April 2007

VULTURE CULTURE

Hugh Grant's brush with the law for a cafuffle with a rouge snapper has resulted in my inbox being besieged by requests from fevered media outlets wanting me to comment on whether his career is over.  In the 24/7 news cycle, Hugh is a top topic after losing it with a papp, and many are of the opinion that it will be curtains for Grant.  Let's just cast our minds back a few years, when Hugh recovered from something far more risqué than throwing a take away tub at a photographer!  Wasn't the king fop caught in flagrante with an LA prostitute?This illicit pleasure and heinous act didn't destroy his box office pull in Middle America. This all runs parallel with my own client Noel Edmonds, being snapped by yet another of those vultures, who circle the celebrity veldt searching for showbiz carrion. Noel's crime was to park in a disabled bay outside the David Lloyd fitness centre in Bristol while launching an awareness campaign for prostate cancer. David Lloyd has a new manager who must have decided to tip off the papers.  There is now a constant frustration for both celebrities and publicists at this underclass of paparazzi who exploit the digital age.  There is no skill involved, just a digital tool and being at the right place at the right time.  They have no relationship with publicists, celebrities nor facts, they just peddle their snaps for cash.  Hugh Grant's career will not end just because he got exasperated with one of these persistent jackals.  And don't give me the spiel that every celebrity has made their name by using the paparazzi; the people I'm talking about are rogue snappers with no respect for anyone. I have had good working relationships with numerous paparazzi, Richard Young, Alan Davidson, Dave Bennett and James Peltekian. They know the code and they work hard to get their shots and they do it by the book. It's sometimes an uneasy relationship but it's always fair and bound by a mutual respect for each others' craft.  But I fear that tabloid TV which, I know,  I have done many noddys for, is actually making heroes out of these simians who have no manners, are thick skinned and generally downright rude.  Their intent is to drag someone else through the same swill pit that they bathe in every day.  I really believe that the public is now beginning to differentiate between the real craftsmen and the carpet baggers. God knows the ranks grow every day and fortunes can be made from a candid shot.  The French paparazzi that pursued Diana, Princess of Wales down that tunnel became notable overnight because of their antics, but that hasn't been the death for this generation's paparazzi, which are even more like jackals scavenging for a picture that will swell their bank balance.  News organisations can distance themselves from these piranhas' modus operandi because they are freelance and when they get a killer picture, the news organisation will consider the risks of stirring up the wrath of the P.C.C.  It all emphasises the true price of celebrity and whatever letter celeb they are, A, B, D or Z, sooner or later after being pursued relentlessly for a snap, they will be asking themselves whether it's really worth being a celebrity at all.

YOU’LL NEED TO BE A REALLY GOOD LIAR.

I found this interesting nugget from Joe Eszterhas excellent book “The Devils Gude to Hollywood” PR folk take note!

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “The art of lying is the art of the practical. It ought never be indulged in for the pure pleasure of the thing, since over usage dulls the instrument, corrodes the character, and despoils the spirit. The important thing about a lie is not that it be interesting, fanciful, graceful or even pleasant but that it be believed. Curb, therefore, your imagination. Let the lie be delivered full face, eye to eye, and without scratching of the scalp. Let it be blunt and forthright and so simple that you can repeat it in detail and under oath ten years hence. But let it, for all of its simplicity, contain one fantastical element of creative ingenuity – one and no more – designed to capture the attention of the listener and to convince him that, since no one would dare to invent the improbability you have inserted, its mere existence places the stamp of truth upon everything you have said. If you cannot tell a believable lie, cling then to truth which is always our secret succour in times of need, and manfully accept the consequences.”

REST IN PEACE CUDDLY BORIS

Sad news the mighty Boris Yeltsin has passed away and has moved on to take his seat in the great Politburo in the sky. I had the privilege of meeting Yeltsin in Moscow in 1996. I was on a recce to see the Moscow State Circus, before it visited London in the summer of 1987. I had the pleasure of hyping their season in Battersea Park - now that is another story. One evening on the trip I found myself with various circus grandee's at a lavish flat of Valentin Gneushev a prominent Russian circus choreographer in the heart of Moscow. It was an informal do, lots of vodka but very little food when the huge frame of the then minor party official filled the room. Yeltsin was a virtual unknown but through an interpreter, we told one another bawdy jokes. I discovered he shared my love of circus and told me about an exciting non-PC act that involved Brown Bears ice-skating. I have to confess I saw the act on another trip to Russia a few years later. I learnt that Boris was fond of, gymnastics, and boxing. He made an odd comment about Olga Korbut that I did not understand but he and his interpreter laughed like drains. His real badge of honour was that he had lost two fingers when he and some friends sneaked into a Red Army supply depot, stole several grenades, and tried to dissect them. Rest in Peace party animal and circus fan.

