Getting the lowdown on human frailty - why we are all suckers for wanting to teach the world to sing (and making Coca Cola even wealthier). But who cares: it's art

I’ve often thought that if I were to have my time all over again, I’d have tried for a job in advertising and marketing, or ‘advertising/marketing’ as I think it should be called as the two are so intricately entwined that I’ve come to the view they are just two sides to the same coin.

Obviously, none of us can have our time over again, and equally obviously I am talking as a man who, over the years, has learned much, not least about himself and who now judges a lot rather differently. (Incidentally, one of the things I like to think I have learned is that the only really stupid people are those who do not learn from their mistakes. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you have no one to blame but yourself when yet again things go tits up.)

What I mean is if, at 18, I knew what I now know, I would have worked far harder at university and taken the whole thing a lot more seriously, and then upon graduating with a far better degree than I did get headed straight for the advertising industry to find whatever toehold I could to get started. (I sat for an MA Honours in English and philosophy, but was awarded an MA ordinary - the English department wanted to fail me after a college career of doing hardly any work, reading hardly any of my set texts and turning in essays which were at best puerile and at worst utter rubbish. That I got a degree at all is down to the philosophy department insising that as I had done reasonably well for them, I should get some kind of degree. (And thank you Neil Cooper for passing on that snippet.)

I know there are some, if not many, who regard advertising and marketing as perhaps the shallowest of all shallow professions, but I disagree profoundly or rather to some extent. That criticism of advertising, the suspicion that it is essentially venal and mucky, is neatly summed up in a description I heard recently (and I can only paraphrase) that advertising/marketing ‘delves deeply into the surface of things’. But I have come to regard it as something very.

I was reminded of all this when I came across a series of ten 15-minute talks on BBC Radio 4 recently by one Rory Sutherland called ‘Marketing: Hacking The Unconscious’, a series the BBC describes on its website as ‘Rory Sutherland explores the story, and psychology, behind the most influential marketing campaigns in history’. That very neatly sums up why I am interested, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say fascinated, by advertising/marketing: examining what makes people tick, getting to understand their behavior as individuals and in groups, and then applying the knowledge gained to creating advertising.

OK, using the insights gained to, as cynics might have it, sell to people crap they don’t need might not be the most noble human activity, but the ‘selling’ is not what I am interested in: I am interested in the doing, the thought and creativity that goes into marketing, as well as the oddities in human behaviour it throws up. I am bound to admit that I - although apparently not a great many others - feel that much of the creative work in advertising can often come far

closer to being ‘art’ than a great deal of what we are presented with as being ‘art’ in self-conscious ‘art’ exhibitions (although I should add that I don’t much, if at all, subscribe to the hi’ falutin descriptions of ‘art’, its purpose, its imperatives, its consequences and principles. But I shall leave that for another time.)

I am attracted to the deep thought that goes into creating an ad campaign. I am attracted to, and impressed by the subtlety, the vision of many ads, the analysis of human behavior, and I don’t restrict this to television ads, but to posters and photography. I readily acknowledge that many, a great many, might be put off by the purpose of advertising: simply to get more people to buy a certain product, and I concede that there is nothing necessarily noble in that. But it is the preceding processes involved in thinking up an ad and an ad campaign which capture me and which I cannot deny I admire and respect.

I have recorded one of those 15-minute programmes by Rory Sutherland and you can listen to it below. Perhaps they might convey just why I am fascinated by the industry and its work.
Here is the one:


Rory Sutherland on advertising, excerpt 1

. . .

It is surely no fluke that some of some of those who worked in advertising went on to become artists in a different realm: the novelists Fay Weldon, Elmore Leonard, Dr Seuss, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Salman Rushdie, the filmmakers Jonathan Glazer, John Hughes and Ridley Scott, and artists Andy Warhol – famously — and Norman Rockwell. I suspect there is something about the discipline necessary in copywriting and graphic art which is conducive to make the transition from the one ‘venal’ realm to the far more hi’ falutin world of ‘art’. Or perhaps I’m completely wrong: they would have progressed anyway and the fact that they worked as advertising industry ‘hacks’ is coincidental. But I don’t think I am wrong. That isn’t to limit art in any way and that most certainly isn’t to promote all advertising as akin to art – there is quite a bit of dross out there, too.

Obviously, as there is quite a bit of dross in about any sphere you care to look at. But the best advertising is, at least for me, quite fascinating. I have spent that past 43 working in the newspaper industry, first, comparatively briefly as a reporter and then as a sub. I wasn’t outstanding as either. I was by no means a bad reporter and, I must add modestly, possibly better than some because there really were and are some clunkers out there. But my heart wasn’t in it. I disliked the bullshitting involved and realised that to progress and get to the top you either had to really believe in ‘news’ and ‘the public’s right to know’ and ‘writing the first draft of history’, or you simply had to be a real cunt, someone who really didn’t care about trampling over others. And none of that fitted the bill.

