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CHAPTER 18. MULTINATIONALISM.

In the mornin’ you go gunnin'
For the man who stole your water
And you fire till he is done in
But they catch you at the border
And the mourners are all singin'
As they drag you by your feet
But the hangman isn't hangin'
And they put you on the street

You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back Jack do it again

When you know she's no high climber
Then you find your only friend
In a room with your two timer
And you're sure you're near the end
Then you love a little wild one
And she brings you only sorrow
All the time you know she's smilin'
You'll be on your knees tomorrow

You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back Jack do it again

Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you're not a gamblin' man
Then you find you're back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand
Your black cards can make you money
So you hide them when you're able
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table
You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back Jack do it again

Big multinational advertising agencies have offices in most major cities in the world where advertising is considered an important economic concern. They also stretch their tentacles into perceived up-and-coming markets in less democratic counties with a scattering of smaller satellite offices to keep things ticking over in case of a major political change which might allow business to flourish more freely.

     One agency was different from most other multi–nationals in that most of them allowed each of their national offices to do its own thing and cater to its own markets - Continental, British, Australian and American consumers having different cultural attitudes and expectations from each other as well as markets further afield. This agency’s own network had a less sophisticated view and believed there was a middle-ground compromise of what they termed ‘International Advertising’, a sort of all things to all men approach, which meant ideas had to be watered down and simplified to make sure they spread across every international market. It was a philosophy that led to mediocre, dull work and was the kind of stuff and many creative people in the business despised and hated. It also meant that the agency had acquired the reputation for being a dull and boring place that some of the larger, more high profile domestic brands steered clear of.

     The main clients were also huge on the international scene and had vast amounts of money to spend, not only on TV production, but media wise, the edict appearing to be, spread the thick blanket of mediocrity far and wide enough and you’ll eventually suffocate anybody into submission. Their TV campaigns were tailor made for the purpose and always produced via the same easy way out technique: QCAAJ - aka, ‘quick cuts and a jingle’. At first sight, any of these commercials came across as a rich, opulent, tsunami of what was loosely described as production values, but which really meant ‘if you don’t have an idea, chuck so much money at the thing, people will be swept away in awe.” Maybe they would, if they were still awake.

     If one contemplated working at this agency as creative person in the late 70s and early 80s, one risked contracting a highly contagious, loathsome, career destroying mental disease and being employed at another agency after was apparently out of the question. One was considered to be contaminated and an infectious danger to any other agency creative department. Having spent four years in this place myself, and seen some of dreaded symptoms first hand, I have to say I sympathized with other London agencies desire never to allow what the huge American holding company of this one perpetrated to become a plague.

     Joining in the late 70s, it seemed the agency was living in the plastic, smiling family culture of 1950s America and that they either believed the British consumer was in the same boat or was going to make damn sure that’s how they ended up. For some obscure reason, the powers that were had chosen to ignore the effects of the British advertising revolution started in the early 1960s, where consumers were treated as intelligent beings, whose ready wit had become sophisticated by what that revolution had presented them with so that they now needed to be entertained and made to feel good about a product before choosing to buy. It wasn’t as if these sophisticated methods of communication were hidden. They were out there for all to see on bus sides, in newspapers, magazines, on posters, in the cinema and especially on TV. The ‘new movement’ was idea led, copy lines were powerful, provocative and thought provoking, art direction and photography stunning, the images seductive and enticing, the competition between the handful of agencies producing the work, Collett Dickens and Pierce; Doyle Dane Bernbach; Boase Massimi Pollitt; and the new Saatchi and Saatchi.

     Eight years before, while I was still at JWT, the management at 40, Berkeley Square had accurately read the signs of change and had made attempts to keep up, realizing the days of the huge multi national dinosaurs were numbered. They set up a super creative group, headed by copywriter, Tom Rayfield, and containing the best talent the agency had under its roof to look after the flagship accounts, like Guiness, Parker Pens and Rolex. They built a new open-plan environment for the new group at the front of the second floor, strategically only a few yards from Jeremy Bullmore’s office. It seemed to work. Under Tom’s supervision, the group set it’s own high standards, hiring new talent to shore up any cracks there might be in their armour, most notably, Chris Wilkins, who was to produce some of the best Guiness ads ever seen and later to originate some of the greatest advertising lines and ideas the industry has ever produced.

     Remember:‘Lipsmackithirstquenchinacetastinmotivatingoodbuzzincooltalkinhaighwalkinfastlivinevergivincool fizzin Pepsi?’ or: ‘Why flick a mint with one flavour when you can flick a mint with two?’ (Tic-tac mints.)

SOME LIKE IT HOT

In 1970, Reg Orman, an American art director from the JWT New York office, spent a few months in Tom Rayfield’s newly formed and exclusive creative suite at the front of the third floor of JWT, 40 Berkeley Square. I was standing outside this temple of ultimate creative activity talking to art director, Howard Cue, another Rayfield inmate, when the designer door with its wooden frame and tinted glass, was thrust open and Reg, resplendent in his English Cockney cloth cap, Levis and cowboy boots, emerged shaking his hands as if the fingers were frost bitten.
     “Wow! This outfit is so hot, you could burn your fingers if you don’t watch out!”

     Reg’s Far Eastern girlfriend, noisy photographer’s agent, Amanda Roo, watched him walk away down the corridor still shaking his hands.
     “He’s wery excited,” she said grinning like the proverbial Cheshire pussy and following him eagerly.

     Howard’s expression mirrored my own thoughts exactly as we watched M Amanda scampering to catch up with her hero and after a few second’s empty silence he summed up Reg’s enthusiastic display exactly.
     “Cunt,” he said.

     Chris Wilkins was poached by Boase Massimi Pollit, one of the most creative and sort after places of employment on the British advertising scene, whose Creative director, John Webster, was probably the greatest genius the industry has ever produced before or since, responsible for the Cadbury’s Smash Martians campaign, voted the most popular advertising campaign ever by British consumers.

     After a couple of years, out of the blue, Webster promoted someone he used as a sounding board to the position of creative director. This turned out to be an industry-shaping move, both Wilkins and Trott, who until then had been fierce Webster champions and supporters, resigning, practically on the spot. Chris’s summation of the situation was,
     “Strikes me, it’s a bit like replacing Beethoven with Mantovani.”

     Chris moved to Saatchi and Saatchi and Dave started his own agency, Gold Greenless, Trott, which was to become even more famous in terms of its creative output of powerful ideas than BMP itself. GGT was also to become THE sort after starting place for new creatives joining the industry, most of whom would have killed for a chance to work there, some probably doing so.

     Trotty, as Dave was known by those pretenders who believed they would one day become part of his inner sanctum, by dint of their own natural talent-filled egos was a hard task master and paid pee-nuts for those given that chance. He was a down-to-earth, intelligent, dedicated, articulate workaholic with a London accent who didn’t take prisoners when it came to the business of creating some of the most impactful advertising the world had ever seen, and teaching those who were prepared to burn the midnight oil how to do the same.

     This was advertising of the people, for the people by the people, and boy it showed, big time. Unlike some of even the best creative advertising up till then, the communication produced by GGT never patronized its audience. It entertained where relevant, and always went straight for the throat with maximum impact. And the stuff always looked good. Nothing was decorative or over art directed. Winston Churchill said famously that a dog looked up to you, a cat looked down on you, but a pig was an equal and looked you straight in the eye. In the British advertising industry from 1980 to 1990 while Dave Trott was at the helm, GGT was definitely a pig.

     I met Chris outside Saatchi’s one day and he seemed cheerful and said he was enjoying just writing ads again and didn’t miss the admin side of being a deputy creative director. A few weeks later, he joined Y&R as executive creative director.

     My friend, copywriter, Pete Cass, who started his career at Saatchi and Saatchi while Chris Wilkins was there, said the acerbic Wilkins wit was always lurking. There was a senior art buyer there whom, according to Pete, was a bullying, aggressive queen bee sort of a person who seemed to go out of her way to be unhelpful to anyone. Pete was in a glass walled office with Chris one day when this Maddam Defarge type person went sweeping past done up to the nines and obviously heading for a very expensive, paid-for lunch,
     “Oh dear,” commented Chris, “Mutton dressed as pig.” Along with a few of the other large mainstream agencies, JWT began regularly to produce award winning creative work, the agency image changing from Dinosaur to sleek battle cruiser as a result. A few years later, the JWT management took things even further at the behest of Michael Cooper – Evans, by then managing director, by re-employing Alan Thomas who’d left to become creative director of Davidson Peirce Berry and Spottiswood. They offered him the position of executive creative director, a post he took up only after Jeremy Bullmore, then chairman of the board, promised not to interfere with Alan’s methods. Alan himself re-employed Max Henry as head of art giving him carte blanche over how that side of the creative department should function.

     Max quickly earned the title, ‘Max the Axe’, firing head art buyer, Vi Skeets, 6 art buyers and retaining only one, Wendy Jackson. He also fired several typographers, and quite a few creative teams.

     This desire of most of the larger, long established agencies to rise from depths of and mire of the international advertising bog and shine didn’t apply to one already mentioned multinational agency in particular. Now and again, they did hire some of the industry high flyers, both on the account and creative side but none of them stayed long, probably realizing that however hard they tried, they would eventually be overcome by whatever weird force it was that kept the creepy monolith cruising along, and end up permanently brain damaged as far as their future careers weren’t concerned.

     Melissa and I had been employed by the agency to produce the kind of high profile creative work that they, wrapped up in its international ethos, no longer had the ability to produce if it ever had had the knack or know-how to do so in the first place. (At least, that’s what they’d told us) This cost them in terms of our salaries and inducement packages and they also had to sign an agreement that we would be allowed to operate outside the agency mainstream philosophy. In other words, the agency management would have to leave us the fuck alone and let us get on with the job without interference. We still had to answer to the two joint creative directors, up to a point, but as I said earlier, Melissa had her own way of dealing with creative directors who were unsympathetic to her views about creative work.

     Our real boss was Brad Browning, an ebullient, charming, enthusiastic Greek/American art director from the New York office. Also, we didn’t have to deal with executives from the agency’s American holding company. These could be extremely unpleasant people who effused a creepy, patronizing manner, and seemed to live in a world that wasn’t part of or even related to ordinary, every day life, but rather connected to some powerful, sinister, unseen regime that rumour said had strong links to the Mafia. Indeed, there was one particular high-ranking executive who looked like he was straight out of the Godfather.

     Sid Greer was one of the highest of the high, and had quite a formidable presence to all but Jane, who feared and revered no one on the planet, and me. Dressed usually in lightweight cream coloured suits stretched across the magnificent expanse of his 260lb frame, Greer would sit like a Buda occupying the whole of a sofa, his wide, luridly patterned tie lying like a landed mackerel across his distinctly over-lunched gut as he continuously displayed the perfect, flashing plastic smile that only perfect Hollywood dentistry could muster and transmitting all the charm of a jolly but ravenous barracuda.

     Slightly further down the scale in the agency’s great scheme of things was our own Chairman and Vice President, whom we’ll call God, which was how he was perceived and feared by most.

     Suffering from small man syndrome, God was a subtle, bully. Possessing the worst kind of English affectation with a deep, theatrically cultured voice that was sometimes difficult to hear, (which was just as well, because, to me, he talked absolute crap), and foppish in his 1940’s double-breasted mode of dress, the Americans adored and almost revered him like he was some kind of guru. I never supposed for one moment that the Americans understood a word he said either, but those in charge of the US corporations and, subsequently, the government, being the multi-faced scum-bags they’ve revealed themselves to be over the years, they’d never have admitted it publically.

     God spent most of his time jet-setting around the globe lecturing to various agency offices and clients and talking the kind of over-intellectual bollocks about advertising, brands and consumers that would confuse most sensible people and make those of us who understood their art and practiced it with passion want to throw up. He once contributed to an article for Campaign magazine on what was described as Nouvelle advertising. Chris Wilkins, arguably one of the greatest and funniest copywriting talents ever to grace the advertising business, (he’d been at Cambridge at the same time as Melissa Story) commented, in the same article on God had written,
     “You read what God says and you think, ‘yeah, right…’ and then you think, WHAT?!!”