BLOG JEWELLERY

I am surrounded by blogs not unlike a plague of locusts. Attached to every email signature that arrives in my inbox from a fellow PR uber cheese, is another link to yet another wacky blog. Cleaning off this smelly, vacuous, verbal diarrhoea, I urge fellow travellers to focus on the issues at hand. This current trend employed and promoted by highly dubious corporate PR networks, is gnawing away at my conscious, not dissimilar to intrusive toothache. I refuse to succumb to the pathetic attempt to misuse the web. Wacky names and mysterious authors aren’t fooling anyone. Deep inside the cool copy, is transparent attitude, crafted for gain, aiding and abetting some creepy multinationals It is amazing that young, savvy and extremely bright graduates agree to freeform on the polemics of the web for corrupt snake oil salesmen. Oh well, perhaps it is a quick fix to pay off a student loan. Although a form of prostitution, corporate dick sucking has always been considered a necessary evil. These arrogant masters of the PR universe will climax quickly, stimulated by the pornography of their deals. These superannuated corporates who embellish themselves with blogs are akin to those women of a certain age who adorn themselves with clothes that they couldn’t carry off when they were 17, let alone 45. I am eager to discover whether these cool blogs are created to make them look edgy. Does it send out a signal that they are so close to the edge playing with sharp instruments? Or have they just fallen off after a night in a trashy St Tropez club for the “never have beens” with their proverbial niece draped over their arm. I chant most mornings, pleading to the cosmos to keep the cynical demons away. If I let them in they will devour my honest enthusiasm. I am reminded of a panto I was publicising some years ago. As I, and a number of pensioners from Plaistow, watched Toni Palmer as principal boy, bound onto the stage and slap her thighs, one of the old dears turned and said to another, “Look at that Maud, talk about mutton dressed as mutton!” Cyber wallpaper paper fails to fool, perhaps the narcissistic bedroom bloggers have heaps more integrity than these delusional PR networks. The underbelly hides a more dubious modus operandi?

YOU NAME IT

Every morning I wake up and wonder what kind of opportunities the day will bring. As a publicist, I have to be careful what I decide to get involved with. I read in the The Mirror today about the campaign to keep the memory of Charlie Thompson alive. She was the 13 year old girl who was hit by a train and killed in 2005 and now her parents are encouraging people to write her name all over the world in her memory, and so far “Charlie” has been written as far away as Outer Mongolia and Australia. All pictures of her name will go to raise £11,000.00 to buy a bus for poverty stricken children to get to school in Khandel in India. I find it slightly bizarre that tomorrow I will be amidst a group of fame merchants, taking part in the judging for “Name In Lights”, Joshua Sofaer’s latest conceptual art project. Sofaer is calling the public to stake their claim in popular culture by submitting in 150 words, their case for why their, or someone else’s name should be a contemporary art installation. The winning entry will have their name displayed as a piece of art, in illuminated 12 ft high letters, on the top of Birmingham Central Library.

One is purely art, the other for a grieving father trying to create a legacy for his daughter. In my quiet moments, I sneakily wish I was doing more for the charity than the art project.

WHAT KATIE DOES NEXT.

What Katie does next is critical to her future by CLAIRE SMITH

THE nation, and indeed the world, continues to be enthralled this week by the question why two twentysomethings who met at university have decided to split. In the absence of any concrete information from either Prince William or Kate Middleton, speculation continues to be the order of the day.

http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=598832007

The Mirror's veteran royal correspondent, James Whitaker, sparked "chewing-gum-gate" when he suggested courtiers had bitched about Middleton's mum Carole for chewing nicotine gum during the Prince's passing-out parade at Sandhurst.

Yesterday the Prince was said to have dismissed as "mischief" the suggestion that Carole's use of supposedly middle-class idiom such as "toilet" and "pleased to meet you" had been an issue.

Kate, meanwhile, or sources close to her, denied that she, or sources close to her, had murmured behind their hands about William's attraction to various double- and triple-barreled fillies.

