest in.

QVC is a modern TV phenomenon. It does nothing that is not designed to sell products; it's a 100 per cent focused retailer. It claims seven million UK viewers a month, of whom one million are regular customers. Net sales last year were £331m, an increase of more than eight per cent on 2005. The channel's ability to shift units went into overdrive in the run-up to Christmas 2006: they recorded sales of £1m in a day. The figures from its sister company in the US are even more alarming: 50 million viewers and 7,323,433 "active customers" a month. QVC has become a global business, reaching its persuasive tentacles into 160 million homes and turning over $7bn around the world.

Despite these eye-popping figures, it's not unfair to say that QVC has a little image problem. Despite the leaps it's made in the past decade, people think of it as a tacky and low-rent offshoot of cable TV, devoted to selling cheap, Ratner-esque jewellery and low-rent furnishings.

Scoffers will tell you that for every million "active customers", there are six million passive ones, including stoned students, semi-destitute dreamers and elderly sufferers from dementia who think the presenters are their grandchildren. The presenters have not escaped ridicule in the mainstream media: in the first Bridget Jones's Diary film, Bridget's flighty mother (played by Gemma Jones) finds a job demonstrating flashy gee-gaws on QVC while their virtues are praised by her off-screen lover (Patrick Barlow), an oleaginous smoothie covered in orange Tanfastic.

The truth is that the vast majority of QVC's presenters are young, good-looking and unaffected, exuding the kind of wholesome cheerfulness you might find at a Christian revivalist meeting. And the company is now looking for new presenters to add to its ranks. They've launched a "QVC Presenter Search", which started in London, Birmingham and Glasgow and was conducted along the lines of The X Factor. Thousands of aspirants queued up to be put through their paces: instead of singing, they had to describe a recent holiday "in their own words" in front of a panel of three judges. If they got through to the next round, they chose one of a range of products to present to the judges in three minutes, using every persuasive technique they could muster. Finally, on screen this month, the best performers are live on QVC, and viewers can vote for their favourite.

QVC inhabits the old Observer newspaper building, the one that resembles a Mormon tabernacle on London's Chelsea Bridge. In its mile-high glassy atrium, a plasma TV is switched to Richard Jackson's Garden, where the green-fingered expert is offering a set of "8 Wireless Solar Garden Lights and White LEDs & Ground Stakes," reduced from £33 to £29.98. Half of one atrium wall carries a picture of the company's 580,000 sq ft (the size of eight football pitches) distribution warehouse and call centre in Knowsley, Merseyside, from where they shifted 13 million sales units across the UK last year. I was shown around the three "live studios" in which the unending procession of fashion stuff, jewellery, beauty unguents and fitness equipment is filmed. "It's like a department store on TV," a producer explained, "with a different department on camera every hour."

In the TV Gallery, you gaze awestruck at banks of monitor screens and split-level production desks, which suggest the director is filming a coronation or major sporting event rather than a bloke holding up a fork-and-trowel set. But some sophisticated retailing is going on here. Two of the men on the computer screens are watching the sales performance at the Knowsley depot, as customers ring in and buy the goods on screen. It's all happening as we watch. Viewers can ring the studio and ask to have a gardening detail repeated or clarified on-air. As more and more garden lights and trowel sets are sold, and their numbers dwindle, the director can flash the words "Stocks limited" on the TV screen. "Only if it's true, of course," laughs the producer, defensively.

Were they tired of being thought the Woolworths of the airwaves? "Absolutely," said Judy Deucher, director of merchandise. "That's the perception people have of QVC until they get to know it. But if you watch, and see people buying a £1,400 computer or a £5,000 strand of South Sea pearls, you realise it's not like that any more. We offer value, but that doesn't mean cheapness; it means it's affordably priced for its category. You can get a tub of serious skin cream from Estée Lauder for £90, but we'll give you a baby tub as well, to try out in case you're not sure you'll like it. And you can send it all back inside 30 days and get your money back."

Deucher deals with all the brands clamouring to get airtime on her channel. She talks fondly about certain brands that perform well – like the time they sold 85,000 Molton Brown Beauty Kits in a single day – and is regally fastidious about others that haven't met her demanding standards. Born in South Africa, she worked as a jewel buyer in Cape Town before moving

here 10 years ago and walking into a job with QVC.

She is a staunch defender of the channel's fascination for marketing faux-precious stones with names like "Diamonique". "It's all about what the customer's looking for," she says. "There's a lot of interest in costume jewellery – look at Butler & Wilson. Just because it's not precious, doesn't mean it's not important to people." She explained at length the TV channel's new discovery of something called Tanzanite ("It's found only in Tanzania – which makes it rarer than diamonds") and how they negotiate directly with the mining firms who hold the rights to it, and with the stone cutters who polish it, in order to buy it in sufficient quantity.