     The agency sycophants shuddered in their collective boots whenever God was in town. I thought God was just a tyrant with not one creative cell in his rotund little body. The fact that he professed to once having been a copywriter meant 0.0% of fuck all to me. He never made eye contact, which I took as a sure sign of paranoia. God was also an incredible letch. I suppose most men are if they’re honest. It’s just some are more subtle and less obvious than others. He thought he could buy whichever woman he wanted and I suppose, to some degree, he could with his income, connections, facilities and power. Suzie, a very beautiful, sparkly young girl art director, once almost fell into his clutches by allowing herself to get conned into visiting him in his hotel room at Inn On The Park by Hyde Park Corner, to discuss an agency mailer she was involved in designing. Suzie was stunning, fun and intelligent but could seem infuriatingly naive sometimes, displaying all the nouse of a delightful butterfly on speed. She and God had dinner in his suite with copious amounts of Dom Perignon on offer.

     But Suzie, being so overwhelmingly attractive, was pretty used to getting herself out of sticky situations and when God suggested she stayed the night, having grabbed her and rammed his fat little tongue down her throat, and despite the fact that she was pretty pissed, and having already noticed the matching set of posh toweling dressing gowns laid across the bed, she grabbed up her bag, blew God a kiss goodnight and made for the door finding it locked. She told God quietly but succinctly that if he didn’t let her out of the room, she would scream the place down and that her boyfriend, Malcolm, would make hamburger out of his face. It worked. He unlocked the door without a murmur and she left the hotel. A short time after, Suzie also left the agency discovering to her surprise one Friday afternoon that she no longer had a job.

     It wasn’t that God was short of girlfriends, his latest acquisition being Nicky, a copywriter at the agency and a very tough, ambitious individual at that. Maybe not quite in Melissa’s class creatively, she was still very professional and nobody’s fool. She was tall and striking, with long blonde hair and was quite beautiful in a hard-lined sort of way. She had very large but well-proportioned breasts and long legs and she never wore trousers – always skirts and high heels.

     She was married to another copywriter who was quite famous in the business when she became a member of God’s concubine. Unfortunately for God, he didn’t know what he was taking on and only became aware of Nicky’s power when she announced one day that she’d sent his other women packing and that she’d tolerate no such shenanigans in the future. She’d paid a visit to each of the other four women he had in tow at the time and told them to pack their bags and get out of town if they knew what was good for them, but in terms probably a bit stronger I should imagine, based on a contretemps I once saw her have with one of the creative secretaries.

     Nicky’s attack methodology was pretty ferocious and physical without actually throwing a punch. Apparently, Paula, a rather pleasing, plump, Jewish girl had retyped one of Nicky’s scripts but made the same mistakes she’d made when she typed it the first time. I was near the bay when Nicky came striding across from her office with the script in her hand and launched in on the unsuspecting secretary.
     “Listen, you stupid fat cow, when I ask you to correct a script that you were lazy enough to fuck up in the first place because you spend all your time on the phone to your stupid fucking fiancé instead of doing what you’re paid for, I don’t expect it to be wrong again.”
     She tore the 2 sheets of paper into pieces and threw them into Paula’s face like confetti, at the same time screaming at Paula, their noses almost touching, “NOW GET UP OFF YOUR LAZY, FAT, JEWISH FUCKING ARSE AND GET IT RIGHT OR I’LL MAKE YOU WISH YOU’D NEVER BEEN BORN.”

     Then she turned on her heel and walked calmly back to her office as if nothing had happened. Nicky and Melissa got on well and it wasn’t till I was having lunch with the two of them one day and slagging off God that it became apparent that he and Nicky were, in fact, an item.

     “Oh, he’s not really so bad once you get to know him,” was all she had to say for the penny to drop like Quasimodo’s bell falling from the tower of Notre Dame onto my head. What I did, then, was corny, girly-like but very effective. I sent Nicky an anonymous memo in a sealed envelope.

     'I am sorry to bring this to your attention but I thought you ought to know for everybody’s sakes that God is up to his old tricks again and offering to facilitate the career of a young female member of staff. She’s is a perfectly innocent party in this and not complicit in any way. She has turned down the ‘offers’ God has made I would therefore be extremely disappointed if her job or place in the company were in any way to suffer as a result and I would be obliged to take the matter further officially were this to be the case. The lady’s name will not be disclosed and she herself will not mention the harassment she has suffered to anyone else if it ceases forthwith. I trust you will take the appropriate action.' Thank you.

     Actually, this is a complete and utter lie. I did contemplate doing the above, but had no wish to end up wearing concrete boots at the bottom of the Thames should I ever be found out. You think I’m kidding?

‘For mash, get Smash’

“Sooty. ‘Ow many more tarms, ‘ave I got to tell you not ter do thut? What ‘s thut you’re sayin’? Dorn’t tell me ter fook off, yer moth-eaten little shite! A’rve ornly got to take me und from oop your shirt, an’ your fookin’ dead, son!”



* * * * * * *


CHAPTER 19. CREATING HELL.

I've been cheated by you since I don't know when
So I made up my mind, it must come to an end
Look at me now, will I ever learn?
I don't know how but I suddenly lose control
There's a fire within my soul
Just one look and I can hear a bell ring
One more look and I forget everything, o-o-o-oh

Mamma mia, here I go again
My my, how can I resist you?
Mamma mia, does it show again?
My my, just how much I've missed you
Yes, I've been brokenhearted
Blue since the day we parted
Why, why did I ever let you go?
Mamma mia, now I really know,
My my, I could never let you go.

I've been angry and sad about the things that you do
I can't count all the times that I've told you we're through
And when you go, when you slam the door
I think you know that you won't be away too long
You know that I'm not that strong.
Just one look and I can hear a bell ring
One more look and I forget everything, o-o-o-oh

Mamma mia, here I go again
My my, how can I resist you?
Mamma mia, does it show again?
My my, just how much I've missed you
Yes, I've been brokenhearted
Blue since the day we parted
Why, why did I ever let you go?
Mamma mia, even if I say
Bye bye, leave me now or never
Mamma mia, it's a game we play
Bye bye doesn't mean forever

Mamma mia, here I go again
My my, how can I resist you?
Mamma mia, does it show again?
My my, just how much I've missed you
Yes, I've been brokenhearted
Blue since the day we parted
Why, why did I ever let you go
Mamma mia, now I really know
My my, I could never let you go

Murder was what seemed to be going on the in the corridors of the agency the day I arrived for the first time as an employee in August 1979. I’d worked in 5 agencies up until then, but had never seen anything like this. It had always been acceptable that members of any creative department were somewhat eccentric, sometimes loud, certainly passionate, occasionally boisterous and maybe even ever so slightly pissed on occasions, but not at 10.00am and not screamingly loud, violent, and roaring drunk all at the same time. Walking out of the 2nd floor lift that morning was a scary experience. Mayhem seemed to be taking place everywhere. Two big, scruffy men in their late 30s were jostling each other aggressively and grinning inanely like drooling apes, one holding the other against the wall. Both were well inebriated or coked to the eyeballs, if not both. Another man came by, grinning at the other two and saying something unintelligible in a voice sounding like gravel being poured into a metal bucket.

     This guy was like something out of a Hammer Horror film minus the blood. In a cream coloured jacket, faded denims and cowboy boots, his bloodshot eyes, glared insanely from beneath the unwashed thatch of lank hair ideally complimenting the scruffy, pointy Robin Hood beard tacked onto the end of his chin. The glass of Scotch in his right hand was almost overflowing, his left holding a long black cigarette holder close to his gob like it was a blowpipe, as he swept past.

     I felt very sorry for whoever was going to be graced by a visit from this Baron Frankenstein creation that morning. How did I remember all that detail from such a fleeting moment? How could I not? This was Steve Donkin, self-proclaimed, superstar art director, bully, thug, acid headed tosser of the first order. There were several famous creative bullies in the advertising industry at that time, mostly driven, talented, prima donnas, and Donkin wasn’t one of them. He was just one nasty piece of work. He was allowed to do his own thing and got away with murder, as far as I could see. He ate copywriters for breakfast and spent his time wandering round the agency waving his metal bucket of pebbles at max volume or skulking in the depths of his huge darkened office in a cave-like corner of the creative floor. The door was never closed, but the place was about as welcoming as Auschwitz on a rainy day.

     I did venture in out of curiosity one Saturday morning when I was working on a new business pitch. Interestingly, the was a huge tank of tropical fish against one wall, which for a split second, made me think Thorpe was just another misjudged humanoid after all. That was before I realized the fish were Piranhas. Donkin worked on some of the agency’s key accounts, all of which succumbed to the infamous QCAAJ treatment at his hands. Maybe the McCann’s management to put up with him because he turned out exactly the kind of boring nonsense laid down in their manifesto, though I doubted this. I just think he saw things the same way they did – with a blanket over his head. In my opinion, Donkin couldn’t art direct his way out of a paper bag when it came to print, but then, neither could most art directors in the agency at that time.

     Donkin’s growing hands-on preoccupation with the commercials went further and further to his already oversized cranium, and he co-directed a commercial on one particular account. Then he figured he should become lone director on all the subsequent films while retaining his employment at the agency, a notion that was turned down flat by executive creative director, Brad Browning, and the rest of the management. Donkin wasn’t best pleased. But despite his ranting and raving, the management remained firm and suggested that if he wanted to direct he should leave and join the production company as a staff director. In the belief that this was the way he could fulfill his rightful ambition as the regular Martini director, Thorpe did just this, but as far as I know, he was never used.

     The entrenched members of the creative department were, with a few exceptions, never over-friendly to whom they considered to be outsiders, like Melissa and I, and probably resented the chance we were given to work on new business pitches and accounts, which would allow greater creative opportunities, such as the COI RAF recruitment advertising. Melissa was very demanding to work with which forced me to raise my standards considerably, something no art director in his or her right mind could have any complaints about. We did OK, and produced work I was proud of, especially on the RAF. I hoped Melissa felt the same, but I was never really sure. I have to be honest. Melissa scared me to death and I sometimes froze like a rabbit in the headlights when we were under pressure, which created a stiff atmosphere between us.

     I admired Melissa tremendously, but it takes a lot more than that for a creative team to work successfully together and eventually, we decided to split up. The decision helped us both relax, which, ironically, was when we produced our best work. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe we should have stayed together, but it was too late, as a new art director, Chris Porter had been hired to work with Melissa and copywriter, Jim Brown, to work with me.

     Chris was an old hand, having worked at the agency several years before alongside Brad Browning. Aged 45, with longish white hair and neatly trimmed white beard, he was tall, slim and friendly, always smiling in his light grey slacks, pretty shirts and white loafers ideally complimenting the stuff on his head and round his chops.

     Chris knew a few of the McCann’s creatives from before, and introduced them to Melissa and I, telling us they weren’t all as bad as we thought. He was right. Some of them seemed like decent people all seemed tainted with the same religious disease - they were terrified of God.

     Chris was one of the greatest storytellers I ever met and was full of anecdotes of his time in the advertising business and as a National Service conscript in the RAF where he spent much of his time as a sign-writer. He was a golf fanatic and had somehow managed to blag his way to membership of the Camberley Golf Club. He said he was at the 18th Hole Bar in the clubhouse one Saturday lunchtime when, through the window, he noticed another member, an eminent surgeon, who, having had a really bad day, was trying to putt a ball into the 18th hole situated next to a water obstacle in sight of the club house as his bored looking opponent looked on. Finally, the surgeon gave up. He placed his ball and clubs back in a very expensive looking golf bag, lifted the bag above his head with both his hands and tossed in into the water. The bag was still floating when he strode into the clubhouse and standing next to Chris at the bar, ordered himself a large scotch.