Ingenious bookies in search of free publicity hit upon the idea of issuing odds for the most likely candidate to replace Kate. Thus it was reported you could get 20-1 on Princess Kylie, while Britney Spears, who exchanged saucy e-mails with the teenage William, was given 20-1 odds of becoming the first bald single mother to become a royal. And commentators in Australia, New Zealand and America leapt on the suggestion that Britain's class system was the real reason for the split, spilling reams of newsprint on Britain's "obsession" with class.

Through it all, Kate, like those other grandes dames, Camilla Parker Bowles, the Queen Mother and Kate Moss, observed a dignified silence - vowing never to talk to the press.

But, with sums such as £5 million flying around, will the 25-year-old accessories buyer for Jigsaw be able to resist the temptation to tell her story?

Media commentator Mark Borkowski said she would be well advised to keep mum for the time being. But, with the right advice, the commoner who lived with a Prince could transform herself into a "worldwide icon" and bag a career for life.

"It'll be very interesting to see what she does next. The papers say she will never sell her story, but Paul Burrell was never going to sell his, either. The longer she keeps schtum the more the story is worth - and it will be one of the biggest stories of a generation.

"Far lesser figures have generated careers out of less publicity. Here's somebody who is a global name and who could become a global icon.

"Whatever happens in the future, whatever William does next, Kate Middleton will always be 'the girl he should have married'."

While at present the heat is on Kate and the Middletons, Borkowski warns that William will become the real focus of attention in future: "The Royals have always been a lusty lot and everybody wants a playboy prince, running around grabbing Brazilian students' breasts. Nobody wants a nice girl from Berkshire."

The pressure is going to be on him, not her. His advice to the nice girl from Berkshire is to lie low, keep her head down and get good advice: "There's a huge future for the girl. It's whether or not she wants it. If she does want it the world is her oyster."

ANYONE FOR PR?

In the first episode of the new Harry Enfield / Paul Whitehouse series, there’s a sketch in which an antique dealer is trying to exploit a rather stupid Notting Hill “yoga whore”.

Sarcastically, the Enfield character suggests that the woman should take up a career in interior design. The woman replies: “Actually, I’ve just had some business cards printed, so I am an interior designer". Enfield looks at the card and then throws it in the bin.

This reflects the current media world, which seems so overpopulated with PR companies that think they are a PR company because they have a card and a funky website. Unfortunately, gullible people who think they need PR employ these vacuous companies who ultimately go on to ruin any reputation their client had in the first place. Today, I had an extraordinary experience which underlines this state of affairs.

A call came through to my direct line. A voice said, "Hello, is this Mark?", to which I replied "Yes". "Are you busy?" she said. "If it’s a sales call, then yes," I responded. "My name is Susan Ware and I’m from Blahhhhhhhhhhhhr Communications," she replied (names have, of course, been changed to save her some embarrassment). She told me she had looked at our website and was impressed by the amount of coverage there was for Lower Mill Estate. She then asked "Do they need PR?"

Confused, I replied: "Borkowski generated that coverage, why would I get my client to employ another PR company?" She continued with "Well don’t be hasty, you may have missed a trick." Considering the amount of coverage we generated for Lower Mill Estate is probably greater than any property development company has ever had, I was straining to think of a trick I might have missed. Obviously the person on the line was a yoga whore. Perhaps I should have pointed out the ink and broadcast that Borkowski has generated to launch the Harrods allotment scheme. Ho hum.

WINDSOR V MIDDLETON

The newspapers are crammed with every theory under the sun about the end of the royal romance. We always expect royal romances to be to be like fairy tales, but over the years they have morphed into fables that have been truly grim, with no happy endings. Surely the papers should be ecstatic that William is single, instead of using psychologists to fathom out why the royal affair has ended. The media are now freed up to write about where William is going, where he's gone, who he's smiled at, who he's seen out with, who was she, is she royal, is she a commoner, will they marry? The headlines would be endless, and let's face it, the fantasy is always better than the reality.

