Come back Monty Python

This TV show ran between 1969 and 1974. It was sometimes hilarious, sometimes dull but always nibbling at the edge of good taste, convention and conservatism. Python in its often ridiculous way captures the foolishness of authority.

In the recent cost of living crisis as the media has embarked on money saving food ideas, offal and fish heads have appeared on the menu and, of course, Spam. This square-shaped mash-up of pork, water, salt, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrate recently celebrated its 85th anniversary. One myth insists that its name is actually an acronym for "Scientifically Processed Animal Matter." Others that it stands for “Spiced Ham” or “Specially Processed American Meat.”

It has sold over 8 million cans and in over 44 countries. It’s still one of the most famous food brands. It even has its own T-Shirt “I think therefore I Spam.”

But it was Monty Python that really brought Spam back to life 50 years ago in their lyrically complex musical tribute: 

Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!
Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam

Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am

Lovely Spam! (Lovely Spam!)!)
Lovely Spam!

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam!

 

And it struck me that some of their most famous sketches remain relevant today:

 

The Dead Parrot sketch which brilliantly encapsulates the issues we’ve just experienced with our departing  Prime Minister and her denial of her demise.

 

The Four Yorkshireman who were affluent businessmen reminiscing about their deprived backgrounds. Their nostalgia becomes more livid and competitive reaching this absurdity:

 

“Right.. I used to get up in the morning at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work 28 hours a day at mill, and pay da mill owner to let us work there. And when I went home our dad used to murder us in cold blood, each night, and dance about on our graves, singing hallelujah. Yah, you try an tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you...”

I’ve been like that recently telling younger people about the Three Day Week in the 1970s and, as I say, you try telling young people of today that and they won’t believe you.

 

But when it comes to bureaucracy and the offices of government what can beat the Ministry of Silly Walks? This may be the best thing John Cleese ever did.

 

 

The occasional shaft of absurdity or silliness can be highly effective satire. Monty Python could do that sometimes although – not unjustly - Morecambe and Wise criticised them saying the Python team could be annoying and unprofessional.

“…there’s five or six minutes of utter boredom. And then there’s three minutes of very funny and then another eight minutes of boredom.” 

I used to get irritated by being told by friends  from abroad that leaving Brexit had made us a laughing stock but I accept now we’re reputationally diminished after the Truss farce and the possibility of Johnson standing again when he’s highly likely to be expelled from the Commons for lying to them - no I didn’t, yes you did…

The past few months should have been enough to convince even the most right wing Tory member that we can’t go on like this, that the parrot is dead, that Boris is a bad man and own up to the fact that this government is damaging the country. I am not an especially political person and avoid ideological debates but it’s time for Monty Pythonesque ridicule to return.

In the meantime sit back and experience what might be one of the most loony weeks in our history.

GROW'S THE ONLY WAY TO GO

 Grow’s the only way to go

Yes, I admit it. I’ve been too obsessed with the pronouncements of our new Prime Monster. And that’s why I’m having so many peculiar dreams. 

Recounting ones’ dreams is unforgivably boring but here goes anyway.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I’m at home, feeling a bit odd but itching to tell my wife about my new plans.

“Growth” I say importantly.

“Where?” She says looking concerned.

“No, not a growth. I’m talking about growth of our life, our income and our self-perception.”

“Have you been drinking?” she asks.

“We need a proper meeting now “ I say “to sort out our strategy, our direction of travel and our key beliefs.”

Silence. Or was that a snort?

I plough on with my prepared speech.

“We have been leading a life of restraint and sluggardly growth…I want explosive growth and I want it now. I want to invest in impressing my network. I’m going to have daily lunches with the brightest and best I know but first I’m going to start with an image renovation. I’m buying a red Porsche, wearing red braces, red socks and getting red framed spectacles. Red is the new hot colour for my world of growth. Red Hot is my new life.”

I pause, slightly moist eyed at the power of my words. A quiet voice interrupts my thoughts.

“And where’s the money coming from for this …new life?”

“We must borrow for tomorrow. The more we spend the more they lend.”

I didn’t see the book flung at me until too late. As I slumped to the floor I heard my wife say:

“Red also means something else. It means stop.”

And then I woke up.

Zzzzz!!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s been a strange week. 

I’ve been wondering if we can trust a Truss and I’m really not sure at all. I’ve lived under 15 prime ministers. Liz is the most unusual and Kwasi Kwarteng reminds me of Antony Barber, Heath’s “dash for growth”  Chancellor in 1972.

Truss seems fearless, carefree and a bit careless. In business I’ve lived with go-for- growth CEOS and it always ends in tears. That’s usually because events outside their control scupper their well laid plans. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, he replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events’.

