Contents
Cover
About the Book
Sad Men Playlists
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
End of Part One
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
End of Part Two
Part Three
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
End of Part Three
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
End of Part Four
Epilogue – Present Day
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Dave Roberts
Copyright
e-luv: an internet romance
The Bromley Boys
32 Programmes
For more information on Dave Roberts and his books, see his website at www.daverobertsbooks.com. And once you’ve read this one, go to www.sadmen.co.uk as well.
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain
in 2014 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Dave Roberts 2014
Dave Roberts has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448154203
ISBN 9780593071304
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This book is dedicated to Zac & Lila, Hazel & Ian, Billy & Frank, and Saatchi & Saatchi.
By the time I was fourteen, my life was already planned out. I was going to marry the girl in the Flake advert (spoiler alert – that didn’t happen) and become an award-winning copywriter for Saatchi & Saatchi, the world’s finest advertising agency. The pursuit of the second and only marginally less ambitious part of this plan would take me halfway around the world before eventually ending up in America. Not in Madison Avenue and the glamorous, seductive world made famous by Mad Men, but in an average street a hundred miles from New York, in Hartford, Connecticut.
It was there, on a sweltering summer’s day a few months ago, that I heard my wife Liz (who has never appeared in any chocolate ad) shout, ‘Dave, the mailman’s here with your package.’
‘That’s postman and parcel,’ I mumbled, pushing myself away from the computer where I was writing an ad about frozen prawns, scheduled to appear in the October edition of Sandwich and Snack News. Even though we’d been living in her parents’ attic for a couple of years, I had adapted to living in the US in typical British fashion – by not adapting at all.
As I leapt down the stairs, taking several at a time, I felt a mounting sense of excitement. I’d been tracking this parcel online for days, charting its progress across the Atlantic. It had been to Heathrow, East Midlands Airport, Cincinnati Sorting Facility, West Hartford Sorting Facility, and now, finally, it was here.
After signing for it with a flourish, I took the box into the kitchen, keen to see how many things on my wish-list Nick, my brother-in-law, had managed to send. The idea was that being surrounded by some of the things I missed most about England would help me get over my homesickness – things like Cadbury’s chocolate which you just can’t get in the US, unless you go to places with names like ‘Ye Olde English Shoppe’, which I could obviously never do.
I opened the parcel and let out an involuntary shriek of delight when I saw the treasures within. Even Liz looked impressed – a long way from the look on her face when she had seen the last piece of mail I got from England and completely failed to grasp (a) the sheer desirability of the 1949 Romford v. Bromley programme, (b) what a small price £24 was to pay for it on eBay, and (c) the fact that I only had thirty-two programmes and badly needed more.
I lifted out a box of Weetabix and instantly felt even more nostalgic for home than usual, sparked by memories of some of the brilliant adverts I’d seen over the years. While Liz saw nothing more than a yellow cereal box, in my mind I saw the cartoon bovver boys from the 1980s, starring parrot-voiced Brian. They didn’t just want itchy breakfasts, they wanted Weetabix.
And so did I. Tomorrow morning, I would introduce Liz to my favourite first meal of the day: two Weetabix with a generous amount of butter and a layer of Marmite (‘The growing-up spread you never grow out of’) which Nick had thankfully also included. It would be, as they said in later commercials, ‘unbeat-a-bix’.
Next out of the box was a Topic bar, which looked much smaller than I remembered, but the jingle asking ‘What has a hazelnut in every bite?’ was soon running through my head (as was the playground response ‘Squirrel poo!’).
A couple of packets of Smith’s Crisps (he’d thoughtfully put in one for Liz too) brought back images of singing potatoes who, to the tune of ‘Bobby’s Girl’, insisted that they ‘wanna be Smith’s Crisps’ because ‘if we were, what tasty light and golden crisps we’d be’. It was almost enough to make me burst open my bag there and then.
But I resisted, as I needed to leave enough room for a slice of cake and a cup of tea. Not just any cake, but an exceedingly good Mr Kipling cake. And not just any tea, either, but PG Tips, forever associated in my mind with the exchange between Shifter and Son, piano movers, which began with the son saying, ‘Dad, do you know the piano’s on my foot?’ Whereupon his father sniffed and wiped his hand under his nose before replying ‘You hum it, son, and I’ll play it’ as he started banging the piano keys.
