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