I turned to sub-editing because I was equally interested in the whole process of producing a newspaper, and reporting was only the first step. And there I remained, not a particularly good sub-editor, though one who knew what I should be doing, but nor was I outstandingly bad either. I coasted (and I have to say coasting is pretty much the story of my life). But there is also something in the discipline of sub-editing which could give an insight into the production of ‘art’ (and sorry, but I really can’t resisit those inverted commas).

For example, for five years, from 1990 until 1995 I lived in London and ‘did shifts’ for a variety of newspapers. One day I could be working on The Times, the next on the Evening Standard, then back on The Times, then the Daily Express, or the Daily Mail, or the Sun. Some were broadsheets, some were tabloids, but each demanded a certain style. And I have to say that boiling down several hundred words of agency copy into four or five short paragraphs, or reducing a welter of rather boring copy into something reasonably interesting did teach you a lot.

As Sam Goldwyn observed ‘if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice’, so with little to entertain you with today, here’s a rerun – all the rage these days are reruns – of a previous blog entry about smut and double entendre

I’ve nothing much to say today (did someone say ‘as always?’ Quiet at the back), but earlier this evening I was chatting to a guy at La Pappardella in Earls Court, and we were talking about – or possibly I was talking about – seaside postcards (by Bamforth & Co and later Donald McGill), music hall humour and double entendre, and I said I would send him a link to one entry of this blog (posted on just under two years ago in Augist 2014).

It contains a recording by actor Arthur Bostrum who in the BBC’s sitcom ‘Allo, allo’ played an Englishman in wartime France pretending to be a French policeman but who, unfortunately, spoke French very badly. Don’t know what ‘double entendre’ is? Well, let me explain by way of a joke: a woman walks into a bar in Paris and orders a double entendre. ‘Certainly,’ says the barman, ‘I’ll give you one.’

Anyway, having nothing much to say today and given the current TV fascination with reruns and compilations and reruns of compilations and reruns of reruns, I thought why not, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. So without further ado click here to read my entry, or re-read my entry, celebrating smut. I love smut. The recording is in four parts. Just - well, I am sure you know the drill.

. . .

PS The character I was talking to, one Jim Harman, a man with quite some experience, now 77, who was in the RAF, then worked as a telecoms engineer for an oil company in Nigeria after previously working in Angola and Portugal and who splits his year between Old Blighty and Ausatralia, had a fascinating story to tell.

It seems that last Thursday he went for a check-up with a private dentist after root canal treatment when his dentist found that there was still some infection in the wound. He injected him with bleach but forgot to dilute the bleach. Because he was in such pain, the dentist injected him with anaesthetic which calmed it for a few hours, but then it got worse again.

After a day of agony, he returned to see his dentist who immediately sent him off to A&E at the local hospital where where he was found to have renal failure: the anaesthetic had shut down his kidneys, spread the remnants of the infeciton and his lymph system had been poisoned. After a day’s worth of treatment of steroids and a saline drip to clear his kidneys, he was told by the medics that they had found odd antibodies in his blood which had countered the infection which they couldn’t explain: had he at some point ever been bitten by a snake? Yes, he said, three times, in fact, over the years he spent in Africa. Ah, they said, that has saved your life. The antibodies helped to counteract the infection.

Well, reporting it now, it seems to me that some of the story doesn’t add up, but that might have been me not getting all the details. Anyway, that was his story.

Will it snow on June 23, 2018? Who knows? I don’t and neither do you. But there might certainly be stormy weather ahead for the EU

I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve twice posted I’ve taken photos - irrelevant to current events our what? Couldn’t be more irrelevant - reported two spats with the Guardian, recycled a few videos with music tracks I like and even threatened to start a new, personal blog, which no one will have access to, anything but anyting rather than join the cacophony and add my two ha’porth in comments about Brexit - what’s best to wear in the run-up to Brexit, how Brexit might prove to be the ultimate diet, why Brexit can be blamed for the decline in bees, that kind of thing. But there is no getting away from it (which isn’t that surprising).

Brexit is everywhere, though what it will mean for Britain is still anyone’s guess, and in keeping with the fact that it is anyone’s guess, everyone with even half a deadline is predicting: in today’s Guardian the Lib Dems Vince Cable is on the side of the doomsayers and reckons it will cause an even bigger financial crash than the one in 2008.

On the other hand some think once Britain has rid itself of the shackles of the EU, the good times might come a rolling. Here the Independent (no longer a print newspaper but carrying on online like some ethereal guardian angel for the bien pensant who thinks the Guardian is too much of a lefty rag) outlines ten reasons to feel positive about Brexit.

