YOU CAN DO ANYTHING BUT NEVER GO AGAINST THE FAMILY (THE GODFATHER)

This week has been all about families, led of course, by that Meghan/Harry interview. Becoming part of a family from the outside has never been easy. Families have their rules, black sheep and in-jokes. But when it comes to the Monarchy it gets a whole lot harder especially when the Institution is heralded as the “Greatest Show on Earth” and as a newcomer you don’t have a proper part.

I felt sorry for Meghan; it must have been a shock. She’s a decent actress – watch “Suits” and you’ll see -  and like many actresses full of herself. For her it must have been like finding herself on stage and realising she didn’t know her part. Of course she felt suicidal. Isn’t this dilemma one of the biggest nightmares anyone can have?

Add to this the problem of the other family – the courtiers and Royal Household long known for their hostility to outsiders, change and any failure of protocol (did she curtsey deeply enough?) – and she was scuppered. 

Harry, unsurprisingly, is a lost soul doing his best to support her and stamping on everyone’s toes.  It was a poisonous cocktail.

But what a pity they did that interview. Better by far to have faded into the glorious Californian sunset. 

Rule One with family:  Never go against it. Go public with your grumbles and that’ll unite them against you, binding them like superglue. Oprah Winfrey may have done more to close the ranks of Windsor than anything else could have done. Families are united by love, loyalty and self-protection even when they hate each other.

In “Suits” the series about a New York law firm in which Meghan appeared, the lead figure (Harvey Specter – a great name for a lawyer reputed to one of the best in Manhattan) at some point says of the firm Pearson Specter Litt:

“We are not colleagues. We are not friends. We are family.”   

The best companies to work for are those that create the ambiance of a family full of empathy, practical jokes, the desire to celebrate success and hunker down when things go wrong. I’ve heard this described as “teamwork”. It just isn’t. It’s “family” which is teamwork at a completely different level.

The current trouble is Zoom meetings are counter family, functional affairs that eventually wear down all feelings. No wonder then that the CEO of Goldman Sachs recently described them and working from home as an aberration that he was going to stamp out as soon as possible. There’s no doubt that working from home for many is efficient and time-saving but it’s a bit like eating a roast without gravy. The essential constituent of face-to-face interaction and creativity is missing.

This may not concern some whose only mission in life is efficiency and productivity. The Times had a survey last week on “The Future of Advertising”. In it the consensus was that the key, number one ingredient of advertising was “creativity”. Surprise. Surprise. Well yes. Because marketers today score it number eight behind stuff like social media strategy. Absurd.

Family and creativity come from the same emotional stable. It’s unlikely that Saatchi and Saatchi or Collett Dickinson Pearce would have been the forces they were if they’d worked from home. Home for many in my day was the office where the real family lived, played, fought and created.

The Monarchy may be flawed but its ability to turn on pageantry and strike awe into hearts is amazing. The family from hell but what a story. Just don’t go against them.

THE NOT SO SUBTLE ART OF LYING

Having spent a considerable part of my life in advertising it would be fair to say some of it’s been in the company of the Lord of Mendacity. Richard French a doyen of the ad business, was asked at a party what he did and said: “Me? I’m a professional liar”. He did it to get a laugh which he got.

Over the past few years I’ve watched aghast at the example politicians and others are setting to a generation of young people to believe it’s perfectly OK to tell whoppers. No longer “the dog ate my homework.”  Instead “we were burgled last night; they wrecked everything. It was terrible… and my gran got whacked above her left eye and is badly bruised poor thing. They got away with TV, Cocker-Poodle and worst of all our Lenovo with my homework” (well done, specifics help add veracity). 

Strangely the more punctiliously regulated world of advertising is virtually devoid of lies now. 

I recall hearing a golden moment on a terrible night for the Tories in 1992 as their share of vote collapsed to Tony Blair. Tory spokespeople tried to eke out comfort by analysing swings so as to try and gild that crock of disaster. Chris Patten, Party Chairman, was interviewed and asked whether he’d admit this had been a bad night for the Conservatives. 

