Wetting my pants: 1
The Advertising editorial office door burst open and the Marketing Director stood there. My own desk was closest to the door and I found myself gazing up at the huge pictorial calendar he dangled high in the air.
He was stern. We looked, wondering. The cover photograph was of a basketful of puppies.
What he was showing us we recognised as the company’s promotional calendar, sent round the world each year to our agencies and sales outlets as well as to professional customers in the fields of engineering design, medicine, education, photography and all things associated with photography in any form. It was produced for us by a PR agency.
I was 42, an advertising editor and working in the company’s advertising department. For six months I had been editing the Marketing Division’s glossy journal Kodak View and a separate news magazine for the UK. With five other copywriters and editors I wrote and designed brochures, press ads, leaflets and booklets.
His expression invited sympathetic response. ‘You mean, the picture?’ I asked. Theatrically slowly, he turned to me. ‘The picture,’ he said, ‘the whole thing. You could do better than this, couldn’t you?’ I didn’t much like the emphasis on 'you' but I said yes, I could.
‘Right,’ he said, and told me to produce a dummy. I remember thinking I should have said, Look, you don’t understand. I am fundamentally stupid. I get confused. But I didn’t.
The Calendar pictures - photographs, all of them - had always been ‘stock pictures’ - photographs shot on 'Kodak' film but hired from picture libraries. I never had been able to understand the reasoning behind this. Stock pictures get used over and over again, and you might one day see a bronzed woman on a beach advertising chocolate bars and the same bronzed woman the next day telling you to ‘eat healthy’. And (in those days) stock pictures always looked like stock pictures.
In those lovely, creative hours you can enjoy while lying in the bath fantasising about doing someone else’s job better than they are doing it themselves I remember once deciding that what the company should do was to get pictures shot specially for the calendar by top professional photographers. And now, unbelievably, I had the chance to try it out.
I spent several days working something out. I reckoned that a single theme running through all twelve pictures was a reasonable proposition. A new theme each year. I knew the right man for the photography. The following Monday morning I picked up the internal phone with a certain relish and rang Jack Oakley, the company’s senior advertising photographer. Neatly bearded, with the sort of eyes that look as though they were made for smiling, he was a delight to work with. We joshed each other frequently and competitively and I now had a beauty.
‘Jack?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got a job for you.’ I heard his chair squeak as he leaned back.
‘Ah.’ There was a clearing of the throat. ‘Let’s see. I can do you a nice passport. Or back-lit leaves? Contre-jour’s always popular.'
I left a short pause. ‘No, Jack. The calendar.’
There was a longish silence, with some chewing on Sherlock Holmes pipe.
‘Paul, you’re joking.’
‘No, wetting my pants.’
That was Monday. By the following Monday morning two small boys from the local school had been booked to appear with suitably primitive fishing rods and tackle in the form of sticks and bent pins. Transport and separate packed lunches for boys were prepared and a chaperone detailed. We arrived on the banks of the River Gade in Cassiobury Park to shoot the boys having boy-type adventures along the river bank. The shoot went like clockwork. For the design I had briefed a freelance graphic designer, John Perrett, who always came up with fresh-looking graphics, and with our selection of the eventual pictures he did so again. I rang the marketing director and arranged a date and time for showing him our results.
He arrived and we went through the colour mockup of cover and pages. I had months earlier installed a lightbox by my desk, where I would spend long hours choosing between dozens of shots to find exactly the right ones for the current ad or leaflet. Our marketing director was now leaning over it, examining the transparencies. Jack and I knew them to be brilliant in every possible way. We looked at each other. My shirt felt damp in places.
Our man stood upright and removed his spectacles. ‘Right’ he said, and went on to tell me I was now art director of the Kodak Calendar. 'Thank you. Best of luck.’ As he left he turned and said with a faint smile, ‘You realise you’ll be on a hiding to nothing, of course.’
That afternoon my friend Dan, one of the copywriters, sat back in his chair, hummed a bit and sucked his empty pipe. ‘Congratulations! Jolly good, Paul. Of course, you’ll be on a hiding to nothing, won’t you.’
That was how it began. But little did I know.
Continued next week.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
The roadsweeper
My friend the roadsweeper was very nice about it. Me, running out to greet him. His life was not easy. Pushing a broom along suburban gutters all day long cannot be one big laugh, and having a six-year-old running out and telling you he’s already swept that bit himself could end in something nasty.
That particular patch of road, kerb, gutter and pavement are clear in my mind. I suppose that being six does keep you close to the ground and these underfoot details make an impression. Much of life was spent on those square paving slabs edged with the granite kerbstones. I liked to get the soft house broom from the hallway cupboard, take it out and push it along the gutter towards our house, liking the sight of the fine grey-brown mound of grit slowly growing as I pushed, all ready for the roadsweeper’s arrival.