     In silence, the surgeon and Chris watched the golf bag slowly sink like a mortally wounded U boat, leaving a carpet of bubbles on the surface like giant frogs spawn. After about a minute, the surgeon swallowed his scotch whole, slammed the glass down on the counter and left. Chris watched him cross the green to the water’s edge, and taking off his shoes and rolling his trousers and sleeves up, wade out to the center of the pool where he bent over and began rummaging about under the surface, obviously regretting his decision to dispose of his exclusive golf weaponry. Locating the sub, he carried it gently back to the bank, and laid it down on the grass. He took a set of keys from a pouch in the bag, and putting his shoes back on, picked up the bag, raised it above his head once again and chucked it back in the drink, turning on his heel and making for the car park, before sweeping away in his posh jag, tyres screeching. I don’t see how even Chris could’ve made that up.

     One of the nicest people in the established agency’s creative department was copywriter, Mike Thornton. He’d been at FCB (Foot, Cone and Belding) the same time as me in 1973, but I never got to know any creative staff as my stay with my partner, Tony Broadbent, was only 4 months. This was the time of miners strikes and the infamous 3 day week when all lights had to be turned off at 4.3o so that we could experience the delightful Dickensian sensation of working by candle light. Well, if the great Mr. D. could do it, then why couldn’t we? They could have let us go home early, but what the heck?

     Tony and I were 5 minutes late with the off switch one afternoon and were interrupted by one of the creative group heads, one Amala Chandana, who shoved open our door, with having the grace to knock first, and started screaming at us like we were naughty 5 years olds who’d strangled the family cat and hung it out the window. Ms. Chandana was a largish, sari wearing Indian lady, with a cultured English voice, that showed no trace of her probable origins, and that she was a likely member of India’s perceived highest caste, Nagar Caste Surat, according to her somewhat superior manner. In my view, there is no excuse for anyone to yell at any member of staff for any reason and it’s something I don’t respond well to. I’m normally quite placid, but if someone steps over that particular line, it’s as if a Roman Candle in my brain explodes. I don’t remember what I said but it was quite a tirade and probably contributed to Tony and I being made redundant some 3 weeks later. That and Tony upsetting one of the agency senior partners in a Gordon’s Gin meeting one day.
     “Why do you insist on treating me like some kind of ignorant child,” he asked Tony.
     “Why do you insist on behaving like one?” replied my intrepid, suicidal partner.

     Two of our friends from JWT, the late Graham Houghton (whom I’d also known at Sidcup Art School) and his partner were both made redundant one Friday so Tony and I went straight to our boss, Creative Director, Len Sugarman, who’d employed us in the first place, and asked him if we would share the same fate. Len, a tall, frizzy haired, heavily built Jewish walrus of a man, who had a habit of flapping his hands together like a couple of fatty fins, assured us we would be fine. We weren’t.

     Come the Monday morning, our office had been stripped – our personal belongings removed, including my portable radio and Tony’s thesaurus. There were two white envelopes on the table containing pay slips and letters pertaining to out redundancy in light of the county’s general financial crisis. Lenny the walrus was nowhere to be found so we went to seek an audience with managing director, Bill Keiley, who told us if we didn’t leave his office forthwith, he’d call the police.

     The creative secretary, Mary, who’d been sweetness and light during the four months we’d been at the agency, was embarrassed and told us she’d been forbidden to discuss the situation with us. Mary did manage to retrieve the thesaurus but couldn’t find the radio. It wasn’t till my time at the next agency that I discovered Mary was Mike Thornton’s girlfriend when she turned up at his memorial service. I’d been working late one evening and met a grinning Mike in the corridor. He’d just come from God’s office and was over the proverbial moon.
     “Hey, guess what,” he said not trying to hide his excitement, “They’re sending me to Sidney for a few weeks. How amazing is that? I’ve never been to Australia and I’ve always wanted to go.”

     Non swimming Mike, had been in Sidney for 3 days and was standing up to his knees in the sea off Bondai Beech watching the 10 years old son of the account executive he was staying with, when a sudden rip tide swept him off his feet and catapulted him into 14 feet of water where he was found later face down. The 10 years old boy, a strong swimmer, survived. Mike drowned.

THE PIT


     “Into everyone’s life, a little shit must fall,” I was told by one of the creative directors and head of copy, when I joined the agency. He was referring to a particular account, which every creative person in the agency was expected to work on, as part of their terms of employment. The creative director’s description proved to be the case. These people seemed to have an agenda that took no account of, or had any respect for, the talent and expertise of anyone in the agency, in any agency, from account people, researchers, account planners, and especially to creative teams. They worked strictly to their own company guidelines, which didn’t make any logical sense to anyone skilled in the art of communication, which, by that time, was a sophisticated and effective industry, especially in the UK.

     They laid down their own crude and primitive values, and lectured on the subject at any meeting, often talking aggressively over the top of anyone trying to make some kind of sense out of the laws they laid down, laws that made the job of creating competitive, intelligent, effective advertising for them and their miserable products impossible. It was like dealing with brainwashed people ruled by a dictatorial regime that had brainwashed every member of their staff. North Korea had nothing on them.

     They were a law unto themselves and had an extraordinarily low and patronizing view of their own consumers. When I was partnered with Jim Brown we were tasked to work on the one particular brand. He had worked with the same client at previous agencies and warned me they didn’t listen to reason and had their own set of guidelines that had to be followed no matter what. He said you just had to swallow your pride and find the best compromise solution to every brief.

     He also knew two of the clients we were going to deal with having worked with them both before. One was a youngish Glaswegian, with the Sir name, Slaggen, whom Nick said was not too bad as these guys went, and his boss, a mid forties, skinny, red-headed chronic diabetic, Bob Splane, whom Jim Brown said was a bit of a nightmare to work with, mainly because he was a pathological liar. I don’t know what planet Splane originated on, but it wasn’t this one. You’d think that people involved in marketing would be aware of what’s going on around them in the various media, particularly in the highly competitive battlefield of advertising. You’d think they’d be aware of all the great brand leader campaigns out there, examine them, study them, immerse themselves in the sophisticated wit and humour therein, and encourage an agency to do the same for their own brands, realizing that consumers responded more and more to lively, intelligent forms of communication and had become, over time, expectant of nothing less.

     To hear Bob Splane lecture on the his company’s philosophy you’d soon come to the realization that he and his kind had their heads buried in some kind of thick, gooey sand, blinding and deafening them to the world around them. They’d learned nothing from the incredible advances made in the advertising industry in the previous 25 years. What did they think the hugely successful Saatchi and Saatchis, Collet, Dickens and Pearces, Boase Massimi Pollits of the world owed that success to?

     The evidence was all around them on posters, in the press, on television, radio and in cinemas, yet they chose to ignore it all, and in a lot of cases, deride the very best of it. Splane would ramble on like a Mormon bishop about ‘brand values’ holding up copies of press ads that looked like they’d been produced by Walt Disney before the 2nd World War, but had in fact been produced that same month. The typography, if you could call it typography, was abysmal and virtually unreadable, the copy patronisingly dull, and the layout out of the Arc.

     There was always a crudely photographed and heavily retouched pack shot in the bottom right hand corner of the ad. After painful weeks of presenting script after script, one was finally agreed though by that time, there was only a vague notion left about what the hell it was we were trying to communicate. The script was approved by whichever Emperor was in charge of the company at the time; a production company chosen and briefed and a pre-production meeting held with Bob and Slaggen, the agency producer, the production company producer, the director, Nick and I, and the agency account director, Michael Framer, a creepy, bloodless Dracula look-alike who seemed to have been prised from the same mould as Splane.

     The film, despite its lack of idea content, was nevertheless beautifully shot by Bill Marshall, of the production company, Morgan and Mount, but was turned down immediately by Splane on the grounds that one special offer pack had been left out. Everyone in the meeting remembered the conversation at the pre-prod meeting with Splane when it had been agreed this wasn’t necessary. Celia, the agency producer, even had the decision in her minutes of the meeting, but Splain still insisted on a re-shoot at the agency’s expense. Framer didn’t even enter the argument, obviously believing Nestle creatures to be immortal and above reproach on any level.

     Splane’s attitude was always high and mighty and his enjoyment of piling on pressure to those he considered less mortal, especially creative people was obvious. Every now and again, usually after one of his raves, he’d take a small, brown leather case from his inside pocket and leave the room. Jim Brown had explained that he would often do this as without his regular insulin fixes, he’d die on the spot. He also told me that Splane had a daughter who couldn’t stand her father’s puritanical ways to such an extent that she’d left home at the age of 18 and was living with a couple of hippy blokes in a tepee in Wales. Knowing that, somehow made the meeting with him somewhat less painful and he came across as even more of a dick than I’d originally thought.

Just do it. Nike.

Derek Watergate: “Hello and welcome to the most scintillating programme on the planet, and not just any old planet, but this one. Welcome to Gardener’s Wellie Time.
SFX: Loud moans.
D.W: “Can we have the first question, please, from Mavis Waterbut?”
Mavis Watering-Can: “Hello. I’ve got this smell problem at the bottom of my garden and nothing I’ve tried makes it go away.”
D.W: “Virginia Creeper. You know a lot about smells, I’ll be bound.”
V.C.: “Only when I’m near you, Derek.”
SFX: Hysterical audience laughter.
V.C.: “Er, let me see. I had a similar problem a couple of years ago at the bottom of my garden.”
D.W: “What did you do?”
V.C.: “I buried my husband there.”
D.W: “What, alive?”
V.C.: “Of course not. I killed him first. And the smell is rotting flesh.”
D.W: “Well, that IS a relief.”
SFX: Audience chuckling.
D.W: “Can I ask you, Mavis, is that what you did? Do away with your old git and bury him in the garden?”
M.W.C: “Yes.”
V.C.: “Well, there’s no short answer to the pong problem, I’m afraid, but it will go away eventually, once the soil has had a chance to digest all the flesh and organs, but I can recommend a way to avoid the problem in the future. Next time, bury the body in some other fucker’s garden. That’s what I did. It was half a mile away and I couldn’t smell a thing.” SFX: Applause.

* * * * * * *



CHAPTER 20. JFK.

She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene
She said don't mind, but what do you mean, I am the one
Who will dance on the floor in the round
She said I am the one, who will dance on the floor in the round

She told me her name was Billie Jean, as she caused a scene
Then every head turned with eyes that dreamed of being the one
Who will dance on the floor in the round

People always told me be careful of what you do
And don't go around breaking young girls' hearts
And mother always told me be careful of who you love
And be careful of what you do 'cause the lie becomes the truth

Billie Jean is not my lover
She's just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son
She says I am the one, but the kid is not my son

For forty days and forty nights
The law was on her side
But who can stand when she's in demand
Her schemes and plans
'Cause we danced on the floor in the round
So take my strong advice, just remember to always think twice
(Don't think twice, don't think twice)

She told my baby we'd danced till three, then she looked at me
Then showed a photo my baby cried his eyes were like mine (oh, no!)
'Cause we danced on the floor in the round, baby

People always told me be careful of what you do
And don't go around breaking young girls' hearts
She came and stood right by me
Just the smell of sweet perfume
This happened much too soon
She called me to her room

Billie Jean is not my lover
She's just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son

Billie Jean is not my lover
She's just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son
She says I am the one, but the kid is not my son
She says I am the one, but the kid is not my son

Billie Jean is not my lover
She's just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son
She says I am the one, but the kid is not my son

She says I am the one,
(you know what you did, (she says he is my son)breaking my heart babe)
She says I am the one
Billie Jean is not my lover
Billie Jean is not my lover
Billie Jean is not my lover
Billie Jean is not my lover (don't Billie Jean)
Billie Jean is not my lover
Billie Jean is not my lover

The inhaled hiss of a pissed off python announced John Knight’s arrival one lunch time in the office he and I both shared with 3 other junior art directors at 40 Berkeley Square in 1968.
     “’Cor, fuckin’ ‘ell!” he said, cupping his right fist in his left palm. He’d just returned from a hospital check up having had a hernia removed the week before, and I assumed his screwed up face signified post op discomfort. I was wrong. “Just look at me fuckin’ knuckles, Nilw,” he invited. I looked and winced. The skin of each knuckle was scraped, the wounds highlighted with blobs of blood.
     “Christ! How’d you do that?”
     “The bus was crowded and I ‘ad to stand all the way ‘ere. Then this black cunt gets on. He’s pissed and as the bus pulls away, he makes a grab for the over’ead rail, misses and falls against me fuckin’ ‘earnia and it really fuckin’ hurt. And e’s only grinnin’ at me. He thinks it’s fuckin’ funny, dun ‘e? So I fuckin’ popped ‘im, didn’ I? Look what ‘is fuckin’ ‘amstead’s did to me fuckin’ German. I should’ve stuck me fuckin’ boot in.”