As I waited for the kettle to boil, I realized that British advertising still had the same hold on me it had always had. My thoughts drifted back to the time when PG Tips put me on a path that would shape my life, where adverts would dictate much of what I did, and the desire to be a part of the world that created them would become an all-encompassing obsession.
I was three years old at the time.
I had just sat down at my MacBook Pro and embarked on a six-hour EastEnders marathon when Liz poked her head round the door.
‘Don’t forget your deadline,’ she reminded me.
The hand holding a McVities Chocolate Digestive that I was about to dip into my cup of PG Tips hovered in mid-air as I froze. She was right. This was far more important than what was going on in Albert Square. I dipped the biscuit, thankful that I no longer needed to go without wheat and dairy, and paused the on screen action.
I then opened a Word document and got on with what I was meant to be doing – writing about prawns. How lucky can one man get?
‘At Royal Greenland, quality is more important than speed. That’s why we let them grow for five to six years in the icy cold, unpolluted waters of the Arctic.’ I savoured every word as I typed. ‘Only then do they reach the sort of texture, colour and size which set them apart.’
I sat back, satisfied. This was back to doing what I loved most, writing ads. When I was doing this, it was easy to forget that we were living with Liz’s parents in a blue-collar part of Hartford in Connecticut, just until we got on our feet again, after having to leave New Zealand when the money ran out.
As I tried to come up with a killer final line, I thought about how our luck had started to change with that out-of-the-blue phone call from Andy, the junior art director from my Manchester days, the one I worked with on Indesit. I asked him what he’d been doing since I last saw him and almost immediately wished I hadn’t. After BDH, he’d done something I’d never managed to do – worked for Saatchi & Saatchi. Arnold, the Manchester office MD, had given him a job and he spent several years there doing ads for Cold Shield windows and Moben Kitchens until the agency managed to lose both accounts in quick succession, and Andy was left wondering what to do next.
That was when he decided to open his own agency in Macclesfield with an account director colleague. And that was why he was ringing. Would I like to be their copywriter? He could email me layouts, which meant I could do it from home in the USA. It would only mean an ad every couple of weeks since most of their clients needed only design work, but that could change if they put on some new business.
When you’ve done nothing for years, there is no feeling that compares with being asked to do some gainful work. Even if it is just an ad for a prawn recipe that’s going to appear in Sandwich and Snack News.
The headline I settled on was ‘Mojito-style prawns. Preparation time – 5 to 6 years’. It had taken me only marginally less time than that to come up with it. The copy needed to stress the slow growing time that made them so tasty and I was confident I knew enough about the subject to write what was needed.
This was because the one useful thing I’d learned from my Saatchi obsession was to place as much value on research as Charles did. And now, thanks to the internet, I didn’t even have to go to the library any more. I spent literally hours online reading up about prawns (‘a suborder of decapod crustaceans’, according to Wikipedia) and now knew more about them than any man should ever know (biologists are in two minds as to whether prawns feel pain). When thousands of red prawns were washed up on a beach in southern Chile, I knew about it within minutes, thanks to Google Alerts.
And it hasn’t just been decapod crustaceans I’ve written about. A major benefit to working for a small Macclesfield agency (as every adman knows, there’s always a benefit if you look hard enough) was that my work was appearing in places it had never appeared before. Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine carried my ad for Interface ‘Flor’ Flooring (‘Try something new in the bedroom’), while the back page of the RIBA Journal was home to a Perspex Tables ad (‘Perspex bring something different to the table’). Page nine of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus featured my ad for the Royal Armouries Museum (‘In 1066 the Vikings invaded Yorkshire. Next week, they’re back’), and my brochure selling sound-absorbing panels to offices (‘Business has never been quieter’) was distributed at the 100% Design Exhibition in London.
I made sure I got copies of every one of these sent over. And although Andy’s agency hasn’t actually done a TV advert in its short history, I make sure I keep up with the latest UK trends just in case. When friends send over DVDs, I always ask them not to cut out the ads, which are often the best part. For me, anyway.
On a recent DVD, one advert in particular caught my eye. It was for Covent Garden Soup, and opened with a group of chefs preparing soup in their kitchen. It was then that things took a familiar turn: they went outside to a giant catapult, launched the carton of soup into the air, and it landed in the outstretched hand of a Mrs Jones. I’d like to think a young copywriter somewhere saw the Great Northern Bitter ad while leafing through an old awards annual. I know that was how I got plenty of my ideas.
