It’s a guilty pleasure. Jeering at the candidates’ mistakes that all seem so obvious from the safety of your sofa, arguing with Lord Sugarpuff’s boardroom decisions and deriding the outrageously scripted puns.
But once again what strikes me is how horribly uncooperative the women are when they have to work together.
It’s perplexing and also disturbing to watch how undermining they are, and how useless they are at backing each other up.
The men are as you’d expect — swinging cocks, jockeying for the Alpha Male position.
Hear me ROAR
But they often gel as a go-getting team.
Watching the series this time with my daughter — who is on the brink of taking her options at school, wondering what to do with her life — I was a bit embarrassed at how rubbish the women are.
What does this look like through her eyes?
I know it’s only a game show, produced to create TV ratings, but watching the catty ripostes and lack of support amongst the women’s team reminded me of my own experiences working in a male-dominated business.
Women are not very kind to each other in business.
I’ve been talking to another blogger fourhillsfarm64 about the legacy of being a child who has grown up and lived with the long-term disease and death of a parent (or loved one).
I’ve covered some of my own thoughts and experiences on this in previous posts.
The outside calm and the inside crying
My father was disabled and horribly ill for most of my life, from the age of 10 to 45. I got so hardened to grief, shock, sadness.
I grew an emotional shell so that I could crawl, tortoise-like, through the everyday awfulness.
Yet a line of poetry, a word in a book, a certain song; hearing the echoes of a late evening train going away in the distance.
Then the shell might crack.
Then the stupid tears might soak my face and hair in silent senseless weeping.
Lying in my small box room, overwhelmed with a helpless, hopeless feeling that elsewhere, Life was happening.
That something important had been taken away from me, before I’d even got the chance to know what it was.
Bloody Shell
A shell can offer good hard protection in life. But it also hardened me to the misfortunes of others.
Where others see complete tragedy — a family divorce — a house sale falling through — a lost ring of sentimental value — I quite often think (only to myself, of course) “Meh – why are they so upset? It’s not like anyone’s DYING… … it’s not like anyone’s got an INCURABLE DISEASE or anything…”
Harsh but true of me. Although I don’t like to admit it.
My childhood hero
I thought I was like Spock.
I mustn’t show emotion. Emotion equalled weakness. And weakness meant I’d be unable to carry on.
In my young adulthood it meant I was probably not a very good friend to those who needed my warmth and friendship.
It’s been hard for me to soften up, and to understand what I lost — and the shell I gained.
These days I can be moved to tears when I see or read about human kindness and compassion.
All it takes is friendly word at a sad moment. An unexpected offer of support. And I’m suddenly human after all.
But hey, thanks Spock. You are, and always will be, my friend.
I hate feeling that I’m ‘past it’. That maybe, just maybe, I’m now considered ‘too old’ to be a writer in advertising and marketing.
This insecurity is all in my own head. Probably.
But I’ve been mulling (ooh I love a good mull) over my 25-odd years in the business, and I’ve noticed a running theme.
Good copywriters have the ability to constantly reinvent themselves.
Creative writers like me who joined the industry in the late 80s (please don’t do the maths), and who are still working in it today, have had the ability to keep on changing.
We moved from pure advertising (amusing TV ads, crazy radio scripts, snappy 1-line posters and press ads) to integrated advertising (getting into response mechanisms — phone numbers, coupons).
COUPONS! Anybody here remember ‘Order today by completing and returning the coupon’ ads?
No?
You obviously haven’t lived.
John Caples. A fine example of a coupon ad.
We worked without email. Or the internet.
We had to do our research using big, fat factual books.
And spend the entire afternoon at vast photo libraries, just to find one amusing image of a cat.
Oh yes. Things have certainly moved on.
Markets changed. Needs changed.
We transformed ourselves from through-the-line (writing everything from DRTV to direct response press and posters) to below-the-line (direct mail, door-drops, POS).
We evolved from results-based direct marketing (‘Check out my 0.5% pull on this muthafucken leaflet dude!’) to the metrics and real-time evaluation of digital marketing.
