Upstairs on the buses

A mailboy at J Walter Thompson in the mid-1960s, the biggest and poshest of advertising agents at that time, I was told about the occasion the chairman walked out of our Berkeley Square offices with a client. No taxis in sight.

“Perhaps we should walk up to Oxford Street and catch a bus,” said the Great Man. And they did. “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggested.

“Will that cost more?” enquired Nervous Client.

This was an era long before our current obsession with Consumer Insight.

Happy New Year!

Artists as Talkers

I didn’t make time to listen to any of Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4 this year – but they were well regarded by many as being witty and wise. And I’ve seen enough of him to know that he is both those things, aside from being an interesting artist.

In general, artists are not known as good talkers. Many seem almost totally inarticulate about both their lives and their work.

The great exception, of course, was James McNeill Whistler. “I wish I’d said that,” said Oscar Wilde admiringly to him at a salon in Paris after the artist had been holding forth.

“You will, Oscar, you will,” responded Whistler.

Above: Whistler by William Merritt Chase, 1885

In search of Mrs Shakespeare

It's said with rather boring regularity that little is known about Shakespeare the man. It is this that has fed the Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare movement. And yet, in reality there’s so much that has been turned up on him, much of it ill-fitting our Romantic view of The Artist.

That’s aside from all those quartos and folios of his work.

Recently I’ve been grappling with a biography of his wife, Ann Hathaway, by Germaine Greer. At one level, it’s an extraordinary achievement – to write 350 pages, tightly packed with relevant information, on a woman about whom next to nothing is known (aside from his leaving her the second best bed).

On the other hand, I’m not at all sure that I will stay the course. One can only take a certain number of might-have-beens, could-haves, we-can-only-imagines, possiblies and supposes.

A Sort of Christmas Card: Mr Pepys’s Christmas Day

Diary, 25 December 1662

Up pretty early, leaving my wife not well in bed. And with my boy walked, it being a most brave cold and dry frosty morning, and had a pleasant walk to Whitehall… By and by down to the Chapell again, where Bishop Morley* preached upon the Song of the Angels – “Glory to God on high, on earth peace, and good will towards men.” Methought he made but a poor sermon, but long and reprehending the mistaken jollity of the Court for the true joy that shall and ought to be on these days… He did much press us to joy in these publick days of joy, and to hospitality. But one that stood by whispered in my ear that the Bishop do not spend one groat to the poor himself. The sermon done a good anthem followed by vialls, and the King** came down to receive the sacrament… I walked home again with great pleasure, and there dined by my wife’s bed-side with great content, having a mess of brave plum-porridge and a roasted pullet for dinner, and I sent for a mince-pie abroad, my wife not being well to make any herself yet. After dinner sat talking a good while with her, her [pain] being become less, and then to see Sir W Penn*** a little, and so to my office, practising arithmetique alone with great content, till 11 at night; and so to supper and to bed.

Wishing you a very happy Christmas.

*Bishop of Winchester, then in 1663 also Dean of the Chapel Royal

**Charles II
***Admiral William Penn, a close friend of Pepys. Father of the founder of Pennsylvania

Mandela and the move to violence

In all the adulatory coverage following the death of Nelson Mandela, I’ve yet to see the view expressed that the switch of the ANC from non-violent opposition to armed insurrection, following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, might well have served to stiffen the resolve of the white supremacist regime in defence of apartheid, caused many more deaths and extended the period of time before change came about.

Just as the bombing campaign against Germany, aimed at bringing an end to hostilities, served only to prolong the Second World War…

Mandela and his colleagues must have been fully aware of Gandhi’s strategy.

Folking awful

For a while I sang in folk clubs. It was the pseudo-folk revival of the mid-1960s.

“What did you think of it?” I asked one club manager – a world-class cynic at the best of times ‒ perhaps a trifle too eagerly.

“Folking awful,” he responded.

Vitality the vision

Some years ago, I helped Unilever to develop a new “corporate mission”. In the end it all came down to one word – VITALITY.

Clarity about vitality as a way of being could create real new momentum for the multinational giant ‒ as the focus of all R&D and marketing efforts; on whom to promote and whom to recruit (and whom not); on which brands to acquire and which to sell.

I was so excited by the word and its obvious relevance and potential that I lobbied as many members of senior management as I knew ‒ and in due course it was adopted.

A little later I was disappointed to learn that it had not been taken up by the HR people in the company in any meaningful way. And the company went on owning the profitable but not very obviously vital Pot Noodle brand.

Now I see on the internet that the strategy has been reduced to a standard formula. This is it (above). Useful, no doubt, but unlikely to unleash much in the way of vitality. 

Conquering Cleo

Ahead of the première of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford, Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph pointed out that he had “never seen this play fulfilled on stage or witnessed two actors adequate to its leading roles.”

I know what he means. The last time I risked it was a couple of decades ago ‒ a dreary production with a schoolmarmish Cleo at the Birmingham Rep.

Well, the new production at the Swan, a joint effort of two American companies (the Public in New York and GableStage in Miami) together with the RSC, scores a creditable one out of two.

The Mark Antony, the well-established British actor Jonathan Cake, really looks as though he has wandered in from a remake of Carry On Cleo.

But the Cleopatra, Joaquina Kalukango, virtually fresh from the Juilliard School in New York, is absolutely magnificent. What a pity she didn’t bring her own leading man.