But there were other, more original ads, especially one from Matt Skolar at Saatchi & Saatchi. It opens in a classroom, where all the boys are dressed like Hank Marvin from The Shadows. We follow one of them home, where his mum gets a packet of Mattessons Fridge Raiders from the fridge and hands them to her heavily bespectacled, guitar-carrying son. As he starts eating them, the cockney voiceover says, ‘Mattessons Fridge Raiders. For when you’re Hank Marvin.’ I’d waited my entire career for someone to use authentic rhyming slang in an ad. The wait was finally over. Perhaps he’d seen my Trust Motors leaflet – although strangely that had never appeared in an awards annual.
I always looked forward to getting a fresh batch of British ads, because the general standard of American ones has slipped a bit since Mad Men days. There are still some thirty-second bursts of brilliance, like the campaign for Dos Equis created by the Beer Men at Euro RSCG. In these ads we meet ‘the most interesting man in the world’ and discover that ‘his business card simply says “I’ll call you”’, that ‘he is fluent in all languages, including three that only he speaks’, and ‘if he were to punch you in the face, you would have to fight off the urge to thank him’. Each of the ads ends with him saying, ‘I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.’
But for every ‘most interesting man in the world’, there are dozens of ads selling cures for ailments that sound as though they’ve been invented by copywriters. Low T Syndrome? Smother yourself in Androgel. RLS or Restless Leg Syndrome? Ask your doctor about Requip. Erectile dysfunction? Pop a couple of Cialis pills.
It’s medical products that seem to bring out the worst in American copywriters. One ad in particular, for Phillips Colon Health, has the distinction of being the worst I’ve seen since a certain WASS ad from 1979. It is set at a local council meeting. The chairman asks if there are any questions. This prompts a woman wearing a shirt bearing the words DON’T WORRY, BE REGULAR to stand up. She is holding a packet of Phillips Colon Health and shouts out, ‘Anyone have occasional constipation, diarrhoea, gas, bloating?’ One of the council members acknowledges that yes, he does. This is her cue to tell him, and the assembled crowd, that ‘One Phillips Colon Health probiotic cap each day helps defend against these digestive issues, with three strains of good bacteria.’
‘Approved!’ says the woman running the meeting.
How this ad was ever approved is beyond me.
Whenever I think about advertising, which I do far too often, I think of the people and places that played a part in my story, and what became of them.
Fred, the man who gave me my first job in advertising and taught me how to keep my sentences short, went from Leeds to Frankfurt to London to Leeds (again) to Washington DC and finally to Málaga in Spain, where he now works as a freelance writer and takes really good photos, especially of dogs.
Jacko (aka Leszec Jakubowski) became Lee, because he got fed up with being the only person in Leeds in the 1980s with a Polish name. He now has his own marketing business and also designs book covers. I met up with him last year. He looked about thirty and must use Camay Soap (1960s advertising joke there).
Failure has had a highly successful life which has included designing fluffy toys, illustrating greeting cards, drawing cartoon strips which have appeared in the Dandy and the Beano, and co-producing a series of books that sell an envy-inducing number of copies. He recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday. The first things he got in the post the next day were an NHS bowel testing kit and a SAGA ‘cruises for the mature traveller’ brochure.
Saatchi & Saatchi (Wellington) didn’t just become the best agency in New Zealand, they were also named as one of the top ten agencies in the world by Campaign.
Bevan’s Press Play Design agency in Wellington sadly appears to have gone out of business.
Birrell left DDB Needham to go and work for Saatchi & Saatchi, but despite this we remained friends. His job took him around the world, including managing the global advertising account for Toyota and Lexus. He is now chairman of an IT company operating in Japan and Singapore, which I am a lot happier about.
The short, scruffy Peter Jackson went on to make some of the highest-grossing films of all time. He has, at the time of writing, won three Oscars – the film world equivalent of getting into D&AD.
Jeff Stark moved to Saatchi New York, before leaving to sail round the world with Mrs Stark as crew. They got as far as Tonga before getting bored and returning to London, where he directed TV ads for the next twenty years. He still directs but is easing into retirement and doing a bit of stand-up.
Jeremy Sinclair is chairman of M&C Saatchi, the world’s fastest-growing independent agency.
Bruce from BDH went on to become executive creative director of the similar-sounding (but much more impressive) BBH in London, taking over from the legendary Sir John Hegarty. He has made the pages of D&AD four times. As he predicted back in 1981, his son Peter Crouch grew up (and up and up and up) to play for England, scoring twenty-two goals in forty-two appearances to date.
