NOBODY LIKES US

When our entry “Bigger than us” came last in The European Song Contest on Saturday with just 16 points I was not surprised. We’ve been placed in the bottom five out of twenty six entries, an astonishing nine times, since 2005.  Either we are terrible musicians or we pick the wrong songs or we are just extremely unpopular.

In November 2018 Music Week trumpeted – that’s what you do in the music business – that the UK was a global leader in music: growing to an annual £4.5 billion turnover; exports up 7% to £2.6 billion. Receipts to the UK treasury just under £1 billion. So it’s not that.

When it comes to popular votes by which we choose our entry to this competition we have, let’s just say, a slightly uneven track record. As I watched poor Michael Rice giving what was described by the UK press as a “very solid performance” – could there be a worse accolade? – I knew we were doomed. Extremely solid performance. Extremely flaky song.

The answer then is an extraordinary feat of mediocrity, almost as though we didn’t really care. I fear we have become the global Millwall FC whose fans’ match song as you may know goes like this:  “nobody likes us, we don’t care".  And they don’t and we don’t.

We have become the stroppy kid who decided to walk out and now they’re all sniggering at us and making us very cross.

In the midst of all this confusion and self-pity I find an increasing sense of personal resolution because I have a funny feeling this is all going to work out OK in the end. The EU is a bit of a mess, which we knew. Mess is a constant in life. It all depends on how you deal with it.  If you consider Orban (Hungary) , Kurz (Austria), Salvini (Italy) and the presence of Le Pen (France), the AFD (Germany) the Union part of European seems open to question.

Yet we know young people, pretty well across Europe, mostly believe in collaboration, sharing, liberal values and quite soon, as they flex their muscles, they won’t put up with the playground behaviour of the right wing here or in Europe. They know, and let’s face it, this is all they’ve ever known, peace and success is achieved through compromise, listening and a determination to look after each other.

I find myself thinking that Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate change activist is altogether more wholesome and well principled in her ambitions for humanity in general than, say Nigel Farage, although I think he believes what he says. It’s just that,  as with Michael Rice, I don’t like the tune he’s singing. Old fashioned. Separatist. Hostile. Cruel.

We have to grow out of this belligerent Millwall tendency. In a democracy we must, of course, let this play out. But we need a better story for it to end well and we need to tell it better. It seems as though some think this is the Game of Thrones. It isn’t and we need to grow up and start being kinder to each other. It’ll just take a bit of time, calm and common sense.

UP, UP AND AWAY

Michael Gove says he’d like to play Tyrion Lannister in the TV show “Game of Thrones”. What did he mean by that – being perpetually drunk and spending time with prostitutes like Tyrion? Perhaps not - perhaps instead he’s been seduced by Tyrion’s intelligence, wit and panache. 

For those unaware of Game of Thrones (are there any?) Tyrion is a smart dwarf who has great charm and a concealed lust for power. In what is a pigmy-brained conservative party Gove wants to be head pigmy but his colleagues all want to be the PM too. They must all be quite mad as it’s worse than a poisoned chalice. In a quote from series seven Peter Baelish describes something resembling today’s political world:

"Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb….. only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is."

Many of us are obsessed just with the sensation going up – to what end? Once up there’s only one law that has much relevance. Gravity. 

Which reminded me of freeclimbing – that’s rock climbing without ropes. It’s been in the news  because American Alex Honnold recently free-soloed the 3000 foot El Capitan at Yosemite in just 3 hours 56 minutes. It made me feel sick just thinking about it. In the same week a British climber out walking there was killed by a massive rock fall. I’m beginning to hate heights and rocks and falling and futile ascent.

So what possessed me to take two visitors up the i360 in Brighton when they paid a visit to cold and windy Brighton?  Only as we started the ascent did one of them say he suffered from vertigo. The whole event is bit of a damp squib – it’s like  a rather slow lift dressed up as a BA “Flight” (they keep on calling it a “flight” when it’s clearly not.) Much is made of the pre-flight check and the ritual of being body scanned and searched. All the waiting takes a long time. The ascent is a slow business (although the view over Brighton isn’t displeasing)  and then it comes down again. £16.50 for a yawning ½ hour.

Richard French – one of the guests – got it spot-on when he said it can’t work commercially. They play dreadful music instead of having a running commentary. There’s no energy, no drama and what little theatre there is, is performed poorly by bored and under-rehearsed 20 year olds. BA should be ashamed to lend their name to it. He said it needed to be a faster, more breathless experience. Four ascents an hour at less than £10 a pop. The visitor numbers so far are unsurprisingly disappointing.