But why, Judy, should your customers want Tanzanite? Who's going to show off her new ring and say, "Isn't it lovely? It's Tanzanite you know"?

Judy considered. "Why would you want to buy a Paul Smith jacket?"

"Because we know Paul Smith's jackets are well-made, and we know their reputation over the years."

"And who told you about him originally? The papers. Well, we're telling the customers about Tanzanite. We know the customer is interested in gems she can't find in the high street."

The notional customer is, of course, a woman. The QVC demographic suggests that the majority of customers are women over 45, with men tuning in at weekends for the DIY and gardening shows. But things have changed since the days of 1993 when it arrived on these shores as part of the BSkyB channel package. "When we started," said Brian Farrelly, director of broadcasting, "you could get us only on cable and satellite. Viewers with those were relatively affluent people, prepared to pay £40 a month for extra channels. Then the internet arrived, and people became less guarded about shopping from a distance. Then you could get QVC on Freeview, first at £100, now for £20. So our market's grown in the past few years, and the Freeview audience is a little older and less affluent."

It still didn't explain why so many people, presumably inured to advertising pitches, should suddenly start making serious retail decisions at 3.30 in the afternoon. "It's education," said Judy. "You're not just saying, 'This is a Samsung TV, buy it, here's the price,' you're educating them about High Definition." Really? "Sure. I love the gardening show, for instance. I'm probably a shocking gardener myself, and I've only a tiny garden so I'm not able to make use of the lovely things they sell, but I love watching because I feel I'm learning."

The channel's executives are keen to insist on the channel's "brand principles" – which are, rather surprisingly, not "Quality, Value, Convenience", which once formed the company's name. They're now "Trust, Information and Ease", three words that steer round the grubby concept of money and sales even more cautiously than the original trio. The key word, they say, is Trust, which refers to the presenters, in whom the viewers supposedly put their faith that they're not being sold rubbish.

"The presenters are the customer's advocate," said Farrelly. "They ask company experts the questions you'd want to ask in Currys if there was someone around to ask. They make it user-friendly. We used to sell computers by having clued-up computer geeks talking about 'dual-core technology', until we realised it meant nothing to the vast majority of people. So we took out the geeks, got more women doing technology and said, 'Tell us what it's for, how you'd use it and how it'll transform your life'."

Spotting that manufacturers aren't necessarily the best advertisement for their own products, QVC employs consultants to run "guest excellence seminars" where their powers of articulacy and persuasion are honed. The star turn at these is Dexter Moscow, a former advertising executive and estate agent, who's brought in by QVC if a company can find no one equipped to sell their products credibly.

Mr Moscow is a salesman to his bootstraps. His voice is musical, seductive, soothing and trustworthy. His broad, family-doctor face radiates friendliness or polite concern. He ticks off points of argumentation on his fingers like a champion debater. He could sell

gumboots in the Sahara. He could sell you anything. "My special areas are technology, optics and security equipment," he said. "Though I'm known as 'Mr Christmas' because I'm on quite a lot selling Christmas products, from July through to November. I suppose," he concluded modestly, "it's my grey hair and my favourite-uncle demeanour." Moscow runs something called Audience Dynamics, training corporate types how not to freeze, corpse or look like murderers in front of the camera. His guru is Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. "I'm a Carnegie teacher. The key to it all is his 30 human relationship principles – literally understanding the other person's point of view and doing your utmost to fulfil it. And that's what QVC is about, understanding the needs of the viewing public." (Hmm, like the "need" to own a Tanzanite brooch, I suppose.) Moscow also invokes, a little surprisingly, the shade of René Descartes to explain that the emotional and logical sides of the brain aren't as distinct as was once thought. "If you want to engage someone, you engage them on an emotional level about an experience they once had, and once you've made that emotional connection, you can lead them, or help them, to make a buying decision."

It sounded rather weaselly to me. OK then, I said, take a camera. It's got five millions pixels and that's its selling point. Where's the emotional pull in that? Dexter looked at me kindly. "But John [understanding voice], why are five million pixels good? Because the reproduction is fantastic. Why [concerned frown] is that important? Because when you've reproduced the film, you can blow it up to fantastic proportions, with perfect clarity, without any fuzz. Why is that important? Because [thrilling smile, like sun emerging] you can then give it as A Gift to somebody, about whom you've thought, 'How can I help them remember a tender moment in the best possible way?' So that it isn't [eyes start to liquefy] a disappointment when you show them the picture ..."