Lee Tamahori, who directed the 007 lookalike in the Diamond Pasta advert, went on to direct a real James Bond film, Die Another Day, with Pierce Brosnan.
As for me, I’m better now. My health problems have just about gone, though I still take mineral and vitamin supplements.
My life in advertising has been more than I ever could have imagined when I started out on that cold morning in Leeds. I’ve seen the business go from hundreds of independent agencies with names like BDH, BBH and BHB to a handful of corporations called things like Publicis, Omnicom and Interpublic.
I’ve seen media options go from a TV ad, radio ad, press ad and trade ad to a list that includes social media, email blasts, product placement, mobile devices and digital TV, where you can buy a thirty-second spot for around £15. Very popular, I would imagine, with agencies needing to air fake adverts that they want to enter for some award or other.
I’ve sat in a studio with one of Herman’s Hermits and recorded a rap song with a Kiwi cowboy. I’ve listened to a woman talking for hours about tailor’s dummies and talked to a room full of students about Jeff Stark. I’ve heard a client describe the Honda Accord as ‘the Rolls-Royce of cars’ and fallen in love with an Indesit 101, the Rolls-Royce of automatic washing machines. I’ve destroyed ceilings in three different adverts and demolished 144 bars of chocolate in a week.
But nothing lasts for ever (except a DeBeers diamond ring, obviously) and, apart from a couple of prawn, Perspex or sound-absorbing panel ads every month, my advertising life is over. It’s always been said (even by me once) that advertising is a young man’s game, and I’m fifty-eight. It’s time to finally give up on my dream and move on to the next adventure.
Unless Charles, Maurice or Jeremy happen to be reading this.
My earliest memory is seeing a chimpanzee driving a van to a small shop on the high street. He then got a few boxes out of the back and delivered them to the shopkeeper, who was also a chimpanzee. If I had been old enough to know that I was watching an advert for PG Tips on TV and not real life, I’m sure I wouldn’t have wasted much of my early childhood scouring Bromley High Street for a glimpse of van-driving chimps.
But the disappointment of not catching sight of them was soon overshadowed by the discovery of my new love. Advertising.
I learned to recognize the words ‘End of Part One’ when they appeared on screen, and stopped whatever I was doing (usually eating, or throwing things at my sister Miriam) to watch the adverts. From the outset they had a dramatic effect on my young life.
Whenever I dressed up as a cowboy, I borrowed my friend’s NHS glasses so that I could look like the Milky Bar Kid, and instead of shouting things like ‘Ride ’em cowboy!’ I’d announce in a loud voice, ‘The Milky Bars are on me!’
I took to following my mum around the house whenever she was about to go out, singing ‘Don’t forget my fruit gums, Mum, I just love those fruit gums, Mum, don’t forget my tube of fruit gums, those that last all day’. As she made a quicker than usual exit, I’d follow her down the front path repeating the words loudly. Although it worked for the boy in the advert, I was less successful: she usually came home having apparently forgotten my fruit gums. I’m sure she found my behaviour endearing and not in the least bit annoying.
A few years later, when my parents took me to the supermarket for the weekly shop, I followed them around, insisting that they replace the box of Persil washing powder in the trolley with Ariel. This was a product that had captured my imagination with its breakthrough use of hungry enzymes, which gobbled up dirt particles like prototype Pac-men. My mum, seemingly more convinced by Persil’s ‘whiter than white’ argument, made me put the Ariel back on the shelf.
The battle over washing powder was forgotten a few months later when I was presented with a tube of Signal toothpaste. I had never wanted anything so much and had been so desperate to get it that I’d even promised to brush my teeth every night. As any TV viewer knew, Signal was different to every other toothpaste because it had a red stripe through it, which was made from hexachlorophene. This, the advert proudly proclaimed, sought out and destroyed millions of germs and apparently made your teeth really white. The results, in my case, were disappointing, but I convinced myself that I was finally free of germs that I didn’t know existed.
While other kids lay awake at night thinking about dinosaurs and space travel, I pondered quandaries like ‘If a million housewives every day pick up a tin of beans and say Beanz Meanz Heinz, how come I’ve never heard one single housewife say that?’ and ‘How does Mr Kipling manage to make so many exceedingly good cakes? He must never get any sleep.’ I learned not to take slogans too literally after exploring the boundaries of Milky Way’s claim to being ‘the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite’ by stuffing five down in quick succession.