He retorted crossly that it had not been bad; instead it’d been an absolutely ghastly night. And he added when asked why it had gone wrong that the voters had said they didn’t like the Tories and they would have to change. Patten demonstrated the power of truth in putting down journalists wearing earpieces being instructed on the questions they should ask and failing to hear that word “ghastly.” 

Older generations were made to believe telling the truth was important. Getting away with it is the new cool way of behaving. Find a £20 note on the ground and say “nice one” not “whose is it?”. There was the doubtless apocryphal story of the traffic cop saying  as he pulled over a young man for exceeding the speed limit “I’ve spent all day waiting for someone speeding” to which the culprit said “I got here as fast as I could.” And, of course he got off.

Our biggest conundrum in politics is Boris who, despite the Brexit falsehoods about Turkey entering the EU and those slogans on that campaign bus, has earned a certain respect from the electorate for his barefaced bravado. I remember once seeing him interviewed about his exotic private life. He harrumphed and described himself in the third person as a scoundrel whose behaviour was execrable. The conservatives are currently 13% points ahead of Labour much as Trump is far ahead of his Republican rivals despite his extraordinary untruthfulness.

But it’s getting worse. Actor Miles Fisher described as a deep-fake viral creator has impersonated Tom Cruise so well on Tik Tok we are inevitably heading to a world of visual lying.

There comes a time when we need to say “enough”. Lying, like shoplifting, like driving whilst drunk, like bullying needs to be decried. If the post-Covid “build back better” campaign is to have any credibility telling the truth needs to be applauded and its ugly brother, lying, needs to be shown up and shamed.

Final point. Journalists need to be less aggressive. Their contemptuous behaviour has added fuel to the Liar’s party. Telling fibs to a sneering ogre of an interviewer seems almost acceptable.

Almost. But not quite.  Time for us all to be more sceptical.

IS THIS REAL LIFE OR IS THIS JUST FANTASY?

I’ve been staring at a blank page for half an hour or so with that Queen song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ drifting in and out of my mind. I don’t know the answer. We’re living in limbo and it’s very strange.

Will I ever wear a tie again? Will I ever wear a suit again or will I, in rebellion against dress-down-coronavirus, start to dress like a dandy – velvet suits, jazzy waistcoats and cravat? Perhaps a monocle. And certainly a cigarette holder? Dare I take up smoking again? Balkan Sobranie, naturally, if I do. Somehow or another I feel the rustling desire to make a dramatic, rebellious statement.

Watching television has been depressing. Terrestrial TV has run out of ideas. Has run out of ideas. Repeat that. And again. My splendid 98 year old mother in law laments the omnipresent Poirot and his blasted little grey cells and Midsomer murders…”I saw them all the first time and I didn’t much like them then.”

But it’s the tragic low budget, low-idea ads that are the worst of all. I spent twenty, happy years in advertising alongside or in competition with legends who created glorious advertising like that for Sainsburys, the Economist, Heineken, Carling, Araldite, Nike and Heinz. 

There is so little I like now. Back then clever people wrote great jokes or sumptuous ideas and film makers like Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and others then turned them into magic.

There was an exception recently for Brut. It’s amazing that this strong smelling lotion is still around. It was something we, at our agency, once advertised. The male perfume – “the great smell of Brut” – was launched with advertising featuring Henry Cooper. So we proposed creating new advertising to bridge the gap since it had been on TV with the theme: “Henry’s back with the great smell of Brut” featuring Lenny Henry. The client abruptly rejected it. Only now do I think it was because Lenny is black. 

That was 30 years ago. Brut is back on TV with hard man Vinnie Jones saying with a scowl in effect “stop poncing around with this glitzy ad you idiots it just smells good”. At this point a voice says “here’s the horse” and on walks a white horse to Vinnie’s disgust. There are advertising men through the ages who’ve wanted to get an irrelevant horse into a TV commercial and in lockdown it’s happened.