With all this speculation, what I'm most interested in is what's going on behind the scenes. Today we read that Kate made a pact with William and the Palace, never to betray the trust of the Royals and not to disclose anything about her relationship with William. She's only 25 and she’s known William since 2001, right the way through his formative years at University. She has been privy to the inner workings of the Palace. In the light of this, the value of Kate Middleton's story must be worth millions and lesser known people have made their careers from selling their stories about brief dalliances with celebrities. Can we really believe that the Palace didn’t make her sign a privacy agreement, and if they didn’t will she will keep her word to keep quiet on this? There is a scarcity of “tabloid tales” from the various women that Prince Charles dated before his marriage to Diana because the upper classes all know when to keep their mouth shut, it’s bred into them. But Kate Middleton, although allowed into that world, was not from that world.

Twenty years ago I knew someone who was involved in writing speeches for a prominent member of the Royal Family. When the Palace had had enough of its speechwriter, he was dropped like the proverbial ton of bricks, with no further contact from Buckingham Palace. He used to joke that he waited for a Christmas card from the palace every year, but one never materialised. My friend laughed it off, saying he had known all along that it would end like that.

If we believe what we read, then Kate Middleton is already feeling the cold shoulder from the Palace since the split. Not offering her any kind of “after care” suggests the Palace has not upped its PR ante at all. What it’s not taking into consideration is whether Kate Middleton is really bitter about this break up. Of course, the romance itself was pretty commonplace; innumerate people get together at university, have lots of fun together and then split up a few years later. But how much fun was it for Kate and how much did she really give up to be part of that establishment? The only difference is that there’s a lot more money and column inches at stake on this early romance.

Could Kate, if not now, maybe in the future, be manipulated into being the next celebrity, ex royal befriended by our North American friends? If she took the gig, she’d be paid a hefty sum to become a new personality in media-Ville USA. Or will she be the one we all remember and love, and think William should have married? To the public, she appeared the perfect meek and mild girl, always dressed down and always reserved. So how much of that was her and how much of her personality did she have to modify to fit into the required mould for a future King? If she's left, dropped and hurt, at the mercy of press intrusion, why wouldn't she want to get something out of it?

She should be having fun at her age, not being thrust into the contrived pomp and circumstance that would surely have been her fate. I will be watching with interest to see whether she keeps her word or whether like Diana before her, the real Kate Middleton will stand up and tell her story.

I SMELL A STUNT!

Sorry if this is going to come as a shock, but I smell a stunt! No one wants to believe it is a stunt, because we are always prone to hoping, more often than not against the usual flow of hope, that a bit of movie history is alive and well. However, may I be the first to doubt the legend of Cheeta?

The newspapers have been inundated over the last few days with news of the celebration for Cheeta the Chimp's 75th birthday. Mark it in your diaries for next year; the lovable primates birthday was on April 9th and he had a bash at the primate sanctuary "Creative Habitats and Enrichment for Endangered and Threatened Apes" (CHEETA), in Palm Springs, California. Cheeta has also, apparently, been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest chimpanzee. The chimp in question is four foot tall and 142 pounds and allegedly starred in 12 Tarzan movies during the 1930s and 40s.

Dan Westfall, who operates the Palm Springs sanctuary in California, adopted Cheetah in 1992 from his uncle Tony Gentry, an animal trainer who worked in Hollywood and obtained Cheetah from Africa in the 1930s. Cheetah now spends his days socializing with other primates and his caregivers. Cheetah's staple diet consists of fresh fruit, vegetables, and monkey nuts. The sanctuary's primates are provided with a variety of activities to stimulate their intellect and curiosity. One of the activities is painting, which allows chimpanzees to express their innate inventive behaviour and tool-usage.

Westfall says that Cheeta has become a wonderful abstract artist and has trademarked Cheeta's creations as "Ape-stract". "They are pretty," says Westfall, who gives the art to donors who support the non-profit making sanctuary with a donation of $125 or more. The proceeds go to support the Cheeta Primate Sanctuary.

All this strikes me as a wonderful PR coup for the sanctuary. If the chimp really was the star of the original Tarzan movies of the 1930s and is now considered to be the world's oldest chimp, outliving the original Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller, who can be bothered to quash the story? Cheetah played his role seamlessly in the movies, with no hint that the animal behind the name was not just one chimp but one of several supplied by Hollywood's talented menagerie. A chimpanzee is not the easiest animal to work with, as Cheetah's trainer and Jane's portrayer Maureen O'Sullivan have attested. Although he was most peaceable and friendly on the screen, he was notorious for biting actors and crewmembers.

