They shoot bimbos, don’t they?
Monday, January 9
First day back at Creative Solutions after enforced pay-free holidays (holidays Charlie Chabot spent in Florida with a twenty-five year old former temp receptionist from Sheriff Hutton) began as ordinarily as every day at Creative Solutions did: with Fergus Blaine sniping at me for being late. This, however, was destined to be anything but an ordinary day.
The first departure from the script occurred at ten o’clock when Creative Solutions’ wood panelled box of a reception area began to creak under the weight of swimwear models, an ever-growing gaggle of tarted up, dumbed down, fake tanned girls all vying for a coveted place within the pages of our now approved Bingham Court ‘Heaven on Wheels’ brochure. While I am the first to acknowledge that brains and beauty can go together – Gabriel being an excellent case in point – here and now, casting my eye over the catty creatures corralled into that little wooden 1950’s doctor’s surgery of a reception area like footballer’s wives waiting for a pap smear, busts and bottoms had clearly got the better of these gene pools. Creative Solutions reception wasn’t the only thing dimly lit.
Charlie, who an hour earlier had been howling at the moon about an unassailable mountain of work, was suddenly and conspicuously idle and loitering with intent. ‘Rather good fun, don’t you think?’ he said wringing his hands and perving round the door of his office. ‘Makes one wish one had had the foresight to install peep holes in the ladies loo.’
This being winter and this being a rather conservative part of England, the swimwear models had not arrived in their swimsuits. Instead they had arrived in their street clothes; 'street' being the operative word as many appeared to have popped by between clients. Each had their most flattering and/or revealing bikinis secreted away in handbags.
Unlike Charlie, I could legitimately lay claim to having nothing to do. I’d written all the copy and subheads for the ‘Heaven on Wheels’ brochure already. Fergus Blaine was the art director, the man in charge of the brochure’s visual stimulants. So it was he who was herding the swimwear models off down the hall one by one like cattle through a worming race with what seemed simple enough instructions to slip into a bikini in the toilet, then go to the boardroom for test photos. And one by one they did, a revolving door of ample cleavages and empty heads tottering about unsupervised in the old corridors, intense, dumb eyes seeming to say ‘Toilet, toilet, toilet,’ or ‘Boardroom, boardroom, boardroom,’ an alarmingly high proportion of them ending up in the car park.
For want of something better to do, I hung around watching the waiting bimbos bicker and preen as if this was X Factor auditions, not casting for some two bit brochure destined to expose their ‘talent’ to nothing more than a few hundred crippled senior citizens. I stuck my head in the boardroom door from time to time where a digital camera-wielding Fergus Blaine was whining ‘Okay, for now you’ve just got to pretend there’s an old person in the wheelchair. Do you think you can do that?’ and ‘You know, I think you’ve got a really lovely face, I truly do,’ and ‘Just so you know, your motivation is old people in wheelchairs who want a really nice, hassle-free, exciting, nurse-filled life by the sea. You represent that lifestyle. You are the visual device personifying that lifestyle. The facilitator of that lifestyle. Do you understand what I’m saying? Okay. Then just push the wheelchair and smile.’
The more bikini-clad models I saw pushing wheelchairs, draped over wheelchairs and helping imaginary old people out of wheelchairs into baths, the more I thought we’d created a brochure appealing exclusively to Larry Flint. It had all been Fergus’s idea – the whole ‘Heaven on Wheels’ thing; the visual analogy of the swimwear models playing nurse to ram home the seaside delights of these Total Care waterfront apartments.
Suddenly it all felt totally wrong and crass. To be honest, it had always felt reasonably wrong and crass. Yet Fergus had convinced me of the enormous cut through.
‘There simply aren’t any other campaigns like this for old people’s homes, Bailey,’ he’d said. I wonder why. And even if there were enough swinging old people hooning about in wheelchairs out there to fill Bingham Court as a result of our work, I knew how literally people took advertising, especially old people. And there were going to be some very disappointed old people unless I wrote a very large disclaimer into the copy: ‘Swimwear models not included.’
As for Fergus Blaine, he was now a source of concern for entirely new reasons. I had tolerated his consis-tently derelict manifestations and ramshackle remonstrations because I believed I was dealing with a creative genius. I thought I might learn something. More, I hoped he might lead me by the hand into the realms of greatness from right here in the Kingdom of Ineptness, York. It had been done before. Great campaigns didn’t necessarily have to emanate from great agencies. Quite the contrary, some of the best ads of the last twenty years had risen to the top from very small beginnings in small agencies and/or small countries. Ads for gyms and gay bars and plumbers. You didn’t have to have the Nike account to win awards and sometimes it helped if you didn’t. Sometimes it helped to deal with little companies with little power echelons and, ideally, little grasp of what they were doing. Such companies were far easier to bully into running the sort of ads Clio judges went for than the big, stodgy, marketing graduate-heavy corporations who insisted on running everything through research, research being the bane of all creatives’ lives, proving, as it often did, that the ads we wanted to run didn’t work. The smaller the company, the less research and the more likely hopelessly irrelevant but brilliant ads would go to air and win us awards.