We eventually went ‘media neutral’, until, Borg-like, we were fully assimilated into the web via digital, social media – and content creation.
We haven’t lumbered aimlessly, brainlessly, crashing through a changing world towards our doom.
Today’s copywriter survivors have been constantly refining their predatory skills, sharpening words, keeping canny, staying fit enough to find the next meal.
Then. It occurred to me.
I’m (kind of) happy to be thought of as a dinosaur. Because dinosaurs were not the evolutionary end.
They were just the beginning.
They eventually evolved into birds.
And birds can fly anywhere.
‘Ch- ch- ch- changes…’
Whether you write brochures, blog to order, or tweet wit, copywriters of the world, of all ages, crank up that volume and sing along…
You say you want a revolution
Well you know
We’d all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well you know
We’d all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright…
I don’t read horror books any more (I still watch horror films though). So, I was just looking through one of the many boxes of books I still haven’t unpacked since moving house, when Misery kind of fell into my hand. Then it sort of opened.
Then my eyes started reading it.
My hand turned the pages.
And I was gently pulled into another world.
SLIPPED AWAY? SHE JUST SLIPPED AWAY?
Slipped Away!
Maybe because it’s written from a writer’s point of view: the way King describes ‘falling through the hole in the paper’ is a perfect way to describe how hours, days, nights can be eaten up once your mind has gone to the Other Place.
The Other Place where you can make dreams feel real, where you are making people, ideas, places, stories out of your own mind and the white space is your sky where you can fly free.
So, I ‘accidentally’ read Misery from front to back again in no time at all.
However, now I’m older, I read the same book from a slightly different perspective. I dwelt less on the psychological terror, and more on the idea that if a writer truly was locked away with no distractions, no bars, no alcohol, no children, no boy/girlfriends, would they really start to produce their best work?
Was it Ted Hughes who locked away Sylvia Plath in her room, because he knew if she was distracted by ‘life’ she wouldn’t write?
I sometimes wonder how productive (or creative) it really is to spend time alone.
Mind you, there might be something in it.
I was happily falling through ‘the hole in the paper’ myself just then, when I was interrupted with Breaking News that one of the cats is coughing up a hairball.
Still don’t think I would apply for the Misery School of Writing though.
I am in one of those stupid defeatist moods where I keep typing stuff then deleting it.
The Inner-Critic is on my shoulder poking and laughing at my blog entries and calling me a pretentious twat.
Or else he’s yawning and saying how boring it is.
Criticism.
It can make you improve. Energize you to do better.
Or it can drag you down. Put you in your place and make you feel the inertia.
I remember my first ‘crits’ at college. The hot, wrenching physical pain of your work being picked to pieces, dissected and destroyed in front of your peers.
The feeling that please pleasePLEASE make the moving finger move on, move away, away, from my work to settle on someone else … and please, please, please let them get a harsher roasting than me.
Measuring my own shame against someone else’s.
It’s what you end up doing.
When your heart is pinned to a wall (or a page), everyone has the right to laugh at it.
Hate it.
Love it.
Yet when you know the glow, that sunshine feeling inside that says ‘Hey you must’ve done alright!’ any criticism that’s served becomes a nice little side-dish. You feel positive. You can take the comments forward to make your next paper heart.
As an advertising copywriter, I’ve worked with too many people who told me that the words don’t matter.
If I’d ever had the courage, I’d have told them they should perhaps shut their mouths and open their minds.
A jolly little gingerbread man with an icing smile? A jelly baby’s head?
A fish cake?
My reason for being is to be eaten.
My cakey philosopher friend Chris explains that their very reason for being, is to be eaten.
“They’re sad because they feel only fear, emptiness and despair in this world. You must complete them, and make them whole, by consuming them. Fulfil their purpose, set them free of the bondage in which they exist.”
It’s the Unbearable Lightness of Being Sponge Cake.
So I’ve brought up both of my children up to be individuals.
To celebrate that everyone is different.
To understand that being unique is something to take pride in.
Listen up Sheeple!