Nevertheless, can this really be the original chimp? A certain performance artist creating a show based on the myth pitched me that Cheetah the Chimp was actually dead, that he had been taken to Australia to appear in a third rate circus once he was too old to appear in movies. He apparently died shortly after and his bones were given to the anthropology department of the University of Sydney.

Early in the Hollywood studio era, rights for actors were thin on the ground, so animal stars would have had absolutely none. It's only in the last 40 years that animals have had any real rights. The hijacking of animals for general sale was commonplace. Animal trappers have been in existence for a very long time, making money from selling on animals to circuses or film studios. In early Hollywood, there were certainly many tales about cruelty to animals and huge questions hang over Harry Reichenbach and his disreputable behaviour, often ill treating the creatures he used for his notorious animal stunts. Roland Butler is known to have covered up cruelty stories for the Ringling Bros and the Barnum and Bailey circus, thought to be the greatest circus ever to exist. Therefore, is it really likely that Cheetah the Chimp is spending his twilight years in a safe sanctuary in Palm Springs or has his name been hijacked?

Without doubt, it's a jungle out there, especially if funds are tight. Every charity needs a totem and Cheetah is certainly one of the greatest but, as all good movie publicists know, you should never let the facts get in the way of a good a story. Personally, I hope the Cheetah myth lives on as it's possible that the real story of his life is a little harder to relate to.

Click here to view

NO MORE HEROES #2

Radio 5 Live Weekend News Broadcast on - Sun 08 Apr John Pienaar at the helm talks to Mark Borkowski about the PR fall out as the 15 British military captives who were released by the Iranians are authorised by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to sell their stories

Click here to download mp3

MARK TALKS ON BBC RADIO 5 LIVE ABOUT KEITH RICHARDS CLAIM

Mark talks on BBC Radio 5 live about the reaction to the headlines surrounding Keith Richards claim that he snorted his dead father’s ashes.

Click here to dowlad mp3

NO MORE HEROES?

As someone who has been involved part and parcel in the modernisation of PR under the influence of the Murdoch papers, the internet and 24/7 news and who has watched from the inside as celebrities took to selling their stories to the press in the same manner as a butcher sells sausages, I am inclined to hang my head in shame in the wake of Britain’s Iran hostages selling their stories to the press.

I was raised to believe that you gave name rank and number in such situations, that a professional soldier was just that – a professional. They don’t join up to go on exotic holidays, but to do a job – an often dangerous and terrifying job. Capture is an occupational hazard for a soldier but in a world where the media eye is perpetually on hard focus searching for a story, any story, it’s easy to see how they could have been convinced to stand up and sell theirs.

I watched Jeremy Clarkson’s recent documentary on The Greatest Raid of All Time – a raid in which British Royal Navy and Army Commando units launched a seaborne attack on the heavily defended docks of St. Nazaire in occupied France during World War II. It was essentially a suicide mission, in which 611 men took on the second most heavily defended port in occupied France, and the soldiers involved knew it. An obsolete destroyer, accompanied by 18 shallow draft boats, rammed the St. Nazaire lock gates and was blown up, ending use of the dock by the Nazis. Commandos landed on the docks and destroyed other dock structures before attempting to fight their way out.

I was struck by the differences between that raid and the recent hostage “crisis” – in 1942 the soldiers fought against incredible odds to destroy the docks; they sailed 400 miles through hostile waters, and, to ensure the success of the mission, captured commandos remained silent even though they were taken back as prisoners to the docks, where explosives had been laid, just before the explosives were due to go off. By way of reward, these soldiers have a desultory plaque in Falmouth and are remembered with one documentary on BBC2. Look in the obituary pages of the Telegraph and you’ll see survivors of these kind of actions disappearing like flies, their glory days long behind them, reduced to a few column inches of praise.

Contrast this to the endless flow of words coming from the fifteen soldiers who bartered their way to freedom; they are front page news and the TV and newspapers are rolling over themselves to get the exclusive. But this was not an heroic adventure and the fact that their military masters allowed the 15 to be again paraded and held up as shining examples disgracefully diminishes the memory of real heroes who stayed silent to the bitter end. Of course Iran made the soldiers look foolish, but their lack of stoicism, their plain greed, is shocking to see. They sold their stories like any contestant who had just strolled out of the Big Brother house might sell their story.