By the time Dexter subsided, I was practically weeping myself, what with the emotional connection and all. Could it be that simple? I can speak with reasonable fluency. I'm quite good with words. I decided to volunteer for an audition to be a QVC presenter.

Scarcely an hour later, it was arranged. I was told to present a Canon PowerShot digital camera, costing £409, with a powerful zoom lens, an 8.0 megapixel clarity quotient (well, I sure knew all about that) and a Face Detection facility, along with "extensive movie options" about which the fact-sheet was hazy. Could I remember all that? I wrote a script – an unheard-of thing at QVC, where all addresses to camera are extemporised – and threw in heartwarming little stories about snapping household pets and filming my children in school plays.

To help me, I was given training by Mark West, head of presenters (and chairman of the audition judges) and Kathy Tayler, a veteran QVC presenter with beautiful hazel eyes and an aura of glamour that would eclipse Zsa Zsa Gabor. The actual "training" mostly consisted of being told to be "natural", to refrain from acting or trying too hard, and to mention the manufacturer. Mark suggested I practise facial gestures in front of the mirror ("You should see how many auditioners screw up their faces when they're talking. Some even shut their eyes to concentrate ...") and Kathy told me to make sure the Canon didn't shake in my palsied grip, since the TV lens would be focused on it. I mentally ran through my patter:

"Hello. My name's John Walsh. [Shy smile] You know, I've been taking photographs for years, but I've never really got on with digital cameras ... But when I was offered the new Canon PowerShot, I must say, I was converted. It's got a nice hefty feel, it sits snugly in your right hand and you know it won't judder when you take the shot. The screen is super-adjustable so you can take pictures at impossible angles. Y'know, my neighbour Nigel has a flop-eared rabbit called Cupid, but it's impossible to photograph it unless you're lying flat on the ground. With the Canon PowerShot, however ..."

So my little speech droned on in my head, somewhere between enthusiasm and cheesiness. "I hope you're going to explain these buttons," said Kathy sternly. "And this zoom function." There were two minutes to go. "I didn't go big on the function buttons," I said, "I'm not quite sure what they do." Kathy seized the camera from my trembling fingers. "Twist this one here for the zoom lens," she said, "and click this one here to go to the close-up of the sunflower. And make sure the viewers can see the images, won't you?"

It was showtime. I was ushered into a whitewashed studio with two TV cameras, a Swedish floor manager and some seen-it-all technicians. A microphone was clipped into my shirt, a receiver poked into my ear and I was seated at a small desk from which my all-important notes were briskly removed.

"Counting down, everybody," said the floor manager, waving a hand. "Complete silence. We're going live." His hand came down. I swallowed hard. "Hello," I said, in a strangled yelp. "I'm, er, John Walsh. I've never really liked digital cameras but the Canon er, SureShot, no sorry PowerShot made me, er, converted." I could feel sweat breaking out on my brow. "It's got a nice hefty feel. It sits in your hand as snug as a, as a gun ..."

In my earphone, a brief exhalation could be heard.

"... and it's got this marvellous, er, clarity. If you look here, you can see how clear the image is. And if I click here, there's a marvellous close-up of a sunflower." I looked. The screen was blank. I clicked again. A horrible face appeared, mocking my efforts. Sweat dripped off my nose. I clicked and clicked in a ghastly, accusing silence. No flower. My mind was freezing up. I thought of the script I'd written and could visualise only a blank sheet. Say something, I told myself. Say anything.

"For God's sake," I said out loud. "Where's the shagging sunflower?"

In my earpiece, another, louder sigh could be heard.

My three minutes were soon over. I managed to get in the little stories about the rabbit and the school play, and concluded with a tearful plea about the emotional heft of photographs ("Shouldn't your pictures be as perfect as your memories?") but I never really recovered from the terrible start.

Mark and Kathy were kind. "You look quite good on camera," said Mark. "You look credible. I'd trust you. I know you were nervous, but your voice was loud and clear. And you didn't say 'basically' all the time. But you mentioned a gun at one point. I wouldn't want to compare a product to a gun. As for the obscenity ..."

"You weren't very comfortable with the technical side of it," said Kathy. "Remember, you must keep talking, even if you're struggling to find a button. You have to vocalise. I once broke a strand of pearls while I was demonstrating and, instead of panicking, I said, 'And if you break any QVC product in the first 30 days, you can send it back and get a full refund.' The trick is to keep talking at all costs."

I left the Mormon tabernacle feeling a profound relief that I wouldn't, after all, be spending the rest of my days presenting garden implements and troublesome electronics to an unseen audience of ageing shopaholics – and a new respect for the unsinkable, endlessly inventive, keep-the-ball-rolling chatterers on the bland, vanilla, billion-spinning Planet QVC.