     Without exaggeration, this is how Peckham born and raised, John Knight, spoke, which, in the advertising business, earned him the nick name, J.F.K., the origin of which, I’m sure I don’t have to explain. Hearing the F word as often as you did in John’s company was something you got used to but seeing the word written down so many times is not easy on the eye, so from here on in, I’ll leave it out, as John himself would have said. In appearance, the 1968 John Knight was what you might describe as ‘Post-Mod’. His hair was longish, lank and dead straight, his face, impish. He was 6ft tall and skinny as rake, the 3 buttoned jacket of his grey-green suit, hanging loose on his clotheshorse like, bony frame, the trousers flapping shy of his thick-soled, heavy, American style black brogues. John told me that he’d worked for a printer when he left school, but wishing to better himself, he left his job and enrolled at the London College of Printing, which at the time was fast-emerging as THE training ground for would be advertising art directors with a reputation for producing many of the business’s stars, most notably, Sir John Hegarty, of the now equally famous agency, Bartle, Bogle Hegarty, founded in 1982.

     John Knight was never shy and always spoke his mind, a trait, which was to land him in trouble at the LCP, frequently getting him thrown out of lectures and lessons.
     “There were some great people there, but some right wankers, and I used to give ‘em a hard time,” he told me.

     He made it through the LCP course with a folio of work good enough to get him a job at JWT. And while he towed the line and did what he was told, as all we assistant art directors did, he was already fiercely ambitious to work at what he considered to be a more creative agency than he thought JWT was at the time. At times, the juniors got the opportunity to work one their own with young copywriters on projects their immediate bosses considered relatively un-important or that they didn’t have time to do themselves. These were times when we could do the work the way we thought it should be done and let their real creative juices flow.

     John sometimes teamed up with Harry XXXXX, a young Jewish writer whom he referred to as ‘H’. H found John relentless in the pursuit of good ideas and between them produced some great work over a couple of years, albeit on fairly low budget projects. What was important for young teams (still is) was to get good work into print and the ‘book’ (your personal folio) and/or the ‘book’ ( the D&AD annual) to further a career by moving up the industry ladder, usually by getting a job at a place with a higher profile.

     This John Managed after about 2 years, announcing one day he’d got a job and the newly formed Saatchi and Saatchi. After about a year at Saatchi’s, John moved on to Doyle Dane and Bernbach, in Baker Street, and American agency most famous for it’s Volkswagon advertising. Here he got to work with some famous creative luminaries, such as Art Director, Derek Hass and writer, Alastair Crompton. He did quite well, getting a VW ad into the D&AD annual, but fell out with creative Director, Dawson Yeoman who made him redundant, blaming the 3-day week.

     I’d been made redundant from FCB at about the same time and met John in Berkeley square one morning. His image had changed from Post Mod to designer scruff. He wore a hooded tracksuit top, tight jeans, steel toe-capped boots and his hair was down to his shoulders. Alan Thomas had just returned to JWT as creative director and John told me Alan had hired him.
     “Go and see Alan, Niwl, and come and get stuck in,” was his advice. It wasn’t a bad idea but felt to me as if I’d be going backwards. 3 weeks later, I got the job at Benton and Bowles. Under Alan, John was given a free reign and produced some great work, especially on Guiness, but after 3 years, was on his way again, this time to TBW, in Covent Garden, where (Sir) John Hegarty was creative director.

     I met John at an adverting awards evening at the Grosvenor House Hotel when I was at McCann’s and gave him a lift home afterwards. He said goodnight to J.H. on our way past his table and I asked John what he was like.
     “He’s a really nice bloke, and shit hot.”

     A couple of years later, I picked John up as I drove through Peckham on my way to work. It was about 10.30., so we were both late. I asked him if this was a problem where Hegarty, whose reputation as a workaholic was legendary.
     “Nah,” said John, who’d lost none of his cheerful, charming Cockney charm, despite his success, “I do it to piss Hegarty off.”
     “I thought you admired him.”
     “He’s just a fuckin’ machine,” was the surprising response.
     Despite his opinion, the work John produced at TBWA was probably his best. I didn’t like all of it, but everything he did was original and beautifully art directed in John’s own inimitable, wide-ranging style. None of it could be called ordinary. If John Knight was anything, he was real mould breaker. Malcolm Gaskin, one of TBWA’s creative directors at the time, said after John’s death, that he always believed John to be a bit of a genius. Gas, as Gaskin was known, had a standout track record himself, but he and John didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and John told me once that he’d just been in a meeting with Gas and his partner, Neil Patterson, who’d both been lecturing John and his writer about humour.
     “They ain’t got a sense of humour between them,” he said, “I heard that Nilw has been talking to Y&R about going to the agency as creative director. I might ring ‘em up and tell ‘em what a genius he is. I might even offer to contribute to his salary, if it’ll speed his departure.”

     While I was at McCann’s there was an infusion of young talent from various art schools throughout the country particularly from Liverpool. Often preferring to spend time amongst younger people, I got to know them all quite well and would offer them advice on their career paths, which was not so much about doing things the way I had, but rather the opposite. I’d missed a lot of opportunities early in my own career by making some wrong decisions, and I always encouraged them not to compromise and make the most of their talents. The main advice being to get out of McCann’s as soon as they could.

     Two particularly talented people among them, art director, Vince Squibb, and writer, Ged Edmonson were both partnered with other people but really wanted to work together. I went to the management on their behalf and recommended they put these two young guns together if they wanted a really hot, award winning team on the staff. They took no notice and I suggested to Vince and Ged that if they wanted to work together, they should build a fresh, spec portfolio together and apply to some of the renowned creative agencies. They took my advice, and within a couple of months produced work that any creative person in the business would be proud of. They went to see David Abbot at Abbot Meade Vickers, who was apparently astonished by the quality of their work, said he would’ve taken them on immediately, if he’d had vacancies. Instead he sent them to see John Kelley, creative director at Lowe Howard Spink, who hired them on the spot. agency so quickly.

     Needless to say, they did very well at Lowes, winning several awards for work on Mate’s Contraceptives, Heineken and Stella Artois leaving the agency after about 4 years later to go to the newly formed Still Price Court Twivvy and de Souva. They didn’t stay long because it meant too many compromises where the work was concerned, Vince going back to Lowe’s and Ged to White Collins Rutherford Scott. To me it was a sad breakup of the one of the best young teams in the industry, but they both continued to well.

     Something like 15 years later, Vince is now a top film director with the production company, Gorgeous, and the last time I spoke to Ged he was working at McCann’s, Manchester.

     Most of the young creatives at McCann’s, when I was there, shared a large office together which adopted the nickname of The Playpen, where I’d spend as much time as I could, finding it such a lively, stimulating place to hang out. The ‘kids’, as they became known, also gave me the nickname ‘Granddad’, obviously believing that because of my 34 years against their average of 20, it was entirely fitting. Several playpen inmates became what I hoped would be lifelong friends and though I don’t see any of them very often, this looks like being the case.

     Art director, Katie McClen, is one of these, and, having returned to the UK from quite a few years in South Africa, with her 16 year old daughter, I see her several times a year when she and I walk across the cliffs of Eastbourne, putting the world to rights as we go. Katie is one of those rare people who make you feel glad to be alive. She is still the stunning, sparkly, fun loving lady she always was, and, after an introduction from me, was also a close friend of John Knight’s until his death in 1996. At his funeral, copywriter, Giles Keeble, read a beautifully appropriate eulogy he’d written for John. It began:
     “John Knight loved type, he loved photography, he loved creating exciting advertising. John Knight loved wild flowers. John Knight loved birds and he loved birds…”

     This was quite a poignant statement. John was an authority on wild flowers and the feathered variety of birds, breeding his own canaries, neither activities seeming to fit with the image of the rough, tough, Doc Martins sporting, Millwall supporter he willingly portrayed. John was also a dedicated lover of the other bird variety of bird, namely the human type, almost to the point of obsession. It was with this in mind that when I suggested Katie give him a call at TBWA with a view to showing him her work and asking his advice, I warned her to be careful. She asked me what I meant, but I just repeated the caution.

     When Katie returned from her meeting with John, she seemed extra smiley. I asked her how it went, and she said John was very helpful and constructive when he looked at her work as they chatted for about half an hour. But then, as I’d feared he might, he lost control, leapt up onto his desk and launched himself on top of her. Katie said he was all over her like an octopus, a trait of John’s I’d seen him demonstrate on several occasions, notably once when my girlfriend came to our office at JWT to meet me and John grabbed her in much the same way.
     “Cor, darlin’, “ he exclaimed, “You look like you’ve just got out of the bath!”

     As I said, John and Katie became firm friends. Friendship was where things stopped, though several times John told me Katie would one day be the mother of his children. Whether this would or would not have happened, we were never to find out as John contacted lymphoma a couple of years later, and though he bravely declared he was going to beat the disease, he suffered a prolonged treatment regime, only to pass away in his sleep. The three of us met up several times before he became ill and I once asked him who were his advertising heroes were.
     “I don’t have any,” was his emphatic reply, “Who wants to do layouts like Neal Godfrey or Ron Brown? They’re already doin’ ‘em.”

     Fair comment, I suppose.

     Towards the end of his life, John’s writer at the time, Ken Mullen, and Gas went to see him in hospital. Kenny asked him if he could see a light at the end of the tunnel.
     “I can’t even see the bleedin’ tunnel,” was John’s typically witty, but tragic reply.

     At his funeral, the JFK anecdotes came thick and fast. Ken said that he had once done some crafty freelance for an account director at TBWA. The guy came to his and John’s office one day and presented Kenny with a top of the range Mont Blanc fountain pen for helping out. When the bloke left, John commented, “I suppose he finks that’ll make you into a real writer instead of some fuckin’ old hack.” JFK to a T.

Vorsprung durch Technik

Alf Garnet: Listen, you scarse git, read the posters, Read the bloomin’ posters. ‘Labour ‘aint workin’’, what could be more expilcitive than that, eh? Tell me that?”
Michael: “You’re just a ruddy blind Tory mug, you are, just like the rest of your so-called cronies.
A.G: “Listen, Shirley Temple, when Mrs. Thatcher gets elected Prime Minister, it’ll be over for lay-abouts like you, you mark my words. They’ll be now more dole for you to lean on, HER, HER, just you wait an’ see. You’ll ‘ave to get up of your bum and get yourself a job like the rest of us, not that anyone would be daft enough to employ you.
M: “Listen, the day that witch gets to be prime minister, God help us. It’ll be the end of the free world as we know it.”
A.G: “That’s my point, you ‘airy nelly. Free is what you and your kind rely on. Free this, free that – free everyfink and sod the responsibility, that’s your motto.”
M: “You don’t half talk a load of rubbish, you do, mate.”
A.G: “Listen…”
M: “I mean, d’you really think Thatcher and the higher echelons of the Tory part are going to give a damn about the likes of you?”
A.G: “Listen…”
M: “I mean, you’re working class, and they don’t give a stuff about the working class. They never ‘ave and they never will.”
A.G: “Listen…”
M: “Anyone who has a brain knows the Tory party is all about those that have it and to hell with those that don’t.”
A.G: “LISTEN!!!!
M: “And as for people of your denomination, you’ve no chance, mate.”
A.G: “What d’you mean, my denomination?”
M: “Come on, Alf. You can admit it to me. There no one here but us, and I won’t spill the beans. Honest.”
A.G: “HOW MANY TIMES DO I ‘AVE TO TELL YOU? I AIN’T BLOODY JEWISH!”
M: “Prove it, then Go on, bloody prove it.”
A.G: “’Ow can I bloody prove it?”
M: “That’s easy, mate. Show us your wally.”
A.G: “You filthy, scarse pervert. ‘An I let you marry my lovely daughter?”
M: “That’s the only way you’re going to prove to me you’re not Jewish. Up to you, mate.”
A.G: “Grrrrrrr. I’ve never bin so embarrassed in all my life.”
M: “There you go, Alf. It’s not so difficult, is it? C’mon. Let have a close look. Blimey! You’re right. You can’t be bloody Jewish. Not with a wallet as empty as that.”