I was frustrated. This is my town and its key feature was being justifiably traduced. Getting to the top has never been more boring. Brighton deserves much better than this.

WE ALL NEED A BIT OF DRAMA

Recently the UK has been in thrall to the Archer’s story of Helen being emotionally manipulated by her ghastly husband Rob. This story of bullying has raised around £100,000 for the Helen Titchener Rescue Fund on JustGiving. When it was Helen rather than Rob who snapped into physical violence in the recent climax a lot of people got very angry accusing the show’s producers of ”irresponsibility” and of treating the situation as just a soap opera. The story had become so real it had crossed the line of reality.

We live in a post-comfort zone world where we need drama. Young people relish the squirming effect of a stressful situation and of sharing their discomfort with others. Stories are the diet of our times. Some companies, seizing on this, actually appoint Chief Storytellers who emulating  Anglo Saxon bards create concepts like the “corporate camp fire” urging executives to “gather round and attend the tale of the Persil (or whatever) launch.” We are all players in a highly charged narrative. You don’t go to work, you go to theatre.

Stories are changing with the relatively new quotient of  increasing unpredictability … long running dramas like Game of Thrones and House of Cards where anything can happen and even (no especially) the good and virtuous, although there aren’t many of those, get brutally and unexpectedly done away with. The punchline “and they all lived happily ever after” is for the birds.

Today “the hero was unjustly accused, gruesomely killed and the villain went off with his wife whom he first turned mad before throwing her to his crazed poodles and going off to receive his knighthood from King Harry unexpectedly sitting on the throne after that terrible train crash in 2018 did away with the other heirs.”

This is the Elizabethan world of John Webster not the cosy world of Jane Austen. It’s a world of power, violence and politics. The lurid world of Westminster has reached Ambridge and beyond. Conspiracy theory abounds. The line gets crossed again when in the BBC2 Drama Line of Duty a photograph of police and politician in a child abuse investigation is shown with Jimmy Savile in the background.

Dramatic and unpredictable narrative has become addictive.  Andrew Stanton the writer of Pixar’s “Toy Story” describes drama as “anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” The punchline to a story could nowadays be anything but we live in constant hope of horrid surprise.

If Lord of the Rings were rewritten Sam would meet a grisly end, Frodo would secrete the ring and give a chilling grin to the camera in the last scene.

Stat Trek hit the point with their immortal “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” That’s the journey but now it needs more …. “and unjustly suffers an unexpected fate.”

“But the new Persil shrunk all the clothes so the people thought they’d got fat and committed suicide and their zombie-ghosts came for the Persil Board.”

Ha, ha …….

WHAT'S THE STORY?

Storytelling is on the lips of people in big business right now. I keep on coming across self- styled professional corporate storytellers and hearing about storytelling courses. Makes a change from my childhood when I got into trouble for telling stories. Nowadays you don’t get to the top unless you are a storyteller - this goes beyond advertising and branding - this is the narrative that drives the strategy.

And you can see why because we are living in a world so complex and unpredictable where for instance this week it was discovered that sawfish were commonly having virgin births. Slightly less extraordinary than one thought when the experts suggest species will go to extraordinary ends to survive. And sex is a primitive way of achieving that end.

Yuval Noah Harari has written a book called “Sapiens: a brief history of humankind”. In it he explores the reason why Homo Sapiens has been so successful. Part of the reason is the exotic and descriptive language that our species started to develop.  It was beyond nouns, verbs and rational specifics. We traded in speculation, gossip, abstract and the unknown. Homo Sapiens, he suggests in short, made it because we could imagine the future, tell stories and thereby invent things.

I was talking first to a senior executive recently who lamented the inability of his key guys to inspire people when going through their sales pitch which always seemed to become a rather left brained selling proposition-based event. Tell them I said, to get their clients to imagine a future transformed by the product or service the idea they were selling. Take the John Lennon route:

“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try”…

And then to an entrepreneur who had a product idea imported from Asia which was priced awkwardly (sorry, that’s code for “too expensive”.) The solution I suggested would lie in packaging and marketing magic whereby the intrinsic virtues of the idea could be romanced, enhanced and increased in value. In other words it needed a story to be built around it.

Why are Game of Thrones, House of Cards and the X-Men film series such compulsive viewing for so many? How have Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stieg Larsen and Terry Pratchett storytelling defined our view of written stories over the past two decades. The popularity of these and longer form TV series and film legends like Star Wars and Star Trek have happened because they are great primal stories involving exploration, fear, ambition and love but most of all because they carve out new worlds and new possibilities.
We’ve had a week where the Iron Throne of FIFA has been vacated and we face a future of a footballing Arab Spring…write the next part of this story but bear in mind it’s going to get very nasty. Stories like these will be spoken of long into the future.