Unlike most of my schoolmates, I didn’t see Dusty Springfield as a panda-eyed, beehive-wearing permanent fixture in the Top Twenty, but as someone I desperately wanted to knock me up. This was inspired by her starring role in the Mother’s Pride advert, in which she sang ‘I’m a happy knocker upper, and I’m popular besides, ’cause I wake ’em with a cuppa and tasty Mother’s Pride’ while rapping on people’s bedroom windows and offering a loaf of bread on a long-handled pole. Like you do.
Even my pre-pubescent fantasies were fuelled by what I’d seen on the flickering black and white screen in the breaks between programmes. I would often drift off to sleep imagining myself skiing down a rugged mountain, then adjusting my goggles, gazing with indifference at the sight of an avalanche that would have terrified lesser men, and calmly heading to a log cabin in the distance. My mission? To deliver a box of Milk Tray. The reason? All because the lady loved Milk Tray. (In my slightly confused version of events, the cabin door was opened not by the familiar Milk Tray-loving lady, but by the girl from the Flake commercial, whom I fancied more and desperately wanted to marry.)
When the time came to meet real live girls, I relied on adverts to give me the key to what they wanted. First of all, they wanted their men to smell of Old Spice; ‘You’ll become yourself, you’ll find success’ the ad promised, rather recklessly. I bought some. They also wanted someone who would take them to a Berni Inn for a romantic meal of prawn cocktail, steak and chips, and an Irish coffee to finish. As luck would have it, there was a Berni in Bromley High Street. The final piece of the puzzle was what drink they preferred, which seemed to be a toss-up between Martini (‘Any time, any place, anywhere’), Babycham (‘I’d love a Babycham’), and a Pony (‘The little drink with the big kick’).
The night before my first date, I could barely sleep. Even a mug of Horlicks (‘The food drink of the night’) failed to have the anticipated effect. For financial reasons, and because I was only fourteen, the whole Berni Inn/Martini/Babycham/Pony plan was replaced by going to see Romeo and Juliet at the Astor Cinema. The girl’s name was Katie, and things got off to a good start when she seemed delighted to be given a box of Milk Tray. After that, nothing really happened. We saw the film, drank Kia-Ora orange juice (it was advertised in the intermission), then went our separate ways. Once again, I got the feeling that real life wasn’t always going to be like the adverts.
This message was hammered home at the age of sixteen, when I bought myself a pipe. It wasn’t an affectation but a genuine attempt to experience ‘that Condor moment’ – a sudden flash of clarity and understanding which apparently came when you filled your lungs with Condor smoke. That Condor moment, for me, turned out to be a spluttering cough and an attack of nausea. There was a similar result when I sought happiness in a cigar called Hamlet.
Undeterred, I began to plan for my future career in advertising, convinced now that it was my destiny. I even persuaded a piano-playing friend to help me write jingles; our best was one for Debenhams, the department store on Bromley High Street, which went ‘Oh there’s much more, much more at Debenhams, much more, much more to see’ to the Van der Valk TV theme tune. And to think other teenage boys wasted their time writing songs about girls and the misery of their existence.
I’d also write newspaper adverts. One I was particularly proud of was for the Bradford & Bingley Building Society. It would, I felt confident, attract investors in their tens of thousands. The picture showed a flowerpot, shot in moody black and white. Inside the pot was a plant that had pound notes on its stalks. A hand, unseen, was pouring water over the plant from a watering can. The headline read ‘Now there’s an easier way to grow your money’. Inspired by the adverts in my already extensive collection of football programmes, there was very little body copy.
Too little, I realized later when I read it back – just a couple of lines which omitted certain details such as interest rates, contact details and, even more importantly, the name of the building society.
At school, the only subject I’d concentrated on was English. There didn’t seem any point in studying anything that wouldn’t help me become a copywriter – the job in advertising that most appealed to me – although my chemistry teacher was pleasantly surprised by the keen interest I showed in enzymes and hexachlorophene. When the time came for us all to join the workforce, my classmates became accountants and office managers (or in the case of my best friend, Dave, a milkman). I bided my time, waiting for the opportunity.