* * * * * *


Chapter 21. ARDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!


The whispers in the morning
Of lovers sleeping tight
Are rolling by like thunder now
As I look in your eyes
I hold on to your body
And feel each move you make
Your voice is warm and tender A love that I could not forsake

'Cause I am your lady
And you are my man
Whenever you reach for me
I'll do all that I can
Lost is how I'm feeling, lying in your arms
When the world outside's too
Much to take

That all ends when I'm with you
Even though there may be times
It seems I'm far away
Never wonder where I am
'Cause I am always by your side

'Cause I am your lady
And you are my man
Whenever you reach for me
I'll do all that I can
We're heading for something
Somewhere I've never been
Sometimes I am frightened
But I'm ready to learn Of the power of love
The sound of your heart beating
Made it clear
Suddenly the feeling that I can't go on
Is light years away

'Cause I am your lady
And you are my man
Whenever you reach for me
I gonna do all that I can
We're heading for something
Somewhere I've never been Sometimes I am frightened
But I'm ready to learn Of the power of love


Entering the Playpen one day on one of my frequent visits, there was another body. At least, that’s what it looked like. An enormously long person was lying in the corner of the room near the desk of Sarah Munns, a recent graduate from the Watford Art School copywriting course. Unfortunately, the body wasn’t dead - far from it. The bloody thing wouldn't shut up. A deep, cultured, public school type voice interrupted every other conversation going on in the room, with an incessant tirade of misguided witticisms. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.
     “This is Philip, Neal,” Sarah offered, “ He was at Watford with me. Philip, this is Neal.”

     The body stretched its neck and raised its head, to reveal the maniacal grin of what looked like a 14 year old, “Well, hello, Neal. Oh, you look very old. How old are you?”
     “Neal’s 34,” Sarah informed him.
     “Christ,” said the grinning body, “That’s REALLY old.”
     “Neal’s our friend,” Sarah said, “He helps us all.” <
     “So he’s your Granddad,” said the body, widening its manic grin.

     All the Playpen prisoners burst out laughing. Unfortunately for Granddad, the name stuck.

     This was my introduction to Philip Ardagh, and I hated him. He was a bloody nuisance. When I was talking to one of the young ones in the Playpen he’d crawl across the floor like a snake and grab my ankle or pat me on the head and ruffle my hair from his towering 6ft 7 height. It turned out he was visiting Sarah for the day the first time I saw him, not having a job himself. So I looked forward to the relief of him going away, praying for it to be ASAP.

     He didn’t go away. He was there the next day, and the next, and the next. I stopped visiting the Playpen. But it seemed Philip Ardagh was everywhere, and very popular he’d quickly become. Anywhere I went in the agency he turned up or was already there and took every opportunity to take the piss. I was even cautious when visiting the Gent’s toilet in case he sprang at me from one of the traps. Eventually, one of the insane creative directors offered him a job as a trainee copywriter. Despite loathing him, I did admire his tactics. He’d deliberately made himself an integral part of the scenery so that the place suddenly felt it couldn’t do without, and literally talking himself onto a job.

     Having been at the agency for 3 years, I hadn’t had much luck with copywriters I’d been paired with. Art director/copywriter parings are compared to marriage in that trust, respect, a shared sense of humour, an ability to take criticism constructively and a shared ambition to do the best job possible, are all essential ingredients. Doing your knitting while trying to solve a creative problem isn’t. Having already been ‘divorced’ three times, I was trying hard to make a new relationship work with a new lady writer, who’d been hired on a temporary basis to make sure things worked out.

     When we were working, she’d sit opposite me knitting and writing the odd thought down. Not that there’s anything wrong with knitting. I have a friend, Judy Mewburn, who will sometimes knit or Crochet during conversation, but that’s because Judes is the most active person I’ve ever met and has to be doing something all the time. She never loses the thread of a conversation (or the crochet) is extremely intelligent and articulate, and when she isn’t running one of several charities she works for in South London, she’ll be in the bush somewhere with some of her ‘surgeon chums’, carrying out ENT surgery in places where the only medical aid people get is via a hospital boat which stops by once a month. Judes is in her mid seventies and has type 2 diabetes and arthritis. But nothing will stop her doing what she wants to do. And I mean, nothing.

     Mary, the trial writer, and I were working on a new business pitch the London Electricity Board and weren’t getting anywhere. At the end of the second day, we had nothing to show and were due to present to the agency board the next day. I suggested we should maybe carry on working at the end of the day, but Mary said she couldn’t due to a prior engagement. I worked all night at home and came up with a few ideas, which I scratched down as TV scripts. When I showed the stuff to Mary the following morning, not only was she quite dismissive, but offered no constructive input, her only offering being to tell me that working all night was silly, especially as it hadn’t led anywhere and proceeding with her knitting.

     I saw red, then black, then blue and expressed the essence of each colour verbally. I went to see the creative director who’d hired her and told him it wasn’t working out. He said her employment wouldn’t be continued, but that I was presenting him with a problem in that I hadn’t been able to work with the last 3 writers I’d partnered. I pointed out that this wasn’t my fault, and though he agreed up to a point, told me the other management members would just read the surface evidence and see me as being in-compatible with anyone. He also told me that another lady writer had requested to work with me and I should consider this opportunity very carefully. At risk of sounding like a misogynistic pig, I had no time for the proposed lady who seemed to spend all her time talking about her 3 young children and stoned, hippy style boyfriend.
     “Andrew Clive fell off the toilet this morning,” she giggled, “It was so funny and Michael managed to catch him before he hit the floor. I’m going to make him his favourite pasta dish for dinner tonight.”
     (“Who?” I thought. “The baby acrobat or Mr. Woodstock?”)

     Mary disappeared leaving me a note saying she hoped I’d find someone to work with who was prepared to put up with my obsessional behaviour. I sat alone in my office for a couple of days contemplating the future or, more interestingly, my navel. One afternoon there was knock at the door and the person on the planet I least wanted to see walked in, closing the door quietly behind him and sitting on the chair opposite. Philip Ardagh and I chatted for about an hour. Despite his lack of experience of the business, he seemed to understand my predicament exactly. This wasn’t the laughing loony I’d become accustomed to, but someone else. There was no guffawing or stupid jokes, but a quietly spoken, reasoned analysis of the situation. We didn’t come to a solution between us but for some reason, after Philip left, as quietly as he’d arrived, I felt clearer and more positive, deciding to go along with the creative director’s suggestion. After all, what did I have to lose except my job, which I was pretty sure would happen if I were too stubborn?

     Philip Ardagh and I gradually became great friends, which was as likely a happening at the time as Iran converting to Christianity. We shared a passion for writing and were commissioned a couple of times to write scripts for film director, Terry Green, whose son I shared a flat with in the East End of London. When I was forced to leave my home in Kent when my marriage came apart, I ran out of floors to sleep on and Philip invited me to stay a couple of nights at his Darville Road flat in the darkest, scariest part of Stoke Newington.

     As the sound of the street name implies, it was dark, scary, foreboding, crumbling Victorian building he shared with 2 girls (who were in the habit of inviting strange, tattooed, wild looking men to visit) and an elderly, man, Jim, suffering from dementia in a room on the ground floor. The tattooed brigade visitors were so alarming one evening as they rifled through the record albums and other items in the sitting room, while the girls, half out of their minds on something or other, sat grinning inanely, Philip and I spent the whole night locked in his bedroom. On another occasion, Jim set fire to himself, purposely or not, and died of his injuries.

     Philip Ardagh became a respected, popular copywriter with the agency. He was teamed with the stunning, fun-loving young art director, Katie McClen. Katie was arguably nuts in her own way and she and Philip hit it off right from the start, each arguably complimenting the other’s craziness. As with most good copywriters, Philip was articulate, clever, and could charm the leaves off the trees in mid summer. He also demanded professionalism from other staff members, and when one day, creative secretary and friend, Joan, said he’d have to wait for the piece of copy he urgently needed typing, as she was a tad busy, he turned her desk upside down, fresh cup coffee and all.

     Katie and Philip (No, not the famous Oxo pair!) were successful, but, somehow, it wasn’t enough for Philip. After a couple of years, he decided to leave advertising and took a nighttime cleaning job at Lewisham hospital, spending his waking hours working on a novel. After that, he became a librarian, then head librarian over several libraries in the district, before taking a job in publishing writing children’s illustrated educational books.

     Philip Ardagh is now the published author of over 100 of his own books and a celebrity in that field. He grew his now famous beard some 20 years ago which was quite a shock when Ruth, our 4 years old at the time, son, Alex, and I visited him in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. He introduced us to his latest version of the ‘Snuggery’, a shelf of cuddly toys crammed between the top of a wardrobe and ceiling. All the toys had names and he’d keep Alex, Ruth and I amused by animating them and giving them voices. Alex used to call Philip, ‘Big-Phil-Right-Up-In-The- Sky’, a fittingly nutty name, I reckon.

     Philip Ardagh is still right up in the sky today and just as nuts, I’m glad to say.

Nike. Just do it.

The Supremos.

Christopher Moltisanti: “T. I’m SO sorry I’m late!”

Tony Sopremo: “Where the fuck have you bin? You were supposed to be here 2 hours ago. This had better be good, I’m tellin’ you.”

Chrissie: “Well, I had some collections to make and there were a few problems that I had to take care of.”

T: “Like?”

C: “Old man Socko wouldn’t pay up so…well, I had to put some pressure on him.”

T: “Like?”

C: “I got down on my knees and begged him.”

T: “Yeah, sure ya did.”

C: “I did. But it didn’t work. He still wouldn’t pay up.”

T: “You’re kiddin’ me. Tell me you’re kiddin’ me.”

C: “No. Really. He still wouldn’t pay up.”

T: “Whad’ya do next? Don’t tell me – you took his dog for a walk.”

C: “Yeah. AND I washed his car, bought his old lady a bunch of roses, cleaned his apartment, washed the dishes and…”

T: “Enough, already. There’s only one thing left to do.”

C: “Not that, T! Anything but that! I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

T: “You don’t have a choice. It’s what you signed up for. You took a sacred oath.”

C: “Why don’t I just pull a gun on him. He’ll give in, I’m sure.”

T: “Maybe. But first you gotta do what the organization requires. What’s laid down. I had to do it several times in the early days. It’s part of the learnin’ process.Get gone. So remind me what you gonna do.”

C: “Aw, T.”

T: “SAY IT!”

C: “ I’m gonna kiss his ass.”

T: “Say it like you mean it.”

C: “I’M GONNA KISS HIS FUCKIN’ ASS!!!”

T: “I dunno why you’re makin’ such a fuss. You’ve kissed my ass enough times.”

C: “Don’t remind me.”

T: “WADJOOSAY?”

C: “I mean that’s different. You’re a boss, right?”

T: “Right. An’ I got a boss’s ass. And don’t you forget it.”

C: “I won’t, believe me. Not so long as I live.”


* * * * * *






CHAPTER 22. OVER THE HILL.


Sweet dreams are made of this

Who am I to disagree?

I travel the world and the seven seas

Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get used by you

Some of them want to abuse you

Some of them want to be abused
vSweet dreams are made of this

Who am I to disagree?