What will the high street look like when the shackles are removed? Well, expect an instant horror show of Poundland’s and Charity Shops but then a reinvention, balancing functional online with theatre and romance. In the rather tragic story of Mr Selfridge we saw a retail magician at work. What we shall need are magicians, impresarios and jugglers who create appetite appeal to seduce people who then buy online. Mere boring online will lose out as Apple brilliantly showed in their sexy Apple stores.

The hunger for fantasy and excitement is pent up and huge. The opportunity is for showmanship and pzaz. Curiously the desire to go out and shop “using real money” is acute. Restaurants that manage to charm and create that “let’s have another drink" ambiance will thrive.  Hurry back Corbyn & King. 

Real life we have learnt is rather dull. We are mostly sensible and rule abiding but at the back of our minds is the urge from time to time to be a bit naughty, to do something impulsive and delicious. Deliveroo and Amazon are the least naughty, geekiest operations I know.

Time soon to let our hair down.

Tequila!

STOP RE-WRITING HISTORY

During the lockdown a lot’s been written about sleep. Until recently I’ve done rather a lot of it without thinking about it. But now I’m sleeping less well with uneasy dreams full of historic regret. It’s all rather bizarre. I re-live innings I played in cricket and lament that rash shot I made 50 years ago or a presentation I made which I spoilt by making a casual remark which like an ink blot interrupted the clean flow or an argument that I shouldn’t have had. I wake up feeling guilty and tired.

Talking of historic regret I see university applications for History are in marked decline. I  understand why. There’s an increasing trend shifting from analysis and balance to blame. 

The first line of L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go Between” (and later a film) was

“The past was a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

In my childhood there were no computers, calculators, hardly any TVs or household appliances. Children were regularly beaten at school and at home. Capital punishment was accepted as a norm for murder. We had amateurs and professionals in sport. Woman were second class. It was awful in retrospect but then it was just how things were. Doubtless in 50 years people will look back at 2021 and say it was terrible that so few women held top jobs and how lacking in diversity we were or will some freakish change of thinking lead us to be living in Gilead and The Handmaid’s Tale?

A Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham University, Kehinde Andrews, made himself rather unpopular with some people by describing Winston Churchill as a 'white supremacist' in a debate at Churchill College, Cambridge and saying modern Britain is 'based on racism'.  He also thinks the British Empire was 'far worse than the Nazis'.

Rather than frothing at mouth and dismissing what he’d said as nonsense, I thought he made some interesting points albeit in a slightly unfocused, hysterical way. The trouble with demagogues is I’ve never been able to take them seriously except in one respect. They set a poor example to the young in excluding the possibility of rational debate.

I found that moment in 2016 when the American Quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, first took the knee moving and extraordinary. Since then it’s become a little tiresome because it’s now become ritualistic not symbolic. 

If you don’t do it you’re accused of being “a silently complicit racist” which is rather silly. But not as silly as seeing people like Keir Starmer doing it.

The history of humankind is a mess. Should we demand reparation from Denmark, Norway and Sweden for damage the Vikings did to Britain in the 8th century? The Lindisfarne Raid of 793 was particularly nasty. Alcuin the scholar who worked with Charlemagne described how the ground was “spattered with the blood of the priests of God”. Or the French for the appalling way they treated us after the Battle of Hasting. Or the impudent Dutch for seizing the throne in 1689.

Some very nasty things happened in the past. We can’t change that. What we can do is study them and ensure we are cured of the instincts and practices that led to Lindisfarne (mind you, it might be interesting to take the Norwegians, Swedes and Danes to the European Court just to see the expressions on their faces.)

The history of the world is exciting. It’s crammed with progress;  full of good and bad things. If all we focus on are the bad things we are looking at and learning only half the story.

DO I REALLY CARE ANY MORE?

Well, actually I do but not so much recently. So long as we had the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, terrible infection and mortality figures from Covid and a rampant tweeting Donald Trump we had plenty to worry about and get angry about.

Suddenly Brexit is done, vaccinations are happening and, good heavens, at an alarmingly impressive rate of knots, and in a well organised way, and the Donald is silent and has gone. 