Given my abysmal track record in predictions - I predicted Britain would vote to stay in the EU and that Trump would not be elected - I shall gracefully resist once again taking a Mystic Meg role and keep schtumm. But that doesn’t mean I can’t talk generally about what might happen to Britain and the EU over the coming years.

As for predictions, I am bemused: can anyone here tell me what wether we will have on, say, June 23, 2018? That would be exactly two years after the Brexit referendum was held. Will it rain? Will it be a day of glorious sunshine? Will it be hot, unseasonably cold? Will it be windy? Will we be in the fifth week of a drought? There are one or two things we can rule out, of course. Given the time of year, a blizzard would seem unlikely, although I did once witness snowfall in June. (It was in June 1975, and I was attending a two-month NCTJ block release course at the then Richmond College in Sheffield (now Stradbroke College). My mate Tim, a Sheffield local, and I had taken to having a lunchtime pint at the Richmond Hotel ten minutes walk away, and we were sitting (‘sat’) in the bar when I looked out and noticed it was snowing. Mind, it was not a blizzard, the snow didn’t settle and it was unseasonably cold for June.)

So we can say one or two general things about the weather on June 23, 2018, but would be wise to keep it vague. Similarly with predicting what effects Brexit will have on Britain and the rest of the EU: keep it vague and ensure the amount of egg you get on your face is kept to as little as possible.

I don’t doubt it will be an upheaval. Moving house is an upheaval of sorts, even if you move from the bleak inner city to place of bucolic bliss. Things go missing, stuff gets chipped and you don’t really settle in for a month or two after the move. The same will be true of Brexit, but how commentators and pundits can predict so certainly that it will spell doom for Britain/be a return to a golden age I really don’t know.

The fact is that before it became shackled to the tyranny of Brussels/embraced the community of European enlightenment, Britain was far from being the poster boy for prosperity and progress. All nations have their myths, and a current myth in Britain is that we were an industrial giant and a superpower on equal terms with the US and Soviet Russia. But that is not quite true.

Britain has been a member of the EU - and crucially the single market - 44 years and enjoyed many free trade benefits, but from the end of World War II until it signed up in 1973 economically Britain was often a basket case. Cheerful Brexiteers up and down the pubs and golf clubs of the nation will forecast a new golden age of trading. The thing is that the previous golden age of trading had been some 130 years earlier and the world has moved on considerably since then.

Conversely (and in my view) the EU has benefited from Britain’s membership and, arguably, needs us to be a member, and this has less to do with the financial contribution Britain makes than with the steading influence it had. Conventionally, Britain has been portrayed as something of a bolshy fly in the ointment member, complaining about this, objecting to that, but in truth Britain has been one of the steadier members, more inclined than many other members to observe the letter of EU law.

Furthermore, and given the accepted view that France and Germany are pretty much the two mainstays of the EU (and that, we are told, a desire to stop the two countries continually going to war with each other was one of the main objectives of forming a ‘European community’), the lack of Britain’s stabilising influence might be keenly felt.

We’re also told that many of the smaller member states were grateful to Britain for taking the lead in matters where they, too, had the same concerns about some aspect of the EU, but who felt that without the voice of Britain, they could not speak out.

Then there is what might now already be called ‘the problem’ of the EU of Poland and Hungary. Neither country feels much like toeing the Brussels line these days. Just a few days ago Victor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister made a speech that was heavily critical of the EU’s migration policy and in other ways has been apt to clash with Brussels of lesser matters. Mention this to keen supporters of the EU and they will get all misty-eyed and say that ‘families often have their little spats, but at they end of the day they pull together’.

Well, I shouldn’t bank on it. Just as the perceived view of many Brits was (though it was and is not mine) that EU migration and attendant matters was somehow wrecking Britain, it might not be too fanciful to suggest that migration from North Africa and the Middle East could prove to be one of several nails in the EU’s coffin, the loss of Britain’s stabilising influence being another.

As for Poland and the threat it poses to the equanimity of the EU, as far as I am concerned the Polish come in two flavours: reasonable and outright nutters. On the reasonable side one might count the former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, who seems to strike a note of commons sense in all the Brexit bollocks and has no discernible axe to grind. As for outright nutters, look no further than Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the surviving half of the Kaczynski twins - his brother Lech, then Poland’s president died in an air crash in 2010 - and who occupies a strange position in Polish politics.

He and his twin founded the right-wing (and some say rather anti-semitic) Law and Justice party, which is now back in power in Poland under the premiership of one Beata Szydlo. Kaczynski is chairman of the Law and Justice party, and although it is power holds no government position and is just an MP, he is widely thought to be pulling all the strings. Pertinently Kaczynski is also as implacably opposed to further immigration than Orban and has clashed with Brussels on that and many other matters.

