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 …….

A NIGHTINGALE SANG IN BERKELEY SQUARE

I may be right and I may be wrong but I’m perfectly willing to swear that the world has gone mad.
First we had that Brighton Elm – still standing and likely to remain so given the strength of views surrounding it. Their strategy will be anti-people as I gathered from a note pinned to the tree which proclaimed, as though this had been the product of much deep thought, “People can walk. Trees can’t”. (Presumably they’d never read the Lord of the Rings and heard of “ents”.) But those who are anti-elms (‘ulmaphobic’ is the correct term) the solution is for them to find a health and safety angle.

In Islington, for instance, a local resident complained about a pear tree which he said attracted wasps to whose stings he was allergic. It was promptly chopped down.

This is one of those dangerous pear trees. Any second now it’ll attack.

But it’s the sound of birdsong that drowned out sanity this week. In Chattenden in Medway there’s an old army base (Lodge Hill) for which great things had expensively been planned. 5000 houses, schools, shops, hospitals, green spaces. A great, imaginative, economy boosting scheme on a derelict site now covered in tumbleweed.

And nightingales.

They discovered it’s a habitat for the little darlings. So Natural England have designated it a site of Special Scientific Interest, and the economic rug has been temporarily pulled on any further work except for that by lawyers.

Imagine if Inner London developments had been like Lodge Hill. We’d be back in the Dark Ages still.

What’s that? You think we still are?

Well it’s attitudes like that that dominated my week. People asking what’s the point….we won’t have a free press much longer, the rich are getting richer, the new Pope wants the Falklands back, we have a school shortage crisis and there are no jobs…. so what’s the bleeding point?

Nearly everyone I know is a bit weary.

Except those busy making babies like it’s going out of fashion. The baby boom is back to 1950s levels – in 2010 the birth rate was 723k up from 600k a decade earlier.

“What do you mean no growth?”

So we now gave a shortage of school places, 250k nationally – nearly 90k short in London. Ageing population? Pah! Shortage of decent jobs? Double pah!!

Get into teaching boys and girls. Start at £27k in London, get £61k as an “excellent teacher” and over £120k as a head. Besides which there are sign-on perks like tax free bursaries of up to £20k.

Trust me there really is magic abroad in the air – provided you know where to look.

I WANNA TELL YOU A STORY

This week Max Bygraves died. 

He was a comedian, entertainer and impresario and was huge a few decades ago. Think Michael Parkinson + Michael McIntyre + Jonathan Ross and you’ll get the idea.  And this was his catchphrase. He was was always telling a story.

Now storytelling has invaded the business scene. We no longer have ‘business strategies’. We have ‘corporate narratives’ (although they look much the same and with a shudder I wonder what Lord of the Rings would look like written by McKinsey – ‘Frodo Objectives, SWOT analysis of the Hobbits etc.)

The real power of the story is shown in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs which teaches more about what really happened at Apple and why (ultimately) it worked.

  The story about Job’s passion for product and that belief that he was at the intersection of technology and art tells it all as does his love of design. Dewys Landon, a designer, expressed what Apple achieved beautifully when he said;

“Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants, but what he never dreamed he wanted; and when he gets it, he recognizes it as something he wanted all the time."

And then there’s Madmen, the TV story of 60’s and 70’s advertising – was it really like that Don? Don Draper lit a Marlboro and thought wistfully for a while.

No. In Britain it was much better and much worse. Sex, drugs and rock’n roll. The skirts were short and the tempers shorter. Account Directors had races in their Porsches down Park Lane. Sexual harassment was the norm. People lost days of their life in an alcoholic haze and still did great ads. And that was the real point to the story. Great, brave, funny and new advertising that clients never dreamt they wanted and then realised they wanted all the time.

Poor boring madman Don. He should have settled on being an accountant.

The real story of breakthrough success is always accompanied by excess. The bankers at their peak, British advertising, Australian cricket at its pomp, Tracey Emin, Gordon Ramsay, and Christopher Hitchens. True genius seems to burn life’s candle at both ends (and in the middle.)

The story of success, endeavour and risk is usually exciting, fun and a journey of surprises.

I wanna tell you a story because stories look truth in the face.

Stories are about people and as the Gradgrind of advertising Martin Sorrell tells us:

“All business decisions are marketing decisions and all marketing decisions are about people”

And all people are into stories. Because that’s what life is – one big story and not a spreadsheet.

A PERSPECTIVE FROM HOLLYWOOD AND BOLLYWOOD ON 2010

We’ll shortly be bombarded in the media by the “anguishings” of economists and gurus about 2010. So I thought I’d start by going instead to the world of film, with which I grew better acquainted over Christmas, for some pointers.

“This is my show” (Anil Kapoor as Prem Kapur the gameshow host from Slumdog Millionaire.)

As he felt his own control oozing away, Prem got more and more frustrated. Yet we’d all better stop trying to run things and start trying to steer them. However much we huff and puff the age of the Fat Controller is over. Events of 2010 proved just how out of control the bullies are.

“Doubt is not a luxury we can afford any more” (Elastigirl from the Incredibles.)

It was Lord Denning who said “people pay us for our certainties not our doubts” and Shakespeare more tersely “our doubts are traitors”. Whilst we have never lived in more complex times with information overload and unprecedented events happening at random we need to have a sense of clarity and an unfailing determination to be decisive if we are to survive. Better to be wrong than die in a sea of vaccilation.

“Your book is going to change the world.” Stanley Tucci (as Paul Child) from Julie and Julia.

As a writer I always believe this secretly although I doubt if it’s true. Yet the optimist that visualises the best result is the one more determined to go for it. Who’d ever start a film like Titanic, Avatar or Lord of the Rings without such an indomitable belief? There’s never been a better time to go for it.

 “Impossible. Impossible. Nothing is impossible. Dig little mouse. Dig.” Matthew Broderick (as Philippe Gaston) from Ladyhawke.

This irrepressible positivism allied to nothing any longer being inviolate, from the corporate reputations of BP and Toyota to the hero to zero slide of various politicians in 2010 (in Nick Clegg’s case from zero to hero to Nero), underpins the new world order. Since nothing is impossible just do it. And remember Rutger Hauer (star of Ladyhawke) in those bizarre Guinness commercials. He said “just keep an open mind”.

Time I’d suggest to watch more films and read fewer Harvard Business Reviews. When truth is stranger than fiction it’s time to go to fiction for inspiration.

This is the first of a series of blogs to mark the New Year – enjoy them.