The sun is out and much of the world has snow. It’s chilly as winters should be. The critical issues that have been keeping us awake are resolved or resolving. There ‘s light at the end of all the clichés.

But things are getting worse. Because the little things like breakdowns in IT, a collapse in the Royal Mail meaning a friend called to say his Christmas card from us had only just arrived, a missed item in a supermarket delivery, oversleeping or an irritating paper cut have suddenly become issues.

With lockdown our world has shrunk. Events outside until now kept us aware of where we stood…maybe angry, enraged or alarmed but as part of a greater whole. Now we’ve become more inconsequential and vulnerable. I don’t get angry now; I just get irritated and (word of the week) peevish. Little things prey on my mind.

I tried apathy. But I do care. I don’t want to be alone. John Donne said:

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” 

 But Brexit has seen to that, Scottish Independence may go further and lockdown, social distancing, masks and isolation have extinguished togetherness further. Goodbye untrammelled travel across Europe, goodbye hugs, smiles and kisses. It’s grumpy time for many.

Lunch is a thing of the past, I’ve forgotten how. I was thinking about Odin’s my favourite restaurant (long since ruined and then closed by barbarian owners) where conversation spilt like wine across the table. Real Masters of the Universe food and wine. Real original thinking. Or was it more ordinary…a fantasy I’m remembering?

Talking of fantasy I see some pundit economists are predicting a third quarter 2021 through 2022 boom in the global economy. Well, I wish. But an awful lot of retraining will have to happen as unemployment figures soar in hospitality, finance, retail, automotive and travel. That lot accounts for 8 ½ million jobs in the UK alone.

The Marylebone High Street I recall in 1960’s was full of gaps, lots of charity shops in prime sites, drear and uninviting. Until now this envy of the retail world was pretty ghastly back then. So, for sure, recovery and boom may well occur but not for some time, I fear, for most of us. The acid test will be whether the start-up revolution about which I’ve enthused really takes off but if it does (and  I wish fervently it does) it will take a while to bed down.

I am neither a pessimist nor an apathetic. I still feel part of this game of life and that I can make perhaps a small difference. And I do have a solution. Given the issue that will drive the economy is not money alone but human energy, enterprise and resolution. So, when we can, I’d ship as many young people as possible to the Democratic United States of America, to New York and say “get a taste of this for upbeat, chutzpah and energy and bring that back here”.  Show how much the Americans care. It’s infectious but in a good way.

LEARNING TO BE HUMAN AGAIN

One of the big problems with the lockdown and a year of caution has been to restrain our human impulses. Rather than smiling and saying “Good Morning – isn’t it a glorious day” we now tend to walk past, face averted, or cross to the other side of the road.  We’ve lost the art of geniality and affection.

What started as a mildly flirtatious elbow nudge to replace handshakes has now gone, to be replaced by nothing. In fact, meeting people just feels rather awkward now.

We live in a world of masks and many think it’ll remain like this and so I thought too until the Saturday before last. My wife and I had our Covid vaccinations. Rather sportingly it was held in the Grandstand at Brighton Race-Course. The tally-ho atmosphere was still in the air helped by the cheeriness of the squads of volunteers keeping things moving, directing us from the car park, cheering us up. It was a venue of extraordinary purpose, goodwill and efficiency. The whole event had been rigorously planned and rehearsed. Everyone was so focused, charming and happy. On that Saturday the jokey reference to “Jab’s Army” became a jolly reality.

We are often swift to knock ourselves and government but this, together with the nimble footedness of our vaccination acquisition, shows how brilliant the British can be when we try. We have a strong acting and performance culture and this was compelling theatre. We were smiling again and we’d thought smiling was history.