Migration is, though, just one of the problems the EU will continue to face without Britain as a member. Another is the perpetual problem of the euro for many member states and the related problem of unemployment: manageable in northern states, embarrassingly high in Med states. This map, from the European Commission itself, shows quite graphically that the differences are large. And to compound the problem these are just overall jobless figures: among those under 25 the number is far higher, with often one out of two without work.

I did start off by insisting that Mystic Pat had been banished to under his giant toadstool in the garden and vowing to make no predictions. Well, I shan’t, but that doesn’t preclude me from making one or two suggestions. Well, make that one suggestion: Brexit will be the first step in the slow, painfully slow, but certain disintegration of the EU as we now know it. And history will show that Brexit wasn’t a cause but a symptom.

If, as I suggest, the EU will prove less durable than supporters hope, I further suggest it has only iteself to blame. It worked as a small trading bloc and it worked as a European Community. But then the idealist took over from the pragmatists and developed a queer sort of megalomania: talk of ever-closer politic union became louder, there was talk of forming an EU army and for a while the EU had its own ‘foreign minister’ (for some time an ineffectual former Labour Party apparatchik of whom little is now heard).

The real problem for the EU was that it had overreached itself. Member states and their citizens were perfectly happy with getting spanking new roads and schools and hospitals over the years, all paid for by EU funds (which, let’s be frank, was the money of the EU’s major contributors, Britain and Germany), but many became rather picky when it came to the downsides of membership. Most notably they weren’t at all keen to share in the EU’s goodhearted, liberal drive to take in as many immigrants as possible.

This might make it sound as though I am agin the EU. I’m not, although my sister and my brother are both convinced I am a closet Brexiteer. As far as I am concerned the EU is essentially a great idea, but one which, for one reason or another, has gone bad. I think it might have started losing the plot when it was turned from a trading community, and economic bloc into a would-be political union (although keen ‘le projet’ supporters insist that that was always the intention: odd, then, that the rest of us were unaware of it).

In an ideal world I should like to see the wiser heads in Brussels take stock of the situation and decide that losing Britain is Not A Good Idea, and set about seeing how they might change Britain’s mind. But even I know there is no hope of that. Oh well.

Some more pics. Busy? Me?

Update 19/05/17: I thought I might add that these pictures, and many of the other pictures I take and occasionally publish here, are intended to get as close to being ‘abstract’ without actually being abstract. That is what interests me. After all what sad fuck gets off on taking pictures of bicycles, chairs and tables? Once that fuck begins dicking around and somehow ‘reducing’ the images to take them a little further away from what they ostensibly seem to show, it would be legitimate to claim that that fuck is no longer a sad fuck but a slightly (but only slightly) nutty fuck. See what I mean? Oh, you don’t. Oh, well.

Rather curious behavour from a self-appointed beacon of free speech. Make up your own minds

This might be of interest to some of you. I think it speaks for itself. You do sometimes wonder what is going on at the Guardian.

After I had posted a comment on the Guardian website apropos a piece by Hadley Freeman in which I suggested it wasn't her best and that it smacked as though she had forgotten a deadline and cobbled something together at the last minute (and queried what was she actually trying to say), I was astonished when not ten minutes later it had been deleted by the papers moderators as ‘not conforming with its community standards’.

Leaving aside the rather Orwellian catch-all nature of that explanation (and if you ask which standard you had not conformed to, you are merely sent a link to a long, long list of ‘community standards’ with the implicit invitation to go through the lot and find our for yourself), I was baffled as to what had been so offensive in what I had said. So I posted a second comment, this time about the deletion of my previous post, but that, too, disappeared into Guardian never-neverland.

This is not the first time this had happened, so before posting the comment, I took a screenshot of it and you can read what I wrote below. Anyone care to tell me what is so offensive about it?

Sadly, this is not the first time this has happened, and I can assure you on those other occasions I was not in the least bit offensive, either, but I was critical of the Guardian. I stick by what I say in the comment below, that the Guardian very often stands head and shoulders above the other matters in its serious journalism (although it, too, can be ridiculous when it comes to fashion, ‘lifestyle’, travel and food – it is often a self-parody).

I don’t for a second suggest or believe that Britain is in danger of becoming a totalitarian state with the Guardian as a gauleiter. But I do suggest it takes a hard look at some of its beliefs and behaviour, and tries to ensure they are not quite at odds this each other as this latest incidents would suggest.

The above was then also removed, so I left this comment, linking Guardian readers to this blog entry. It, too, was removed.

So I left my final comment, this one. It has since disappeared.

How is that for free speech. And can anyone tell me where the offence might lie?

PS Now you see it . . .

. . . and now you don’t. Isn’t free speech marvellous!