Big events seemed all that interested Boris Johnson. But all he did was so dishevelled I often wondered if he changed his pants. He relied on instinct but not strategy. He was an accident-prone shambles. 

The Truss is different. She and her new team aren’t boring. I expect planned chaos but she’s seized the mantle and is vigorously shaking it. She’s clearly read Joseph Schumpeter (ex-Professor at Harvard University) who created the concept of “creative destruction.”

Here’s a definition :

“Creative destruction is based on the principle that old assumptions need to be broken so that new innovations can benefit from existing resources and energy.”

That has a good radical, courageous sound to it but like heroic surgery in applying it you can sometimes destroy more than you intended. It lives in the world of “oops!”

So we are sitting and waiting. The rich are getting richer. The poor are staying poor. Does trickle down of wealth work? We shall see but the pundits are sceptical.

One of Truss’ more interesting new appointments is Therese Coffey, Secretary of State for Health. In response to a very long question in the Commons recently she stood up said ”Yes” and sat down.

No. Life won’t be boring. But we’re on red alert from now on. Pay attention.

ARE WE A NATION OF IDLERS?

This question is in Britannia Unchained in 2012, written by, amongst others, Liz Truss. 

More fully it said: 

“Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor…. Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”

Oh dear. This is an ill researched cartoon. We work longer hours than nearly every country in Europe and retire later. “Worst idlers” is such an old-fashioned term. Successful people I know are idle but smart – they get other people to do the work for them. What’s more current thinking by a Silicon Valley consultant, amongst others, suggests that productivity would be improved by lower, not higher hours.

Britannia Unchained feels so out of touch with the reality of today’s world. Had the writer been to China where at 12.30 every day the lights are turned low for an hour and everyone goes to sleep? Had they watched Chinese at work? 

The same applies to India where workmen often work in slow motion. Of course, there are showcase examples of speed of construction in China – a multi-storey hotel being erected in a few weeks but health-and-safety doesn’t seem to figure high on their agenda. “996”, the so called Chinese work ethic – 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week  - which the authors of “Britannia Unchained” might presumably have espoused -  was put unfavourably under the spotlight in February this year when a 25-year-old content moderator for short-video streaming site Bilibili died of brain haemorrhage after working extreme hours. The company called it a “wake-up call.”

A friend of mine who’s a corporate lawyer working possibly 70 hours a week on average has worked in Japan and China and thinks it is not that the British are idle, not at all, it is they are a bit “soft”, a softness engendered from us having had it rather easier than the previous generations (up to now). 

The huge salaries some earn are generally the result of working extraordinarily hard (read the story of Bill Gates’ youth). Often at the top of the wage pyramid great wealth, poor health, long hours, burn-out.

Generally at the bottom of that pyramid, terrible wages, poor health, maybe doing several jobs to pay the bills and very long hours. These poor people are not idlers, they’re exploited and have got by so far through being work machines.

But I’m like anyone writing on this subject liable to lapse into generalisations so let me take a step back. Our world is unrecognisable from that of just 10 years ago. We are just beginning to grasp the opportunities of technology like AI and are struggling to grapple with the problems and challenges it will create. The current strikes across the public sector are caused as much by a realisation that a radical change of working practices is imminent as they are about rates of pay.

I believe most people prefer working hard than having too little to do. I believe most people want to do a good job. I believe most people want a decent job.

We need to spend time working on a strategy for the future of work and remove the word redundancy from our lexicon. Work is changing. We need to explain why and how that can benefit us rather than enforce people to be unemployed or unemployable.

We need to work, not just for money but to feel we are relevant and to give us self-respect.

BRILLIANT MARKETING IS ALL THEY NEED

In Britain we’re in the midst of a marketing battle. This is what the current Tory shoot-out is. If I were advising either candidate I’d be advising a no-holds-barred, go for the jugular approach. Winner takes all. The loser is probably finished as a politician so there’s nothing to lose.

Currently Brand Truss (the only potential PM to have the same name as a medical implement) has a significant lead in the polls offering a package of tax cuts and optimism that would even make her erstwhile boosterish boss blush (only he never does that). She wants us to be the “Aspiration Nation”. She belongs to that school of thinking like advertising agency, Saatchi’s, “nothing is impossible.” It’s obviously a seductive proposition  originating from the“I’m going to be King of the World” aspirations of a Boris Johnson. 

Brand Truss is a marketeer’s delight. Big budget confidence. A desire to break the mould. To grow. Here’s a quote she might like from Keller Williams, the American realty company coined:

“When you go from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset a new world of possibilities opens up.” 