This is an age where content is all, circulation is all and memory is diminished. It’s partly to do with the fact that we don’t know who the enemy is any more. It was easy to see how disgusting Nazism was - but now who’s the enemy? This may be a propaganda war but the Iranians appear to be winning it. Over here, short-term celebrity is outpacing real heroism and these 15 soldiers, pawns in the endless chess of propaganda, are the latest examples of a dismal trend.

The people we should be celebrating are the sporting Corinthians, the great scientists, the Florence Nightingales, the soldiers who fought and died without an eye on the media’s chequebook. I feel sad and a little culpable for this state of affairs, and it’s time someone said stop.

We need to stand back and take a good, hard look at what we’re creating: a worthless, futile world in which standards slip to the point of kids believing that the armed forces will do anything to get back home and, when they do get back, will then take money to talk about it. People need someone to look up to; who are we supposed to look up to now, when heroism is equated with money extracted from the media rather than a noble or remarkable action?

CHOCOLATE BILLBOARD

Once upon a time, there was little imaginative thinking when using outside space for publicity stunts. Brands were merely content to have a uniform message on thousands of Adshel sites all over the Capital. I firmly believe there is a fantastic opportunity to bring outdoor advertising to life.

Yesterday, we created an action in Covent Garden for our client, Thorntons. Borkowski produced the first ever chocolate billboard, made from 128 panels of chocolate, weighing 390 kilos. It also had 72 three dimensional eggs and 10 hand crafted bunnies embedded into it.

The idea was to kick off the Easter celebrations early and inviting shoppers, passers by to break off a piece. Despite the space being booked for a week, the 390kilos of chocolate were devoured in just five hours. The results were spectacular; national TV news, the BBC, web activity, chat threads, blogging postings, regional as well as national dailys, all from one small site tucked away in London.

Hoards of agencies come up with advertising which captures the public’s eye, but harnessing stories to capture the media and produce TV coverage are two totally different things.

It’s difficult to impress my advertising friends in the subtle syntax of creative thinking. It’s hard to quantify, but highly effective when it works. Until PR companies can truly have a resonance with the upstream thinking of a brand, it’s very difficult to centre a creative stunt idea to the heart of a brand.

It’s interesting that while we’ve been working for Thorntons, they behave more like a challenger brand as they gain more understanding of how we can help them. It took us eight months to get the client to invest in this outdoor event, but at the end of the day, they were overjoyed.

FALKLAND WAR AND IAN MACDONALD THE VOICE OF THE BAD NEWS REMEMBERED

There has been so much coverage this weekend on the anniversary of the Falklands War, with many of the original war correspondents reminiscing 25 years on.

One person who isn’t seen in print marking the anniversary though is Ian Macdonald, ministry of defence spokesperson who became a nightly figure in the nations’ living rooms. Macdonald appeared on our TV screens providing briefings on the Falklands War, like a baddy in Dr Who he announced in an eerily monotone voice any bad news on the war front from the number of casualties to the explosion of a rogue exocet missile.

His diction made even the good news sound tragic. Unquestionably, the Falklands War turned Margaret Thatcher into a modern day Boudiccea and fuelled the Thatcher cult that went on to smash so many British standards with its belief in free markets, entrepreneurialism and privatisation.

During the Falklands War, Thatcher’s loyal PR bulldog, Bernard Ingham, became a constant nuisance for the media. Ingham was a civil servant who had cleverly learnt ways to the control the media to ensure that the Falklands War would be no Vietnam for the fledgling Tory government. I am not sure if he was the person who employed Ian Macdonald, but certainly, Macdonald’s emotionless and idiosyncratic voice that appeared to control the war news with bizarre quotations from English literature, struck a chilling chord in me as a young publicist, and I felt we were going to receive many more controlled messages in this new era of government control.

The legacy of the Falklands and the manner in which it was reported began the embed system that became prominent in both the later Iraq conflicts. Neither allowed the media the access that had caused problems in previous conflicts. I’m not sure what happened to Ian Macdonald after the war, but perhaps his voice and overall demeanour might suggest a career in German expressionist horror cinema.

The interesting thing about him is that if you try to search his name in Google, he’s conspicuous for the lack of links and threads as the man who was the figurehead for the way that teams of civil servants generated a new method of leashing the media for future conflicts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqF1Hv4nQXY

This interview with Margaret Thatcher underlines her steadfast determination to wage war at all costs, despite whether the correct protocol was observed or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aZdAyHVjzQ