Later in the week we went through a strangely unusual process of purchasing something complex entirely online. It reminded me of “Sleepless in Seattle” as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan ping messages to each other … Ping “You’ve got mail”

It was brilliant. We thought about the answers to each question as did Rojane on a few occasions (“Please bear with me, Richard”) she checked something or maybe asked her supervisor.  Because of the thoroughness of the purchase journey, we felt safer and reassured that we were not making any “I wish I hadn’t done that” mistakes. Jack Welch, the legendary Chairman/CEO of GE when it was a great company, once said he wished he could eliminate human contact and thus human error. I always thought he was wrong. We need human beings and even human error which allows us to say “Sorry”

Our Waitrose delivery came on Friday. The driver, a beaming, apologetic young lady, explained that they’d had an IT breakdown and that our order might be short of a few items and that she was very sorry if this was the case. I said I was sure they’d tried their best. She beamed more and said all her customers were being so nice and understanding. In fact, the order was complete bar one item, the root vegetable and kale soup mix. My beaming driver left (I wanted her to say “beam me up Scottie”) 

I reported the shortage to Waitrose Customer Service plus the inclusion of one item we hadn’t wanted – Duchy Maple Syrup – a lovely syrup but an unopenable bottle except by using a monkey wrench.

Here’s the reply I got:

“I'm glad to hear you had such a pleasant delivery driver today, I'll make sure to pass that on to the branch. I haven't heard the term "monkey wrench" in quite some time so I have to thank you for reminding of that!”

Human beings like this who are smart, funny, happy and who look at you, smile or write charmingly are the answer.  I’ve had a good week. Thanks everyone.

EXCITE PEOPLE, DON'T JUST MAKE THEM DO EXAMS

I’ve been worrying about education, that we’ve become obsessed with grades rather than in helping inspire people, putting it simply, to find joy in life and their talent.

‘To educate’ comes from the Latin and means to draw out. Great education is about inspiring, nurturing the special talent people have, not ramming in facts.

Here’s what Mr Gradgrind said in Charles Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’:

“Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals like this.” 

Dickens was satirising a Victorian school of thought here. He, too, worried about education. He writes about the gloriously named Dotheboys Hall in ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. We’ve come a long way since then but there’s still an obsession about the loss of “learning time” amongst  5 year olds. In Finland they save “learning time” until children are 7 not 5 years old. 

Argo Gosh is a successful entrepreneur in Brighton whose achievements are immense. He told me his greatest period of learning ever was when he had a whole term off school so, from May to September he, his siblings and friends spent their time building an absolutely enormous tree house and being outside in the fresh air learning about life, teamwork and carpentry.

My greatest period of learning was at University not in libraries nor at lectures but talking about all sorts of things to clever, open minded and entertaining friends who made me think. What I acquired was an appetite for life, an appetite that I’ve never lost.

Recently I said that being proved wrong is exciting; discovering my preconceptions or prejudices are simply misplaced; that’s called discovery.

The essence of education is discovery. It’s about opening a book and finding a new world. It’s about going to a theatre (well it used to be) and losing yourself in a story like ‘Hamlet’ you’ve seen and heard countless times before.

What teachers can’t teach - but they can inspire it in you (if you are lucky enough to find a good one) is to be an enthusiastic and energetic champion of an idea, painting, piece of music or piece of science. Brian Cox makes science hum with excitement in a way an average physics teacher won’t do.

They say ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’; well, I’m a rather old dog and I’m daily learning new stuff often from the infectious optimism of young people.

John Sculley, ex Apple said over 30 years ago “In today’s world we need impresarios and wizards.” In today’s Covid world, John, even more so.

We need to design a new future and we can’t do that by applying old tricks. We should be reconsidering our whole education system and rather than ramming maths into reluctant heads find what latent sparks of talent exist there and encourage them to burst into flames.

Einstein was, apparently, not especially talented at school. A more plausible explanation is that his teachers failed to spot that latent genius.

We are on the verge of a potentially exciting period of innovation and an energy boost – this typically happens after a catastrophe.

We need to ignite passion, discovery, excitement and stop being didactic.

On Saturday I heard a young, successful MD of a successful business (Paul Barratt) talk with passion about what he learnt from business books. Not facts. Not formulae. Not tool kits. No. Ideas. Visions. Dreams. Magic.

That’s just what we need. In schools. At Universities. In business. Everywhere. ‘A’ levels are not the answer to a better, happier world. 

But excitement is.