But growth is not easy, not in the current world with war in Ukraine, global recession and a series of problems closer to home in Scotland, France and Italy. Since 1961 we’ve achieved ‘real’ growth, namely over 5% in only 5 years and we’ve had negative growth in 8 years. The Truss manifesto reminds me of Anthony Barber’s in 1972, when he was Chancellor of Exchequer in the Heath government. Barber initiated a 'dash for growth', a hugely ambitious budgetary policy aimed to deliver 10% growth over two years pushing  both the fiscal and monetary pedals to the floor in a confident and focused attempt to detonate growth. 

It failed.

Brand Sunak  is a teller of truth. The Doctor who says sympathetically but firmly “I’m afraid you haven’t got long”. 

He quietly ridicules the fairy story of growth in a world where expert voices would prefer to see us stabilise and reduce debt. But his is not a great marketing story. He sat at Boris’ right hand and his legacy from his boss has been contempt and a damning reference (“do not hire this man”.) Rishi is a marketeer’s nightmare. “Sales are down. The budget’s reduced. I don’t want anything too creative.” 

And he isn’t very visible yet. “Let my record speak itself” doesn’t play well when that record is to have been number two (however reluctantly) to a bloke called Boris who’s now stabbing him in the back of his very tight suit.

Still nearly all the smartest people think he’s clever, thoughtful, an excellent leader and a very hard worker. If I were advising him I’d say become a daily good-news story visiting farms, schools, businesses, petrol stations, hospitals, care homes creating stories about how caring and well prepared he is, never getting caught out on what the prices of a pint of milk or a loaf of Hovis are*.

And every day say “Liz is a nice person for sure but her economic plans are wrong and will make our economy worse.”

His comms advisors have to be pumping stories about Anthony Barber and Liz Truss. Non-stop simple messaging that makes the “Sunak right. Truss wrong” rubric unmissable.

At present he’s invisible. Staying like that he’ll lose badly.

Meanwhile Boris uncta porcus+ is lying in wait. He’d probably beat either contestant now if he could stand and MPs are already beginning to ask  “what have we done?”

 

*80p and £1.15

+ Boris the greased pig                                                                              

THE OLD NEED REINVENTING...LIKE CATS

Tom Goodwin is an Executive Vice President and head of Innovation at Zenith Media. Here’s what he said last week on Linkedin:

“Living in New York and working in advertising I rarely see people over the age of fifty.  I'm never exposed to, let alone have the pleasure of working alongside them. This is one of the worst things about working in marketing right now.  As an industry we're obsessed with youth, we're endlessly trying to get "upwardly mobile Millennials" or "hard to reach youthful influencers" or some nonsensical and largely broke crowd who can't afford the premium SUV we have on offer. Meanwhile we've not looked around the BA First Lounge or the Hyatt Hotel lobby, or the Emirates Business class cabin to see that all the people with money and influence are actually rather old. And wise.

Occasionally, on the rare events where I get to listen to some of the wonderful old folk of advertising, it quickly makes me realize how much we as an industry suffer from a lack of wisdom. We have incredible levels of vision, an abundance of precociousness, brilliant creativity, but as an industry we pretty much have no wisdom at all.”

Personally being one of those “wonderful old folk of advertising” I found myself in profound agreement with Tom who is still in his 30s.

In Japan where the concept of mentoring has always been taken more seriously, “senpai” is someone of a higher age, or senior and “kōhai” is a protégé or junior. Wisdom there is a prized commodity whereas here it’s all over when you hit 50 or 60.  Yet watching Liz Truss our Justice Secretary, a gangling 42 year old and clearly out of her depth, I lamented the lost wisdom of predecessors like Ken Clarke and  Jack Straw, Poor, young Liz. There was no justice in putting her in that job without the gravitas and wisdom to clothe her naked inexperience.

Cats like the aged have a problem too. They kill allegedly 55 million birds a year in the UK.  Their DNA is shockingly obvious. They are predators and pretty selfish creatures.  But the most successful pets in the world numerically.

Their relaunch comes in a new design. The more sedate pussy. Welcome to the “sausage cat” - apparently it’s a fashion wow (or miaow) in America coming your way soon - slowly.

Cats and the aged are not much alike but like cats we aged need to become more visible. We need to review how we’re perceived and relaunch ourselves if our “wisdom” and thoughtfulness is to be treated more seriously. Too many of us are grumpy, petulant lamenters of lost youth - critics of the young rather than enthusiastic spectators and coaches of a youth potentially better than we ever were. We need to get out of BA First lounges and start working again to show how useful we can be and how we can complement the skills of today’s dynamic leaders.

TOMORROW - an additional blog from Richard.