I travel the world and the seven seas

Everybody's looking for something
Hold your head up, keep your head up, movin' on

Hold your head up, movin' on, keep your head up, movin' on

Hold your head up, movin' on, keep your head up, movin' on

Hold your head up, movin' on, keep your head up

Creative folk in advertising agencies, especially men, are considered to be over the hill at the age of 40. True or not, a career doesn’t necessarily end there. I was chopped out of an agency in my 40th year, though still only a baby at 39. I never looked back, freelancing for the next 20 years and earning more than I ever had. In most cases, the clients didn’t operate on the grand scale I’d been used to in some of the larger agencies, but were nevertheless keen to produce good work and I had the chance to work closer with some of them than I ever had before. They seemed to appreciate what creative people brought to the table more than those days in mega agencies when we’d been led to believe clients were just plain awkward. As a freelancer, most clients seemed to enjoy being close to the creative process.

     his was particularly true of Wiltshire based, Avon Tyres, a company nowhere near the vastness of the Dunlops and Pirellis of the world, but dedicated to their products with the same passion as those with the more famous brand names. John Watson, who ran Direct Approach for the Richard Lynham Partnership in the late 80’s, used to make a series of cold calls every Monday morning and attempt to sell the value of the intimacy a smaller agency could supply to prospective clients. One of these companies was Avon Tyres who just happened to looking for a new outfit to handle their publicity and advertising, particularly for motorcycle and heavy vehicle tyres.
     John offered to meet the Avon management to discuss things at their headquarters in Chippenham, usually a 2 hour drive along the M4. They asked when he was thinking of doing so, and John said, “How about in an hour and a half?”

     It so happened, that John had his brother’s Kawasaki 750 sports bike parked outside, resplendent in its streamlined Rizla, livery and off he shot, strolling into Avon’s offices, flash helmet under his arm, pretty soon after. The Avon folks were impressed enough to let us pitch for the account.

     We produced a specialist press campaign and won the business. I’d always loved motorcycles since the 1950 but never really been close to bikers or what made them tick, but all that was about to change. Bob Finchley, the Avon marketing manager for Motorcycle tyres, was a biker himself and I was invited to a motorcycle seminar. I don’t know want I expected, but it wasn’t the back room of a dark, damp pub on the A10 near Cambridge. This was one scary looking bunch.

     

     Beards, long matted hair and tattoos were in abundance and the smell of leather hung stickily in the air as about 25 heavily booted blokes and a couple of women sat sullenly around a huge fireplace housing a massive, crackling blaze, occasionally spitting red hot wooden bullets onto a regularly massacred rug and the bikers themselves. Now and again the carpet flinched in pain. The bikers didn’t.

     Bob obviously felt quite at home with his audience, wasting no time on formalities, and launching a discussion concerning a new sports motorcycle tyre recently launched by Avon and it’s French rival. The response was immediate and not entirely complimentary; comments ranging from, “Fuckin’ crap!”, “’salright, if you don’t mind your back wheel wanderin’ about at 75!” to “Needs a slightly deeper tread pattern, then it would be OK.”

     I’ve experienced people becoming animated about all kinds of things – art, music, their loved ones, children, politics, the state of the world, soap operas, religion, football, but this was unexpected. These bikers were totally dedicated to the machinery they rode and massively worshipful of the biker genre, it seemed, to the exclusion of everything else. The conversation widened to include their attitude to motorists and their perceived attitude of motorists towards them and their general life on the road, amounting, in most cases, to every waking moment,
     “I’ve had motorists deliberately try to drive me off the road,” said one, “One bloke actually got so close on the M4 once, his wing mirror actually ripped the leather on my sleeve. I mean, how fuckin’ mental is that?” A beer break followed and I got into conversation with several of the bikers, coming away with a whole new attitude toward them, of respect, admiration and almost hero worship. Since then, I’ve always tried to facilitate the passage of bikers when driving, an attitude always gratefully received with a wave or thumbs up. Good on ‘em, I say. I just wish I had the nerve or guts to be a biker myself. Sad to say I’m too much of a coward.

     After a couple of toe-dipping superbike race meetings at Brands Hatch as a guest of Avon Tyres, the next stop was the annual Isle of Man TT meeting in 1989. To say I was blown away by the experience is Grand Canyon sized understatement. The sight of thousands of bicycles chained together 10 deep outside the Amsterdam’s main Railway Station, always amazed me, but I was unprepared for the same number of motorcycles of every shape and size around Douglas Harbour. This was biker’s heaven, with hoards of helmet carrying worshippers strolling around surveying the machinery through purist, critical eyes.

     Our party was only on the island for a few days, the main purpose being to watch the championship production races. These were road-going machines, many shod with Avon tyres so this was an ideal test bed, for us, and our client, to witness. For the 1300cc production races, Richard Lynham and I asked to be dropped at the most exciting part of the circuit. We were taken to Ballacraine, where spectators are restricted to viewing from behind a stone wall on one side of the road with the traffic coming from the right through a couple of bends, and an out-of-sight dip in the road. To the left was a short stretch of road, which quickly disappeared behind a house jutting out from a corner.

     When we alighted from our transport, which disappeared with the speed of light, there was a line of leather-clad bikers on the grassy bank behind the wall along its entire length. Richard had a video camera with him, and having chatted with some of the bikers, we climbed onto the wall when the start of the race was announced over the tannoy. The bikers immediately got down on their knees and moved away from the wall.
     “Er…what’s up?” I enquired, wondering if we’d just broken out in some kind of pre plague rash, “You’ll soon find out if you stay where you are, man,” said a bearded Marlon Brando (‘The Wild One’) lookalike.

     The Isle of Man TT events are timed and the bikes whizz around in pairs, about 10 seconds apart. The races are run on ordinary roads, with few barriers, all buildings, curbs, stone walls, telegraph poles etc. remaining in place. We’d seen the reigning production word champion, Geoff Johnson, in the paddock a few hours earlier. He’d had a piece of flint protruding from the left padded shoulder of his leather overalls. When asked what it was doing there, he calmly remarked he’d travelled a smidgeon too close to a roadside farmhouse wall.

     Productions bikes are pretty quiet compared to proper racing machines, their exhaust structure having to maintain the road going specifications. A distant siren warned us of the first two approaching bikes. We saw them about 100yds away, bending this way and that as they came out of the forest towards us through the bends. They vanished from view as if by magic down a dip, then one of them reappeared, followed closely by the other, both in mid air, about 2 ft off the ground, before smacking back onto the road, inches from the curb in front of us at about 100mph. The video Richard shot showed the approach through the bends, the sound depicting excited commentary from us both. This was followed by screams, the pictures going haywire as Richard dropped the camera and we both threw ourselves off the wall and down the bank, Marlon’s caution becoming clear as a midsummer’s day in Alice Springs.

     I’d been close to F1 cars in the 1970’s, often standing far too near the edge of the track with a camera, once at Stowe Corner, Silverstone, as Clay Reggazoni’s Ferrari flashed past so close I could see into the cockpit. But somehow, this was different – less predictable, more spectacular, more exciting, more dangerous, and totally insane. And the Isle of Man TT festival is insane. It’s as exciting as any form of motor sport gets, but people die every year. In the one race that caused Richard Lynham and I to seek emergency sanctuary at the bottom of a grassy slope, two riders were killed. Suzuki pilot, Phil (Mez) Mellor died when he hit a stone wall and Yamaha’s, Steve Henshaw, met the same fate a few laps later when trying to avoid the wreckage of a previous accident. This was to be the last 1300 production race for many years. The bikes had plenty of power but their handling abilities fell well short of what was required for riders to stay alive on such a circuit at such speeds.

     Then came ‘Mad Sunday’ when the circuit was opened to the public. Fuelled by the pumped up adrenalin they’d acquired as spectators, everyone who had a bike took to the road as if to prove to him/herself they were as insane as the pro riders. A few, including two Swedish riders, did just that and were killed. That evening, down at the Harbour, several leather-clad bikers took buckets around to collect for the families and loved ones of those who had perished. It was all very sad and moving but seemingly accepted by fans as part of the TT traditions - a bit hard to swallow, for me, at least. I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to the Ilse of Man TT, but I never went back.



     An interesting meeting, at which I was present, took place between between Lynham and Company and the CEO of Avon Tyres in 1990 just after the start of the first Gulf War. He had a son who was a British army captain War. The guy hadn’t heard from his son, obviously for security reasons, and was worried sick. When it was all over, I was at another meeting with the same client. He was much more relaxed. His son was home and OK. He told us things his son had told him about the war maybe he shouldn’t have. It was all fascinating none-the-less.

     This is what he told us:
     ‘My son, Miles, told me the tanks in his regiment raced across the Kuwait desert like it was a Grand Prix. There was hardly any opposition whatever. They moved so far, so fast, that when they set up camp at the end of the second day, they were about 6 hours and 300 miles ahead of schedule and hardly a shot had been fired. Miles told me that one of his sergeants came to him in his tent in the middle of the night and woke him up to say they were under attack from artillery. Miles asked the sergeant where the fire was coming from and the sergeant told him it was from behind. They’d got so far ahead that were in the firing zone of their own artillery backup.
     ‘Miles’s own company was in the second wave to go in and they got to Kuwait City having met no resistance at all. In fact, by the time they did get there it was all over and victory had already been declared. There were a lot of Coalition guys standing around wondering what they were supposed to do next. The surrendered Iraqi soldiers had disarmed and were standing around chatting with their conquerors in a relaxed fashion even exchanging cigarettes with their captors and playing a little footy between them.
     ‘A day later Miles said he drove down to the harbour again. He was confronted by a wall. It wasn’t just any old wall. It was a wall of bodies. Miles said it must have been 8ft high. He estimated there must have been 5 or 6 hundred dead Iraqi soldiers making up that wall. They were freshly dead. So freshly dead, there hadn’t been time to clear them away. Blood was still seeping from some of them. And the Coalition forces were experts at clearing stuff away.
     ‘Miles told me if you were to have followed the last line of military hardware across the Kuwait desert, you wouldn’t have known there had been a battle at all. Most of what there was of an Iraqi army had been wiped out by airpower as it retreated before any troop invasion took place. There were wrecks of trucks and tanks everywhere. It must have been a real mess. But that last line of the invasion force was all the clearing up equipment. Colossal mobile incinerators the size of 4- storeyed buildings were towed across that desert by giant earthmovers and all the wreckage was dumped inside those incinerators by huge mobile cranes and melted down as they went. ‘The surrendered Iraqi soldiers Miles had met at the harbour had probably been overjoyed at the prospect of going home to their families. Now, near the wall of bodies was the same massive pile of weapons – rifles, handguns, light machine guns, and grenades that the Iraqi soldiers had already handed over. So why had they been killed?
     ‘It turned out that a whole amphibious force of American marines (Navy Seals) had been launched from a Carrier in the Gulf. Their task was to hit Kuwait City Harbour from the sea and take out the Iraqi garrison stationed there. But when they arrived, the war was over and all there was, was a load of uniformed Iraqis standing around waiting for orders from the Coalition forces. The amphibious force arrived too late to carry out their mission. They couldn’t carry out what they’d been contracted for, which meant that the Coalition forces wouldn’t be able to present the Kuwait Government with an invoice. So they carried out their mission anyway. They killed the surrendered soldiers in cold blood because it was pragmatic to do so.’

     No one in the public arena ever heard of stuff like this. There was a time when we did. You probably remember the original Sunday Newspaper colour supplements when all wars were reported in all their gory glory including photography of main events, mainly by the great Photographer, Don McCullin. All this was banned by Andrew Neil when he took over as editor of The Sunday Times. He said he believed that people should really be shown the nicer side of life, which they all aspired to and not all this disturbing war stuff. This was the beginning of kind of censorship and subsequent control of our minds we experience by today’s media machine. Don’t know about you, but I hate the taste of the choking sand from so many years having my head buried.

     I worked as a part of this ‘persuasion’ empire for over 40 years. I never realized in all that time, how powerful it actually was. Looking back, my experience tells me you can sell anyone anything. Just tell them what you want them to hear and Bob’s your uncle.

Nike. Just Do It.

H.C.: “Sooty. Joost put that fookin’ goon down. You’re porkin’ it right in me fookin’ earorle! What d’ya think youer playin’ ut?” SFX: BANG! FALLING BODY. H.C.: “Thut’s fookin’ greet thuris! So arm dead, which means so are you, you stoopid fookin’ bear.”



* * * * * *


CHAPTER 23. WHAT A CARRY ON.