I had sixty-three jobs over the next few years, gaining valuable experience (as I saw it) in a variety of industries to prepare me for all the different products I’d soon be dreaming up ads for. Every Thursday I picked up my copy of Campaign, the weekly trade magazine, and applied for every junior copywriter position that appeared in it. Once, in the space of six days I hitched to Maidenhead for one interview, took a bus to Luton for another and a train to Edinburgh for a third. All without success. But not once did I even begin to question my destiny.
Thanks to Campaign, I no longer simply watched and admired adverts, I also knew the names of the creative behemoths responsible for them. I never tired of the ‘Schhh . . . you know who’ classic for Schweppes, in which the bottle of tonic water is switched on a train with an inferior brand called ‘Starks’ (copywriter, unsurprisingly: Jeff Stark), or the brilliant Dunlop ad which asked and answered the question ‘Where would we be without Dunlop?’ (copywriter: Andrew Rutherford). I was held spellbound by the footballing penguins of Penguin Biscuits fame (copywriter: Steve Sullivan) and the Kronenbourg ad in which Schubert was more concerned about his unfinished pint than his unfinished symphony (copywriter: Andrew Rutherford, again).
As well as being totally brilliant, these masterpieces had something else in common: they were created by Saatchi & Saatchi, probably the world’s finest advertising agency. I was desperate to work for them.
And so it came to pass that on a chilly autumn day at the tail end of the 1970s I found myself heading to their office in Charlotte Street – for the fifth time that month. My friend Jon had got a job there as a junior art director. In my world, this was like having a friend who played for Manchester United. Or sang with Showaddywaddy. I would pop in to see him at work with the flimsiest of excuses. The number of times ‘I happened to be passing’ a building which was an hour’s train ride and several stops on the tube away was astonishing. I think I was hoping to be plucked from the lobby as I waited for Jon, shoved into an office and told to write adverts all day.
As always, I felt a huge thrill as I walked up to the front step, which had the words NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE engraved on it. This was hugely inspirational but patently untrue. The likelihood of me being plucked from the lobby as I waited for Jon, shoved into an office and told to write adverts all day? Impossible.
I sat and gazed, open-mouthed, at the receptionist, who was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen outside a Flake commercial. To avoid being caught staring, I closed my eyes and was soon picturing her stepping out of a Badedas bath and wrapping a white towel around her, her eyes catching mine as she let the towel drop to the floor. Because as everyone knows, things happen after a Badedas bath . . .
‘Dave, Dave . . .’
Jon was standing in front of me, leather bomber jacket (the distinctive uniform of an adman) thrown casually over his shoulder. I fought to suppress a feeling of naked envy.
As I forced myself to leave the building with him, a young man dashed past, looking unbelievably cool in Elvis Costello glasses and skinny tie. He became even cooler in my eyes when I discovered he was merely a post-room junior who had been dispatched by his boss, Irish Mick, to feed ten-pence pieces into parking meters for the spaces occupied by expensive European cars. These vehicles, Jon explained, belonged to assorted copywriters, art directors, account directors, media planners and production executives who were far too busy to feed the meters themselves, especially when they were on lunch breaks that could last up to five hours.
As he was a junior art director, Jon’s lunch break was slightly shorter, nearer half an hour, which was just enough time for a pint of Kronenbourg and a Bowyer’s pork pie. It was also enough time to ask Jon for the most important favour I had ever asked of anyone: I wanted to borrow his bomber jacket for an interview for a job in Leeds. My latest theory for not being taken on by anyone was that I didn’t look the part, especially with my faux sheepskin coat, which was made from some kind of acrylic blend. Not the sort of thing a proper adman would wear.
Jon readily agreed, and I showed him the advert which I’d torn from that week’s Campaign. The headline read JUNIOR COPYWRITER WANTED and the copy, which I thought was a bit overlong, went on to say that Graham Poulter and Associates were ‘The North’s leading agency’ (this was a claim that was made by at least three other northern agencies in the same edition of the magazine). I’d already phoned them before coming out and spoken to Fred, a belligerent American who asked me why I wanted to be a copywriter, then lost interest before I could complete my answer and told me to be there the following Monday at ten.
When I got home, I read and re-read How to Get Your First Job in Advertising, which had come free with a recent issue of Campaign. It was written by Dave Trott, creative director of BMP, an agency that was second only in my eyes to Saatchi & Saatchi. He was a genius, and I treated his booklet as my bible. Among the rules I committed to memory were ‘If a product does not have at least one advantage, leave it alone’ and ‘Puns should be avoided’.