My son is very different to most 10 year old boys. Not because he has Aspergers Syndrome or Autistic Spectrum Disorder … he really is quite eccentric.
His conversations about previous and current Cartoon Network logos and TV idents are long and detailed.
His knowledge of the London Underground system and its trains is, well, very deep.
His ability to make live action and stop-frame films, animate cartoons, code games and sound edit music and SFX using professional levels of software is really quite astounding.
All these things we celebrate.
But as he gets older, the one visible thing we’re finding harder to cheer on is his love of hats.
Hats Life…
He started collecting hats about 5 or so years ago, moving from dressing up in toy policeman’s helmets to various kinds of caps, sailor’s berets, dress uniform and professional headgear.
The pride of his collection – the one he spent his birthday money on last year – is a Deerstalker Hat, known more commonly as a ‘Sherlock Holmes’ hat.
He loves this hat.
This hat (using my amateur psycho-analysis) defines him: he is calm, cool and intelligent when he wears The Hat. He is someone Important. Someone who is finding out about the world through logic and thorough examination.
So he wears The Hat every day.
Every single day. Even in the blazing sun.
Even when the rest of him is incongruously dressed in smart school uniform.
He’s had many comments of course – ‘Hello Sherlock!’ – “Love the hat!” – ‘Where’s Dr Watson?’ – from well-meaning passers-by, teachers and school fellows.
But he bears it all quite amicably.
And as he goes to a small (fairly) friendly church school, he has been accepted as a unique boy with a love of hats. His hats were even mentioned in the school award he won, and in his end of year report.
But now things have to change.
Hats off
I hate myself, but I have begun to ban The Hat.
To make him change. To make him ‘look like the others’.
To ensure he ‘doesn’t stand out’ from the crowd.
Why?
Because he is undergoing what they call Transition to Secondary School.
Although a very young 10, the school system in the UK means he has to go to ‘big’ school after this summer.
I’ve been liaising with his current Junior School and his new school to help him move up without too much anxiety, as he has had a few problems in the past.
At my initial meeting with the SENco (Special Ed.) teacher the very first question she asked me was,
“Will he be wearing his hat to school?”
I’d already been thinking about this. And I felt he needed to be protected from a world that might not be so kind to him as the one he’s been used to.
So I’ve lied to him.
I’ve told him The Hat is not school uniform, and he will not be allowed to wear it when he moves up to Secondary School.
There it goes.
Years and years of careful parenting about celebrating difference and staying true to yourself.
Dumped because of a Sherlock Holmes Hat.
A love/hat Relationship
You might not agree with my decision.
But I know how cruel children can be. How easy to is to pick out the vulnerable one in the crowd. To hound and harry until they get the reaction they want.
As the SENco said, there is a small gap between being liked and admired for your individuality, and being looked down on and cut out from friendships for being a ‘weirdo’.
I am still asking myself‘Why do I have to change a boy to fit in with society?’
I am still staying‘Why can’t society be the one to change — and accept a unique boy?’
In the meantime I am still saying no Hat to my boy.
I’m hoping he’ll understand one day that I would never want to take away part of his brilliant and endearing personality: I was only trying to protect him.
Still. I hate myself for it.
The Hat
If this blog post resonated with you, maybe you’d like to see this Boxed Up Boy
I went to see my daughter perform in The Mikado on Saturday.
It was great to see her on stage. Poised. Confident. Having fun.
Part of a really quite ambitious school production.
She was one of the Japanese maidens, and to see her singing in the chorus was just lovely.
It’s hard to remember now how I once held her in my arms.
Soothed her eczema with various ointments and bath oils 6 times a day. Sat by her cot on long feverish nights.
Stayed with her in hospitals. Sped along roads with her in ambulances (I still can’t talk about those occasions without crying).
I once gave her resuscitation after seizure when she stopped breathing.
Now I see her on the stage. And everything is ahead of her.
And I am so very, very thankful to have her.
A very poignant moment, watching her (to borrow from the Gilbert & Sullivan chorus she was singing) ‘We wonder …oh, we wonder, what on earth the world can be?’.
the crone 