Our lives are rich in stories. That’s why humanity got to be so smart (and sometimes so crooked.)

EXCUSE ME WHILE I DREAM

There are moments when you are so absorbed in something, be it sport or a film or a book, that you lose all sense of time, space and identity. You are, as it were lost in a dream or – to use that lovely old fashioned word – in a reverie.

Losing oneself happened to me at a new play, “Lizzie Siddal” at the Arcola. My goddaughter Emma West plays the lead so, of course, I’m biased and I was likely to be looking at her acting to see her technique, rather like watching a horse doing dressage. Hallo horse. Hallo footwork. But I got lost in the idea of the play, of the intelligent woman being absorbed by the power of Rossetti, only to be ultimately disillusioned as his passionate fire for her became a smouldering ember. As she observes, art in the end is about smudges on paper, just an illusion. Truth is not beauty… not as Keats meant it. Art like acting isn’t real. Emma West does not die. She goes home to a pizza and a glass of Chianti and an episode of "Game of Thrones” – she’s an actress.

The ability to live a part convincingly and to dream along with that performance may seem a far cry from the world of work yet even there I believe in the need to be able to visualise, to see what a scenario might play out like – not logically but emotionally too.

Our experience shows it’s easier to do something so long as people don’t get involved. Jack Welch of General Electric was desperate to eliminate the human interface in customer service. The problem with people he reckoned was they were erratic, subjective and unreliable.  And that’s precisely why we need to have unreasonable people dealing with unreasonable customers. That’s how magic is created. Not by drones serving clones.

Cognosis (a management consultancy) had what Stefan Stern who writes for the FT ironically noted was unusual for their breed. It was an original idea.

And it was this - that a strategy would within a business have a much greater chance of succeeding if the people in the business expected to make it work were excited by it. If in other words other than merely understanding it they got lost in its possibilities. A strategy that was a vision that was potentially and emotionally seen as a real prospect not just some numbers on a spread sheet.

Time, I think, for businessmen to have the odd reverie. Time to dream. Time to imagine.

It’s good to see that even the Scots get it

SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DORSET

It was “Broadchurch” that got me thinking. You know the Dorset Noir TV series that got such astounding ratings on ITV. I was given the box set for my birthday and we’ve spent the past week glued to it.
It got me thinking that Michael Douglas was right when recently he said that the long form TV series like Games of Thrones, the Borgias, Wired and so on were the future of film.

Their publishers said the same to Dickens and Trollope …”look Charlie just write an 800 page cliff hanger with lots of characters and weave a really complex plot. Just remember big is beautiful”
.

After a week in which they held the smallest penis competition in Scotland – I’m serious – and EF Schumacher the economist who wrote “Small is Beautiful” was on my mind, this may seem a bit of a surprise.

After all our attention spans are reducing…aren’t they?

We’ve got 20:20 in cricket, speed dating, speed interviewing, snacking and in Pecha Kucha the 7 minute presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each) which is designed to be twice as good as TED speeches  which last twice as long.

So short is good. We’re all obsessed it would seem by the “quickie”. When I got sent a 25 minute YouTube piece I found myself feeling my time was being stolen. ..”where do I find a spare 25 minutes?”

When I read anything now I think “get to the point PD James, stop prevaricating.” Given this logic the greatest crime novel title would be “The Butler Did It”.

But the return to the Aga-slow-cooked plot where the complexities and weakness of human behaviour get played out and twists and turns happen with tantalising unexpectedness,  is not a sign of a fashion change. The appetite for good stories just never went away. Ask JK Rowling, ask Ken Follett, just as we asked Dostoevsky or Wagner….well… imagine the abbreviated Ring Cycle. No actually now I think about it, speed Wagner should be mandatory.

The reason the Reduced Shakespeare Company is so funny, apart from brilliant performance and scripting, is that it’s mad. Hamlet in 30 seconds is a hoot. Whilst performed over three hours it’s harrowing. Probably even the Petra Kucha (or 20:20 version) of World War II would be pretty funny too.

Only comedy works in the short form - hence PG Wodehouse. In our noir world you need time to eat, digest and discover.

Me? I’m now off to create “Mad Men Noir”. It’s long. It’s brutal. It’s going to be terribly depressing. It’ll involve heavy drinking, the serial killing of competitors and the most complicated marketing plan ever.
As to whether these blogs are too short read next week’s effort which will be 800 pages of unremitting misery all in black and white.

www.colourfulthinkers.com