Armed with this knowledge and a leather bomber jacket, I felt I’d been given the keys to a career in advertising. I couldn’t wait for my interview.
The best way to get to Leeds from my flat near Abingdon was to take a train from Oxford and arrive refreshed and ready after a relaxing four-hour journey. Unfortunately I was broke so I had to hitch my way to the interview. This meant getting up at five a.m. and standing by the side of the M4 in the pouring rain, waiting for a lift, thinking, ‘I bet Jeff Stark and Andrew Rutherford never had to go through this.’
My luck was in. A lorry transporting Chrysler Alpines (‘The seven-days-a-week car’) to Sheffield stopped and took me most of the way, then a sales rep in a Ford Capri (‘The car you always promised yourself’) picked me up and dropped me off in Leeds city centre.
I found the North’s leading agency in plenty of time and was thankful for Jon’s bomber jacket, which had probably saved me from getting pneumonia. It was stylish yet practical – a phrase I mentally filed away for possible use in an advert.
Like the Saatchi office, there were rows of European cars parked outside. Unlike Saatchi, these were all from Eastern Europe. There were Lada Nivas, Lada 1600s, Lada 1200s. It seemed that everyone in the agency drove a Lada. I was confused. Was this some kind of ironic northern cool? Would I have to work my way up the creative ladder just so that I could drive a Lada, a car so rubbish it didn’t even have a slogan? I also noticed that several of them had a parking ticket; one of them had several parking tickets. Irish Mick would never have let that happen at Saatchi.
I walked up the steps, which had nothing inspirational written on them, and came face to face with the receptionist. As seemed to be compulsory in advertising agencies, she was pretty, although more like the mum from the Domestos advert than the Flake or Badedas women. She put a call through to Fred, telling him that I had arrived.
He came down to greet me, as belligerent in person as he had been on the phone. He was a big man in his mid-thirties, shaven-headed and dressed in a simple T-shirt and jeans combo. I presumed his bomber jacket was casually draped across the chair in his office. He glanced at his watch and then grudgingly gave me a guided tour of the agency. Fred explained, with a notable absence of enthusiasm, that what I was seeing was the UK’s only integrated advertising agency, in that it had its own PR, sales promotion and photography companies in the same building. The impact of this was lessened by the fact that each of these companies appeared to have a staff of one.
The main thing I noticed during my whistle-stop tour was the people, whom Fred didn’t bother to introduce me to. He was in too much of a hurry – we were almost running through the building. But everyone we passed seemed to have stepped out of a fashion magazine. They were exceptionally good-looking and perfectly groomed, the men wearing either Old Spice or the great smell of Brut, while most of the women seemed to favour Charlie perfume.
And then I entered the creative department. Looking around, I saw a dozen of the scruffiest, least attractive people I’d ever seen in a professional setting. It was as though they’d been herded together and hidden in a dark room far from the rest of the agency. I immediately felt at home.
We moved on to Fred’s office, which he shared with Clive, his co-creative director. It was modern and luxuriously appointed – a symphony of chrome, pine and plastic. On the wall were several framed posters of Ladas which, I soon learned, weren’t there as a sign of their appreciation of Russian engineering: Lada was one of the agency’s biggest accounts, and in order to demonstrate how much everyone believed in the product, they were used as company cars. After all, if the people who made the ads didn’t drive them, how could they expect the public to want to?
This philosophy, I then discovered, didn’t extend to the directors, including Fred and Clive, all of whom drove Porsches. Not because they wanted to, but because the agency also handled the Porsche account.
But it was Ladas that seemed to get Clive most animated. He had the look of a geography teacher who had recently come into some money. His immaculate suede jacket and perfectly ironed brown corduroy trousers were at odds with his floppy hair and rumpled appearance. He proudly told me that he and Fred would be flying out to Kenya in the New Year to film a series of Lada commercials. I was stunned and intrigued. What possible logic could there be for filming Ladas in Kenya? I couldn’t wait to find out, but was told that they couldn’t tell me any more as it was all highly confidential.
The only awkward moment came when Fred looked at my CV, for which I’d needed three pages to cover the sixty-three jobs I’d had since leaving school. I’d prepared for this and launched into my explanation of how it had given me the perfect background to work on pretty much any product. My time as a dish washer would be ideal for writing ads for, say, Fairy Liquid. My fortnight spent on the night shift in a biscuit factory was perfect preparation for persuading people to p-p-p-p-pick up a Penguin. While being an apprentice tyre-fitter for almost two days provided the necessary experience for involvement on Dunlop.