Sometimes I feel I've got to run away

I've got to get away

From the pain you drive into the heart of me.

The love we share seems to go nowhere
And I've lost my light for I toss and turn - I can't sleep at night.
Once I ran to you
now I'll run from you
This tainted love you've given -
I give you all a boy could give you.

Take my tears and that's not nearly all - oh
tainted love - tainted love.
Now I know I've got to run away
I've got to get away.
You don't really want any more from me -
To make things right you need someone to hold you tight
And you'll think love is to pray but I'm sorry I don't pray that way
Once I ran to you,
now I'll run from you,
This tainted love you've given -
I give you all a boy could give you.

Take my tears and that's not nearly all - oh
tainted love - tainted love.
Don't touch me please - I cannot stand the way you tease.

I love you though you hurt me so
Now I'm gonna pack my things and go.

Tainted love - tainted love
Touch me baby, tainted love

Tainted love - tainted love

In 1992, I joined a business-to-business agency as a full time freelancer. Business- business-advertising is frowned upon by most creative luminaries and, at first sight, a tub of industrial plaster or a Vauxhall van may not appear as glamorous or sexy as a bar of Cadbury’s Flake, but that’s all down to perception. Anything on Earth can be advertised in a way that’s witty, entertaining, and desire inducing. Basically, the job of any creative team is to cause the consumer (a word I hate) to feel good about a product, cause or place to the extent that they want to own, contribute to or visit something or somewhere. The agency I’d joined acquired another in Covent Garden, and I was sent there with Roger Beattie, a freelance copywriter, to spy and perform certain Fifth Column activities while doing a bit of work at the same time.

     The creative director, Ed Springle, whom I’d known for several years when we’d lived in the same Kent neighbourhood, was a deliberately eccentric art director, with the appearance of a tall Sumurai warrior, complete with hair bun but, thankfully, minus a sword, and with a very un-Kurosawa, strong Birmingham accent. Ed was smiley, friendly and welcoming despite his amply proportioned ego and weird comments about the work produced by his department and how he was going to devise a 3 day working week for some members of the creative department, believing such a change around would make partakers more appreciative of their full time work situation and be encouraged to work harder. I’d never heard such a load of bollocks in my life and neither had Roger, who wasn’t so tolerant of our new creative boss as I was. He’d argue with Ed at every opportunity, but Ed just kept smiling and droning on in that monotonous Brummie Bb minor tone of his.

     I’d worked with Roger for about a year, which wasn’t easy. He was clearly an experienced, talented creative person and writer but wanted things done his way. Fair enough, but that’s not how a good creative team works. It’s not just that two heads are better than one, but two heads working on an equal basis create a third, more powerful, more objective head, which does a much better job. I went along with things for a while and there were a few times when it worked really well and we did some good stuff. There were other times when it didn’t work at all. He liked a drink, did our Rog, and once, when we were up against it preparing a presentation, I was busting my ass trying to get all the layouts done on time and needed Roger to fill in a few copy gaps, but he’d gone out to lunch with some mates from a previous agency, a fairly common recipe for disaster. He appeared leaning against our office door pillar at about 4.30pm, grinning like a moron, his tie undone, raincoat, hanging off one shoulder, his traditional brown leather briefcase hanging loose in his right hand.
     “Hello, mate. I’m absholutely fucking wrecked,” he said, chucking the briefcase across the room like a frisbee as if to illustrate his point. It skidded across the desk, spilling coffee over some of the layouts before crashing against the wall and hitting the floor, it’s owner slumping into a chair and into an instant, deep, snore-filled sleep.

     If I’d had a gun, I wouldn’t have given blowing his fucking head off a second’s thought.

     There was no doubt Roger Beattie was piercingly intelligent, and one of the smoothest, most articulate presenters of creative work I’d ever come across. He dressed in a slightly foppish manner for a man still short of his 50th birthday, resplendent in his unbuttoned green waistcoat, short clipped grey beard, and half-framed reading specs suspended from a chord around his neck, declaring he’d stopped wearing jeans at the age of 40. Roger loved science and Beethoven and was an avid reader of science fiction writer, Ian Banks.

     He was also a mischievous bugger. We were having a meeting with a lady account director one day in our long, narrow office in Covent Garden. I was at my desk by the window facing her, and Caroline sat at the other end of the room, with Roger by the door, immediately behind her. Every time she talked to me, Roger would plug his thumbs in his ears, stick out his tongue, and flap his hands at her like some kind of demented school child. She responded to my uncontrollable mirth, smiling widely, totally unaware of the reason for such joyousness, and of the pantomime going on behind her left ear. If she looked round at him, he would zap back into normal mode at the speed of light and just smile sweetly back at her. Caroline must have thought I’d just become temporarily unscrewed.

     Roger and I had to brief a film director in Soho one day, and on the way back to the office near Regent Street, there was a bomb scare, with the part of Oxford Street we were in roped off by the police. Roger, firmly stating that he had no intention of backtracking and/or taking a much longer route back to the agency, ducked under the barrier rope, and strode off along the deserted pavement. A very tall police constable standing nearby, unable to believe his eyes, cursed loudly and gave chase. He grabbed Roger, and, forcing an arm behind his back, marched him back to where he’d left me.
     “People like you make me sick!” the cop yelled at Roger, “If I had the time, I’d arrest you, chuck you in the can, and eat the fucking key!”
     Roger didn’t even seem embarrassed, “It was worth a try,” he said, “I suppose we’ll have to go the long way round. Bollocks!”

     One of Roger’s passions was airplanes, and when Ed was out of the office one day, he happened to pass one of the board directors with the agency’s airline client in a corridor. The two men were introduced and what started as a chance meeting soon developed into a full-scale mini conference. The client was so impressed with Roger’s knowledge of the airline industry and planes in general he requested that Mr. Beattie be assigned to his business in some way. The management were also impressed with Roger’s performance. So much so, that Ed soon found himself out of a job with Roger Beattie taking his place as creative director. This meant Roger and I could no longer work together and he put me with Peter Cass, a writer fresh back from a yearlong assignment in Jeddah. Pete and I seemed to hit it off right away and stayed together as a creative team for the next ten years. I’ve never been so productive in my entire advertising career, and, along with Pete, produced work I’m immensely proud of.

     Pete had only been in Jeddah for a year, yet, judging by the impression the place had on him, you’d have thought it had been 10.
     “We had to come up with a road safety campaign for Cinema and TV. In such a new, massively wealthy country like Saudi Arabia, top range cars were the in thing. The trouble was, the male head of a family didn’t drive but sat in the back of the family motor like Royalty. Women weren’t allowed to drive, so the job was given to the eldest son, who in some cases was only 12. There was no driving test and there was carnage everywhere. One cinema commercial we ran was to encourage drivers to actually put their car lights on at night but it was only optional. It was never law.
     “Sharia Law, on the other hand, governed everything else, and street executions were commonplace - of women as well as men. If you happened to be walking through a square when one was taking place, you had to stop and watch. The only thing you could do was close your eyes. Alcohol was banned but we Brits and other foreign workers lived on special compounds where we were allowed to drink and do most everything we could in the West. Jeddah was still pretty depressing, unlike Cairo, where the agency sent us a couple of times. That was a whole different ball game. We were looked after by Ramish, a black Egyptian, who wore a beige, lightweight suit and a fez. Ramish knew all the best bars and dives in the city. He claimed to be Muslim but drank more that we did. Cairo was a very lively place, believe me.”

     The building in Covent Garden was eventually closed and the staff moved to Regent Street to merge with the holding agency. Roger was still creative director on some Covent Garden accounts and defended his ground vigorously, though, knowing the Regent Street mob as well as I did, I knew it wouldn’t be long before they took control of everything and turned the place into a cheap sweat shop. I begged the Covent Garden management to keep the outfit going at the original location and warned that if they didn’t, it would be swallowed up and bled dry, but I was just met with blank stares. Such an undertaking was beyond their control. In truth, the senior management of the Covent Garden agency had sold out and made themselves virtual millionaires. End of, as they say all too often in that ghastly programme, East Enders.

     What Pete had seen and experienced in Saudi Arabia had obviously created quite and impression, “What’s really weird, is that here’s one of the richest nations on the planet with the money to do anything – educate it’s people, improve its social structure, get rid of poverty altogether, spend money on all kinds of research, improve life in general, but all they want to do it stay in the Middle Ages. It’s all a huge contradiction.” He also told me about a man from a wealthy Saudi family who’d sworn vengeance on the Americans after they’d double-crossed him. Pete said the CIA had set this man up with a ready made army, whom they themselves had trained and radicalised, for the sole purpose of attacking and bringing down the then U.S.S.R backed Afghan government.

     The plan went ahead and the Russians invaded Afghanistan, which, after 10 years, produced a train wreck effect on the Russian economy, resulting in the end of Communism, as was intended all along by the CIA. In return, the Yanks had promised this guy that they would support him in bringing down the Saudi Royal Family and ending their reign, but they reneged on the deal leaving him and his Mujahidin army floundering without a cause. Even though he hated them, the man approached the Saudi Royal Family and told them that his ready-made army would drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait after the invasion. They declined, saying they needed to keep the Americans as an ally for trade purposes, which pissed him off no end and he allegedly swore vengeance.

     Cut to the day of so-called 911. The Regent Street agency had been sold off by Dallas to a scurrilous below the line outfit run by a load of discredited directors, and those who survived the coup were forced to move to Kensington. Someone had excitedly told the creative department that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre and most of us were watching the North Tower smoking a bit on the studio TV. Then came the very dodgy looking plane facsimile apparently hitting the South Tower and I announced, as a joke, that this must be the work of Osama Bin Laden.
     “Who?” was the general chorus.

     I’ve lived in the East End of London for 31 years and have seen plenty of high-rise buildings brought down by controlled demolition. I’ve even talked to some of the guys that do that sort of work, so I know a little bit about how it’s done. I’ve also worked with some of the best animators in the world and have seen things most people would believe to be real, when in fact they are anything but. But, hey, lets not get into that. All anyone needs to do to get at the real truth is ask any airline pilot in the world if an airliner can fly at 400 MPH at such a low altitude, as we are led to believe happened, and see what they say.

     Before the Kensington move, Pete and I produced a press campaign for the controversial magazine, Business Age. We chose a bloody looking, Gerald Scarf style typeface, designed by Steve Kirkendall, and ‘edgy’ headlines. The budget was small, so for some of the smaller b/w newspaper ads, I did the artwork myself. Unfortunately, there was a spelling mistake in one of the headlines, (I’m crap at spelling) which spotted by head of the agency design studio, Melvyn Roads (not his real name) who, instead of politely pointing out the error to the creative team, took it straight to the executive creative director, who was then obliged to make recompense to the client. Nowt wrong with that, but with such a scratchy, anarchic type form, no one else noticed the mistake, not even the client. Roger, creative group head on the account, was furious with Melvyn’s obviously political tactics and swore vengeance. On the Friday evening Mel was due to fly off on a 3 week holiday, Roger took him to one side, and, furtively looking around as if to make sure no stooges were listening, said quietly to Mel,
     “I don’t want you to be alarmed, Mel, but…watch your back!”

     Roger’s mischievousness had quite a history in the advertising business. At one of his previous agencies he went public about his disapproval of a new creative director, but in his own inimitable fashion. He turned up at a meeting wearing glasses.
     “I didn’t know you wore glasses, Roger,” said the new man.
     “I don’t,” Roger said, “I’m just trying them out for Tony Wardle.” Roger was ousted not long after.

Roger told me that when he worked at Y&R and Chris Wilkins was creative director, they were having a conversation about situations where they were bursting to laugh at inappropriate times. Chris said he was once in a meeting round a boardroom table at Saatchi & Saatchi with a very eminent account director and the El Cid Sherry client. The proper Spanish pronunciation for El Cid is ‘El Theed’, and this guy, though English, insisted on using it throughout his presentation…
     “Due to several factors, the market for El Theed has increased fourfold in the past year, in fact, I’m proud to say El Theed has surpassed all expected targets so that El Theed is more than just brand leader, El Theed is at the very forefront of our thrust towards the serious AB sherry market, so much so, that El Theed….”etc.

