Honesty

I’ve been loving the new series of Mad Men, the television drama set in the Sixties at a New York advertising agency where men are men, and women are either pregnant or have typewriters sewn to their fingertips.

Every week I fall for the style and sophistication, the clothes and the power, but it goes hand in hand with smoking and drinking, rampant sexism and lack of morals. It’s like watching a Premier League football team.

In Mad Men they make no bones about how advertising manipulates the great unwashed in to buying stuff they really don’t need, at prices they can’t afford, with slogans they can’t understand. They remind us constantly that success is all a matter of ripping off other people’s ideas and not letting your clients know that you’re making it up as you go along.

There’s a random catchphrase site on the web just now called The Advertising Slogan Generator, and it really shows up how stupid the whole industry is. Go to it and you type in the name of your product then wait while it makes up a slogan for your campaign. I typed in the word Flatulence and got “We Bring Good Flatulence In To Your Life”, and it then gave me alternatives like “You Can Be Sure Of Flatulence”, “Watch Out There’s Flatulence About”, “The Flatulence Of Champions” and, my favourite, “Do You Love Your Flatulence Enough To Share It?”.

This selling nonsense has made me wonder how much better it would be if advertisers just admitted the truth about their dark art and we all got back to telling the plain facts about products. I know that in an ad man’s dictionary the word Description lies next to Deception, Truth next to Twaddle, and Fact next to Fantasy but I can dream, can’t I, of how life changing it would be if they started to tell the whole story?

Wouldn’t you stop to look twice at a billboard with “Global Warming – We Might Just Have Made It Up”? Wouldn’t you be riveted by an ad that said something like “Selfish? Got Nothing To Offer? Make A Career In Banking.”

In these days of celebrities getting accused of textual harassment, there’s an advert running in magazines and papers for a mobile telephone company that asks “What would you do with unlimited texts?”. Why not add the truthful answer to it? Something like “I’d get splashed all over the papers, then chucked out of my home and have to give my wife fifty per cent of my earnings.”

Comedian and writer Ricky Gervais made a movie last year called The Invention Of Lying about a society that always tells the truth to each other. I’d be lying if I said the movie was any good, but it did make me smile at one point with an honest advertising slogan on the side of one bus that said “Pepsi. For When There’s No Coke”.

It’s too late for me to go in to the advertising game now, but if I did then I would ask to be given the difficult accounts and then I’d set about making them more honest. Forget selling Viagra with photos of weedy men turned in to supermen. Why not just a slogan like “Viagra. Something For The Weak End.”

Or I could help Toyota with something along the lines of “In A Hurry? Try Our Cars. We Stop For No One.”

Honesty! That’s what we all need.

Hong Kong Garden

If the blog seems a bit confused this week it’s simply that my body is just back from Hong Kong but my head is still half way over the Middle East, racing to get back and catch up as I try to get some sleep.

Before I flew to the Far East, I took my daughters to the first anniversary party for the Michael Jackson musical Thriller. The noise was deafening as the cast and friends packed a London nightclub and we had to shout over the chatter and music. I was especially impressed with the cast members who played the Jackson Five in their young days and had grown big, bushy hairstyles for the role.

I jokingly shouted to my older daughter “I’m going to get an afro”. She shouted back that this was a great idea and I should do it as soon as possible. Disappointed that she hadn’t laughed at the idea of me looking like an extra from Car Wash, I carried on drinking until my youngest came up very excited. “Who’s going to get your Blackberry phone?”, she asked. I had no clue what she was on about until she shouted “Annalie says you’re going to get an iPhone”.

iPhones were in plentiful supply in Hong Kong, but there were no afro hairstyles that I could see. I had a great, tiring time, and you can still see the video blogs I kept if you wish. The link is below. Check out especially the video where I had my feet nibbled by fish at the Kiss Kiss Fish Spa. It was very unenjoyable for me but our listeners loved it as I was in pain. What a kind lot.

I got to fly a 747 Jumbo plane in a simulator used to test Cathay Pacific’s pilots so I now know how to make the flight go slower and last longer. This is important as I had watched the movie An Education on the way over but fell asleep so had to start it again and we landed about ten minutes from the end. So if you know what happens in that film let me know. It’s up for an Oscar and I’ll be the only person who doesn’t know if it has a happy ending.

While recording in Ladies’ Market on Wednesday a lady came up to me and told me more about myself than is natural. She wasn’t a fortune teller but had recognised me and reads my blog, has watched my shows, and now watches my wife on Shopping TV. She felt we had something in common as her husband stars in the TV show Casualty. On talking to him, though, I found he’s a driver for the cast who was once asked to stand in as an extra in a crowd scene. Showbiz is glam isn’t it?

Now I’m home to cold, frost and sleet, and life is starting to get back to normal. But I’m armed with the knowledge of what the year ahead has in store for me as I had my fortune read twice. The first reader, a Feng Shui expert, said I was soft on the outside but metal on the inside and I have to take fish oil capsules to stop the metal corroding. The second fortune teller said I was like a Princess from centuries ago and that, sadly, like her, I would not get a new husband in the next year. I’m gutted.

If you want to catch up on my adventures, watch the videos at http://www.smoothradiolondon.co.uk/presenters-shows/shows-xmw1/graham-dene-breakfast-show-myfc/win-a-fantastic-trip-to-hong-kong/pvhmwfz7/promo-pauls-blog/