This was, in fact, the speech I’d prepared for my Saatchi & Saatchi interview, which I was convinced would be happening soon. The clients were all Saatchi and I’d been meaning to adapt it for the North’s leading agency, but had forgotten.
Fred and Clive didn’t seem to notice.
Then, to demonstrate my professionalism, I asked Clive what sort of portfolio they were looking for. Dave Trott, in How to Get Your First Job in Advertising, had insisted that this was an essential question to ask.
‘Why don’t you just show us what you’ve got?’ said Fred impatiently.
I placed the Bradford & Bingley money-growing advert in front of them and sat back to receive the praise. Clive forced a smile and called it ‘interesting’. I felt pleased and glowed in the warmth of the compliment. Or at least what I took as a compliment. It was only a few months later that I realized ‘interesting’ was advertising agency language for ‘It’s rubbish but I don’t want to upset you and risk you having a tantrum’.
After I’d painstakingly gone through the other fifty of my home-made adverts, Clive asked his final question: ‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’
I thought for a moment, then told him what I hoped he wanted to hear: ‘Right here, winning awards for Lada and Porsche ads.’
With that, the interview came to a close. I felt confident that the job was mine. Fred promised I’d hear before Christmas.
Once outside, I saw Ladas in a whole new light. I enviously peered inside a 1200S parked directly outside the agency and imagined myself behind the wheel. I was vaguely aware that Ladas were known for outdated technology, poor fuel economy and tank-like road-holding, but now all they represented was glamour and achievement.
Even as these thoughts were going through my mind, I knew they were flawed. Still, to me, the first tangible sign of success as a copywriter would be driving a Lada. And if I could convince someone – even if it was only myself – that a Lada was a car to aspire to, then surely I belonged in advertising.
As soon as I got home, I immersed myself in newspapers and magazines, studying the ads they carried, trying to discover what made them work. I was so eager to learn that I bought myself a notebook and started to make a note of anything I thought could be useful. Among these was the fact that most print adverts seemed to begin with the words ‘When it comes to’ and the penultimate paragraph always started with the word ‘so’. Then there was the well-worn device that was used to sell any health-related item from painkillers to firm mattresses – dressing the model in a white coat. I also found an alarming number of headlines based on the phrase ‘A Man for All Seasons’, including ‘A glass for all reasons’, ‘A shed for all seasons’ and ‘A town for all seasons’.
Advertising had completely taken over my life. I’d never wanted anything as much as I wanted that letter from Fred telling me that the job was mine. Every day I rushed home from work at the MG factory, and every day I felt crushed when I saw that it hadn’t arrived.
It had been weeks since the interview. I was starting to get a bad feeling. It’s been a general rule in my life that the more I want something, the less likely I am to get it. The last time I’d wanted something this badly was for Bromley to beat Sutton in an FA Cup match when I was eleven. They lost 9–0.
I decided to carry on as normal. And with Christmas fast approaching, this meant playing the pre-Christmas advert game with my flatmate and best friend Dave. Every 22 December we watched whatever was on ITV at 8.30 in the evening. In the first commercial break, he had to buy for my present the second product advertised; in the next break, I had to buy him the third product advertised. Even if it was a car. Or a pearl necklace. Or a Commercial Union insurance policy.
I was the more nervous as I had to go last, especially when I learned that all Dave had to buy me was some Campbell’s Omelette Mate. But those nerves turned to relief when my gift to him was revealed to be a tub of Kerrygold Butter. We were both pleased with the outcome.
Then, on Christmas Eve, as I was wrapping the Kerrygold Butter, and just as I’d given up hope of hearing from the North’s leading agency, a letter arrived. I didn’t open it straight away. It was too important, too potentially life-changing. I made a cup of PG Tips, then sat down and slowly opened the envelope. As I took out the letter and nervously unfolded it a feeling of almost unbearable anticipation came over me. The letter was neatly typed, and with trembling hands I held it up to read.
Dear Dave,
Sorry to keep you hanging on tenterhooks for so long, but it was a tough decision.
It came down to two, yourself included. Unfortunately you were pipped at the post.
We would have liked to have taken both of you on, but at this point, impossible.
Best of luck in finding a position as a copywriter. Your talent indicates that you should be in this industry.
Sincerely,
Fred.