     While Mr. El Theed was rambling on, the account director scribbled something on a Post-It Note, folded it and passed it to Chris.Chris unfolded the note, which read,
     ‘Who is this thunt?’ I took two weeks off work in December 1995 as we were moving house. I called in to the agency on the Friday before Christmas Eve and Roger came into my office and told me things were going to work out for the better in the New Year. He told me he’d had a long conversation with Peter Gooding and it was decided that Roger would become Peter’s official deputy.

     This was good news as Roger had proved to be a superb creative director and was confident he could help steer the agency away from the sweatshop facility it was heading towards becoming. I left to do some last minute Christmas shopping and when I returned, a proposed Christmas lunch gathering had formed in the office Roger shared with his art director. He was in good spirits and was taking he piss out of an account man we all worked with, suggesting the man was a robot.

     Roger began robot like actions, marching across the room and bashing into the wall then banging his head against it. He turned round and headed robot like back to the desk, colliding with it and banging his forehead on the desktop and onto the keyboard of his typewriter. It was all very funny but I remember thinking his actions looked a little dangerous. They all left for lunch and I went home.

     Christmas Eve was on the Saturday – the next day – and Roger was leaving that evening with his family to spend Christmas in a country hotel. On the flowing Tuesday, Pete and I had to go into the office to finish some work. At about 10.30 that morning, I received a phone call from Roger’s wife. She told me that Roger had suffered a fall at home on the Friday evening and had died. Knowing how Roger liked his whisky, everyone assumed his fall had been caused by him being a few sheets to the wind but this proved not to be the case.

     When I visited Margaret Beattie later in the year, she told me that, according to the autopsy, there had been little alcohol in his system. He’d been expected home early to help pack and prepare for the family’s forthcoming trip, but she said he turned up several hours late, and sober. She said he seemed vague about where he’d been and she left him downstairs watching television when she went to bed. She said she was awakened by a sound as if a tree had fallen.

     She found Roger lying at the foot of the stairs with a serious head injury. He’d apparently suffered some kind of seizure, on his way up the stairs, blacked out and fallen backwards striking his head on a banister post, causing damage which he could not have survived, and had he done so, would have been in a vegetative state, according to the hospital consultant. While in hospital, Roger suffered another brain seizure, which proved fatal. It’s not in any way certain, but it could be that his wicked sense of humour finally caught up with him. Roger Beattie was, without doubt, one of the cleverest, most intelligent, funniest, wickedest and talented people I ever met in advertising and it was a real privilege to have known him. He was 51 when he passed away.



And that’s about it as far as my career in advertising goes. I left fulltime employment 10 years ago but freelanced for some of the following years, finally judged to be too old by the younger guns taking over the business and wishing to change the world just as I had all those years ago. I’ve no regrets having survived a lot longer that I was supposed to according to the stats, and having had one hell of a great time, worked with some amazing people, and formed some long lasting, treasured friendships with some of them.

     And this was always meant to be about the people rather than the advertising industry itself, so I hope I’ve done credit to those I admire and justifiably exposed those I don’t. I know I’ve left out some who didn’t deserve to be left out for either reason, but I can always add deserving cases later, if and when I remember them.

     I always will remember what the brilliant, if scary, copywriter, Jane Barry said to me back in 1980:
     “When are you going to realize, dear boy, that you don’t have any friends in this business?”

     In some ways Jane was right. Thankfully, in a lot of cases, she wasn’t.

16.24. July 4th, 2013.

FOOTNOTE

As I’ve said, this book is about the people I came across in advertising rather than the business itself. After all, it’s people, good and bad, who are at the heart of all things/industries/organizations. At least, they were the last time I looked. Mind, at the present rate of technology acceleration it won’t be long before we’re all replaced by machines or tech clouds. I’d give us about 3 weeks.

     One of the great things about John Knight, was that, despite his tremendous natural talent and the extent to which he took his profession as an advertising art director seriously, he was unaffected and unspoiled by his success. He still lived in the same Peckham street where he was born and where he bred his canaries, just up the street from his Mum. He was never clouded by superficial fuckin’ pretensions or delusions of fuckin’ grandeur, as he would have put it. He remained the same cheerful, charming Cockney fuckin’ sparrer till the day he died.

     I’m glad to say, that the same sentiment can be applied to most of the so-called celebrities I happened to work with over the years – with the odd exception. I met them mainly when they were employed as VOs (voice-overs) for TV or radio commercials I worked on.

     The wonderfully professional, Ray Brooks, was just that – wonderfully professional and modest. The same can be said for Nigel Plainer, Ade Edmonson, Harry Enfield, and Nerys Hughes, whose baby I cuddled as she went into the recording booth. Pat Pheonix was a lovely lady. Arthur Smith was hilarious, very entertaining, but essentially down-to- Earth.

     Having hired the late Richard Briers for an afternoon session, he turned up pissed and couldn’t perform, but his charm and conviviality overrode the inconvenience.
     “It really is far wiser to hire me before lunch, y’know. It was such a bloody good claret, y’see.”
     Bill Franklyn of Schweppes fame, turned up pissed and lolled about on a sofa chatting slurringly to another VO artist. The producer didn’t seem concerned, even when Bill staggered to the sound booth. Once inside, he became instantly stone cold sober and did the job superbly in one take. When he came out of the booth, he almost fell across the room back to the sofa, hardly able to hang a single word together. If that isn’t professionalism, I don’t know what is.

     Brian Blessed was a lot smaller than life. Copywriter, Peter Cass, dwarfed him. Blessed’s contrived, bearded bluster, was obviously put on for our benefit. Still, he played the part of a Viking ship captain well.

     he late Bonzo Dog Dooda Band leader, Vivien Stanshall, was very entertaining despite being obviously out of his head on something or things or other, but none-the-less performed perfectly well.

     There were many other great professionals I had the good fortune to work with, but one particular Prima Dona stands out in my mind. I’d long been a fan of actor, J.A., but the second he turned up in the wide brimmed, Biba styled hat and what looked like someone’s sheep skin rug around his shoulders, I knew we were in for trouble. He was rude, obnoxious and difficult in the extreme, even critical of the script and of those present. He did an OK job, but the producer, engineer and I were all glad to see the back of him. I can’t see him on screen now without cringing. Maybe he’d had piles or something on the day. If he did, I hope whatever it was hurt like hell.

     He was lucky John Knight wasn’t fuckin’ present.



     R.I.P., John, Mate; Roger Beattie; Peter Hodgson; Noel Myers; Patrick Litchfield; Brian Duffy; Roger Lyons; Allen Thomas; John St Claire; Terry Green; Ronnie Fouracre; Gordon Fielding; David Thorpe; Richard Wilmot; Laurence Hutchins; Tony Ward; Henry Lawrence; John Gillard; Terry Hamaton; Martin Revely; Ron Baker; Brian Eatwell; Roger Holland; Brian Hill; Andy Rourke; Mike Richards; Derek Haas; Maurice Twose; Peter Lister-Todd; Tony Scott; Storm Thorgeson; Mike Sellars; Adam Rountree; John Booth; Stuart Winning; Graham Houghton; Jimmy Wormser; Ivy Schupack; Colin Millward.

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A few years ago, I answered a Gumtree ad in which a large Knightsbridge Photographic studio was inviting applications from people with photographic experience to help manage the place. Having worked with some of the best photographers in the world, I though I’d give it a shot. It was a big place, just up the road from Harrods, and there were a lot of people in reception waiting to be interviewed when I pitched up.

     When my turn came, I was escorted to the first floor and shown into a prefab office occupied by a single wooden table, two chairs and a black guy in a dodgy looking brown suit. I was interviewed, or rather, cross-examined but the dude didn’t seem interested in my vast wealth of experience of working with some of the best photographers this side of Alpha Centauri, blah, blah, blah, but only that I had no criminal convictions, was the holder of a genuine British passport and, most importantly, that I had an English accent and knew how to use a telephone. I began asking questions about the studio and the kind of work it produced, but it was obvious that this dude wasn’t interested and knew next to fuck all about photography.
     “We do portraits,” he said, “Family groups, birthdays, anniversaries, babies, that kind of thing. Your job, if we take you on, will be to get customers by cold calling.”

     With that he stood up and opened the door, interrogation over, and escorted me to an adjoining office where several other interviewees were sitting in nervous silence. Two final interviewees joined us, and, seconds later, a young man in his mid twenties clutching a bundle of papers appeared.
     “I’m John Stott,” he announced without the hint of a smile, “And I’m in charge of you lot. You’ll each be given a list of telephone numbers. You’ve to call everyone on that list and entice people to the studio using a special offer, the details of which are on the second page. I’ll take you down to the call room in a minute, and you’ll spend the rest of the day making the calls. You’ll be paid according to the number of successful candidates you recruit, the details of how much are also on here, he said holding up the paper work. If you do well, you’ll start doing this every day and be paid accordingly. If you don’t, you won’t be coming back. Is that clear? I’ve been through the mill and it’s hard work, but I’ve brought so much business in to this place, they’ve promoted me and put me in charge of this training programme. You are not to discuss anything you do here with anyone apart from me. Right, lets get on with it.”

     The call room was a windowless, basement, coffin strewn with pipes of all shapes and sizes protruding from the wall at various heights from the floor. Two rows of crappy old wooden desks and chairs were placed head to head along the length of the pit, each with a telephone. We were all told to grab a place and get to work.

     I did OK, confirming 3 appointments with families having chatted away enthusiastically to the 3 ladies of the households after cold calling. It hadn’t been as nerve-wracking an experience as I’d thought it might be, but according to Stott, who flitted between callers like a demented fly, 3 out of 15 hits was only slightly more appealing than dog shit. At the end of the allotted time, he held a debriefing in the same office as before. Only half the original telephone crew was present, the rest having been told to sling their collective hooks and fuck off.
     “Right, you lot,” began the charming Mr. Stott, “That wasn’t very impressive, but you survived and you can now enroll for a week’s trial which starts when I’ve finished speaking. But be warned, if you don’t perform well, I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks and you’ll be out on your earhole. It’s not that difficult getting these Muppets in here to have their soppy bloody pictures taken. I’ve proved it time and time again…”
     “Whoooooaaar!” I thought. “Sorry, What did you say? Did I hear you right?” I heard myself say, “Did you actually refer to your clients as Muppets?” Before Stott could answer, I went for his jugular, “These Muppets, as you call them, pay your wages and for the upkeep of this place. Without them you wouldn’t have a job and this so-called studio wouldn’t exist. Having spoken to a few of your Muppets in the last hour or so, I found them to be honest, down to earth, family people, some, genuinely flattered that someone would want to photograph them and theirs. I wonder what they’d think if they knew you referred to them as Muppets. I wonder if they’d be so flattered then, or come within a thousand miles of this dump. What do you reckon?”
     “GET OUT. OR I’LL HAVE YOU THROWN OUT!” The red-faced Stott yelled.
     “Gladly,” I said standing up, “Goodbye, Kermit.”



     One more thing: If you get to work in advertising, you have to be careful what you say. At JWT in 1972, art director, Julian Sambrook, wanted to become a copywriter and booked an appointment with the then head of creative resources, Gordon Bastion. Julian came to the office I shared with Mike Reynolds when the meeting was over. He was furious.
     “He just wouldn’t listen. He told me I’d been hired for my craft skills and that I had no business trying to become a copywriter, and that was the end of it. I reminded him of the awards I’ve won for this agency as a writer working with other art directors and he told me that was irrelevant. He obviously knows nothing about the creative process. Why he’s in charge of who does what in the creative department is beyond me. The real truth is that he’s off on holiday to Africa tomorrow and wants to get off to the airport and could be bothered having a conversation with the likes of me. I hope his fucking plane crashes.”

     Two weeks later, the VC10 plane Gordon Bastion was travelling in crashed while attempting to take off from Addis Ababa airport and caught fire. Gordon was severely burned and died from his injuries a few days later. There must be a moral in that story somewhere but I can’t think what.



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