Such was my hope latching onto someone as awarded as Fergus Blaine somewhere as patently echelon, research and competence-free as Creative Solutions. Yet here we were five months in with nothing more startling to show for our endeavours than ‘Heaven on Wheels’ – Charlie Chabot’s propensity to apologise for everything would more than come in handy once that one hit the market.
This, while sad, still didn’t explain Fergus Blaine and the masterpiece portfolio he had unveiled to me that awful afternoon at Café Uno…
***
A week ago I visited the official websites of Clio, D&AD and New York Festival and scrolled through ten years of gold, silver and bronze winners. The name Fergus Blaine appeared twelve times. So far, so good.
I then did a Google image search for ‘Fergus Blaine’. There on page two of my search, grinning wonkily for the camera and clutching one of the aforementioned awards, was Fergus Blaine. Conclusion: He was who he said he was. He’d won what he said he’d won.
Which still didn’t explain his transparent lack of creative genius.
Well, actually, it did.
There in the photo posing alongside Fergus Blaine was a bespectacled copywriter. There in the award credits alongside the name Fergus Blaine were six or seven more copywriters. In each case the other half of a team of two, but the true source of Fergus Blaine’s genius. He hadn’t come up with the ideas. They had. All he’d done was colour them in and pass them off as his own. Not uncommon. Not even unethical in advertising circles. But altogether misleading if, like me, you were after an art director who could make you look good.
I felt ill. And naïve. And perhaps relieved. I didn’t need Fergus Blaine after all. I could move on without him.
The timing of the most important mobile phone call I will ever receive was, therefore, both perfect and appalling. I had just donned a jacket and carted my sorry soul onto the street outside Creative Solutions for some solitude and a cigarette. No sooner had I lit this than my mobile phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number.
‘Bailey Harland?’ I said.
‘Hello Bailey,’ said a heavily accented female voice. ‘It’s Sepalika Kobalavithanage from JAS 360 Leeds.’
‘I’m sorry?’ She’d lost me after ‘It’s…’
She repeated it more slowly. ‘It’s Sepalika Kobala…vithanage from—’
‘Sepalika! Sorry! Hi! How are you?’
‘I’m wery well indeed, thank you, Bailey,’ she said brightly, any doubt that it was, indeed, her nullified by her curious Sri Lankan propensity to pronounce anything starting with a 'v' with a 'w'.
‘I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.’
‘Well,' she said. 'I must be honest. I hadn’t expected to be calling you so soon, but there we are. I hope this is not a bad time for you.’
‘It’s a perfect time, Sepalika. Fire away.’
‘Well, Bailey. As I said to you at our most entertaining meeting a month or two ago, I thought your portfolio was wery competent, if perhaps lacking that spark that sets the truly great work aside. I could still see wersatility and potential and I thought your attitude was outstanding.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No, no, that’s fine. Anyway, I am calling you now to discuss a possibility that has arisen here at JAS 360 Leeds. Are you happy to discuss this over the phone or would you like to come in?’
‘Over the phone’s fine.’ If I was shaking with nervous anticipation now, my health couldn’t afford to wait.
‘Well, it is most exciting. We have made the pitch list for the Asok Marauder above the line brand work. Are you aware of Asok, Bailey?’ I could hear the smile in her sweet Sri Lankan voice.
I laughed. ‘The name rings a vague bell.’ Asok were the second largest sports footwear manufacturer in the world.’
‘Yes indeed. Well, we are pitching for this extremely large and exciting piece of business in approximately three weeks. Would you be interested in receiving a brief?’
‘Absolutely I would!’
‘Excellent. I can’t tell you anything else for now. Oh, you will of course be paid the going freelance rate for your work. Naturally, if you win us the business, we will be delighted to offer you a full time position. And there will be nine teams including yourselves working on the pitch.’
‘Nine teams?’ This was a bombshell from a number of perspectives. Nine teams was a hell of a lot of teams to compete against for the winning campaign. But I had enough self belief. I was capable. More worrying – considerably more worrying – was that word ‘team’.
‘You said you had an art director, didn’t you, Bailey?’
Yes, Sepalika. I did say I had an art director and I lied. I said I had an art director when I actually didn’t have an art director. Now I do have one and I wish I didn’t.
‘Bailey?’
Yes, Sepalika. I have an art director. His name is Fergus Blaine. He smells, has no social skills, no creative skills and is the last person I want banging away in my ear, day in, day out just to score The Dream Job.
‘Yes, Sepalika. I have an art director.’