A man appeared one day as I was playing on this bit of pavement with my next-door friend Trevor Austin. Trevor had a trike. I did not. 'Ooh! Look!' he said, pointing along The Meadow Way towards Wealdstone. The man was unmistakably my father. He was stooping slightly, holding a huge brown-paper sack or parcel and dragging it along. Then I saw the wheels. It was a trike. A real tricycle, just like Trevor's, only brand new, bigger, brighter and altogether superior. I like to think I let him ride it now and again.
Sweeping the gutter in the road was entirely for my own pleasure. But Saturday jobs in the house and the little garden were taken for granted in the thirties and, for the most part, I was happy doing them. We kept chickens; collecting their eggs first thing on Saturday and Sunday mornings, bits of chicken poo and all, was one job I liked. When we had one of the hens for a Sunday dinnertime the plucking was my job. Dad did the quick and silent execution job and my mother did the drawing of entrails. I was glad to be excused both.
‘Cleaning the silver’ could come into the boring category; coating each fork and spoon with ‘Bluebell’ silver polish, letting it dry to a white powder and then the fiddly bit, rubbing between each tine of the forks - very tedious. On the other had, rubbing spoons with a yellow duster until the e.p.n.s. sparkled grandly was deeply satisfying.
But there was fun as well. Summer picnics out in the local Hertfordshire countryside, annual one-week holidays in Cornwall and Devon and Ramsgate meant no jobs of any kind and a great deal of laughing. My father enjoyed clowning and took every opportunity to raise a laugh among onlookers. Once, walking along a Ramsgate beach he stooped and scooped up a handful of the fine gravel. He turned to me and said, ‘Now, I’m going to show you a very interesting thing.’ He had the instant attention of a couple of families sitting nearby. ‘You see, what goes up must come down’, and he threw the gravel high in the air. Fathers. They can be so embarrassing. When I became one myself I was never embarrassing - take no notice of what our three tell you.
Once, when I was about ten years old and on holiday in Ramsgate, I spotted a beach photographer and his amazing stage scenery of grass-topped cliffs. And, in front of it, a lion. ‘A real lion’, as the photographer pointed out to us but without explaining why it was standing on tiptoes. I didn’t like to ask. The photographer placed me in position and disappeared under his focusing cloth.
‘Give him a cuddle, then!’ he cried, and took the snap.
But back to today. Well, last week.
Last week, a lion rescue was completed. A group of lions arrived in this country. Real lions. For a long time this group has been housed by an organisation in Romania, an organisation that finds itself no longer able to look after them. Their home is inadequate and, in part, cramped.
The rescuer is John Minion, Director of the Yorkshire Wildlife Park. Members of his staff accompanied these beautiful creatures and provided for them a home that is as near as possible to the wild surroundings they were born to.
As Summer approaches, the lions will welcome a visit from you. Unfortunately, cuddles cannot be guaranteed.
Moments
I was about to start writing about Moments when the news of the death of Sir John Dankworth came in. John Dankworth, the great Jazz composer, clarinettist, saxophonist, conductor and all-round musician; you will have read the notices, seen the TV clips.
John provided me with one of those special Moments that happen to us all from time to time; not long ago he was here, sitting at our keyboard and fooling about with extemporary jazz while I flicked switches to take him from ‘Church Organ’ to ‘Electric Guitar’ to ‘Choir’, seeing him glance up at me with a wide grin at every change. When he returned from his last US tour he agreed to set some lyrics of mine for a celebratory song. It was to be performed by children’s choir later this year at the newly-opened Yorkshire Wildlife Park, special news of which I shall write about next week. That commission was among a host of his bookings and commitments of many kinds that had to be cancelled.
But I have that moment to relish, the great John Dankworth at our keyboard. That, and the moment he said ‘OK’ to setting three children’s-song lyrics of mine way back in 1992.
Thank you for the music, John.
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Moments. Those photographic moments, for example. Have you ever enjoyed the experience of having your camera pointing at a person, a group or a scene and then, a second before you pressed the button, seeing something happen? I was very pleased with myself as I pointed my Nikon at the magnificent wrought-iron gates of Green Park with the Victoria Memorial as the centre of interest. It was going to be a wonderful picture, with the shadows just right, the backlit leaves just right. And then, as my finger was about to press, the girl appeared.
And, of course, she made the picture. Without her, it would have been just one of millions of pictures from the same spot.
But there are moments that can be foreseen, too. At a garden party I wandered across the lawn where I’d noticed a boy and girl concentrating on building a tower of wooden blocks; sooner or later it was bound to collapse. I wanted to get that moment, the children’s faces, their reaction to disaster. I moved very slowly round to avoid distracting them until I knew I could get both figures and the collapsing tower. Then I waited, the camera to my eye. The moment came. Very satisfying.
Other moments have stopped me in my tracks and the result, usually much later, came a poem. Once in the Seychelles I was walking on the wide, flat beach dotted with the odd leaning palm. And then came the moment.
Always watch for the moment.
