Bowen Storyboard

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30515-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 238 Seiten

Set in the world of a large advertising company Storyboard focuses on the decision by the agency's clients, Hoppness, Silch & Co. ('the soap people') to destroy one of their competitor's products. Into this scheme are thrust copyeditor Sophia Last and her boss Hugh Grover, as well as over-conscientious Account Executive Keith Bates, his wife Sylvia and their son Stephen. Also caught up in these events is Ralph Cavell, a young research graduate turned journalist. Storyboard is not primarily a novel about advertising. It is an exploration of how people can be corrupted, and ultimately destroyed, by their desire for money and power and how even those people who start out with good intentions can be misled from their original purpose. It is also a critique of powerful corporations that are controlled and organised by the greed of those who operate them. An absorbing and adult novel, Storyboard cemented John Bowen's reputation as a mature and intelligent novelist when it was first published in 1960.

John Bowen was born in India, sent 'home' to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943-47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for Children`s Television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar: Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain: Little Boxes: The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin: there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bowen, John

Leseproben

THE AGENCY

The Agency was a large building, and took up most of one side of a small London square. Eight houses had once occupied the ground on which the Agency was built; a blue plaque on the wall facing the square announced that someone historical had lived in one of them. Houses of the type which had been pulled down to make room for the Agency were still to be seen in the square, but nobody any longer lived in them; they were all offices. A couturier occupied one, and had his workrooms in the mews at the back; two were owned by a firm which sold agricultural machinery. The whole square now was given over to offices and showrooms. Cars were parked round all four sides of it, and from twelve in the morning until three in the afternoon, the lunch-hour taxis ran round and round, like a sluggish river that was forever drained away and forever renewed. The square was no longer as quiet as it must once have been, but trees still shaded it and the Council tended the turf; in summer it was pleasant to sit on a bench under the trees, and eat one’s sandwiches, and watch the messenger boys and secretaries strolling by or lying on the grass, and to stare up from time to time at the Agency, ten stories high with a front of glass that glittered in the sun, and wonder what important affairs were hatching there.

Advertisements were hatched there. A clutch of advertisements made up an advertising campaign, and in the hatching of that clutch, the eggs were warmed by many bodies. All manufacturing processes begin with raw material. Steel is turned into ships; wood into tables; tobacco, paper and acetate become filter-tipped cigarettes. The Agency, like an army, used people as its raw material. People were turned into advertisements.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration. The talents and attributes of the people were used, not the people themselves, although when, as sometimes happened, the talent dried up, there was not much left of the person, since after all it may be said that a person is his talent and his attributes—his capacity to love, hate and fear (which the Agency used), his sympathy and empathy with others of his own kind (which the Agency used), his pride, his hope, his self-respect, his need for self-expression and desire to communicate (all of which the Agency used). The Agency demanded a high standard of raw material, and paid well for it. Above the ranks of messenger boy and telephone operator, it employed two hundred and thirty-eight men, and one hundred and fifteen women, all of whom had I.Q.s of over 100, and most of whom held university degrees. These people were grouped into departments. First were the Account Executives, the non-specialists who formed a link between the Agency’s clients and the Creative and Service Departments of the Agency. Among them were fourteen Old Etonians, ten Harrovians, two Wykehamists, two baronets, an Olympic hurdler, and the younger son of an ambassador; it is one of the functions of an Account Executive to butter-up clients, and the idea of class still persists sufficiently in Britain for clients to enjoy being buttered-up by such people. In the Agency’s Market Research Department, there were three who had studied with Laski and one who had studied with Jung. In the TV Department, there were two ex-actors, a sometime radio announcer, and one man who had made good documentary films in the thirties. A poet in the Copy Department had not written a poem for six years, a novelist had not written a novel for three, and a man who wrote detective stories under a nom-de-plume continued to produce them very happily at the rate of two a year. Two of the Agency Art Directors were A.R.A.s, one had begun as a designer for the theatre, and quite a number had hoped at one time to become painters.

Taste, talent and intelligence were, of course, also to be found outside the Agency, and the Agency found them, and used them. It used the producers, directors, cameramen, lighting cameramen, designers, cutters, dubbers, and all the other film technicians of the television production companies specially formed to make television commercials for the Agency and other Agencies. It hired famous photographers to take the photographs for some of its press advertisements, and its Art Directors shuttled about Europe to find artists who would illustrate others; once an Agency Art Director had approached Matisse for a poster, but Matisse had wanted too much money, so the Agency had made do with Van Dongen. Actors and dancers in need of work were glad to perform for the Agency; one well-known Shakespearian, needing money to pay off arrears of tax, had guyed Othello to sell a deodorant. Art is the expression of the soul of man; intelligence lifts him from the ruck of creation; communication is his deepest need. The Agency took Art and intelligence, and turned them to the task of communication, and what was communicated was a series of promises from the Agency’s clients to the public.

Every medium of communication was used. Personal precept and example—the Agency’s Public Relations Department organized lectures and demonstrations all over the country. Letters—sent out in hundreds of thousands by the Direct Mailing Service. Radio—the commercial radio station of Luxembourg, in between interminable Request Programmes of popular gramophone records, broadcast the promises of the Agency’s clients mainly to the young, mainly to the working classes, mainly to the North of England. Television—at least on one channel, with the possibility of another coming up. The Cinema. The Theatre—in the programme, or sometimes on the safety curtain between acts. Posters —which dominated the streets of every town and city. Newspapers and magazines of all sorts, from the great national dailies with circulations of over four million to the tiny technical journals read only by the trade. Choice among these media was made, for the most part, by the Agency’s Media Department, whose concern it was to see that each promise reached those people who were most likely to respond to it, and reached them at the least cost and with the most frequency—since if, let us say, you are advertising expensive French wines to connoisseurs, it would be unwise to use the pages of the Daily Mirror, most of whose readers care little for such matters.

These were some of the promises which the Agency devoted itself to communicating.

—That a particular patent medicine fortified the “hidden cells” of the body, so that even quite old men and women who dosed themselves with it continued to have clear skin, bright eyes, freedom from colds and (for men, it was hinted) a prolonged sexual potency.

—That a particular cigarette was a badge of social acceptability. Those who smoked such cigarettes found friends everywhere, and even to be seen with a packet indicated that the smoker was “one of the group”. Subsidiary: that these cigarettes “satisfied”—a necessary promise to make, but unimportant because most other cigarette advertisements also made it. Subsidiary: that the new “synthesized” filter, with PK63 to stop the carboniles, cut down the smoker’s chances of contracting lung cancer—this promise, which had some truth in it, was left over from a previous campaign which had failed because, it was discovered, smokers did not care to be reminded of lung cancer.

—That a particular sort of washing powder gave what is called “the heavy wash” a particular sort of whiteness (indistinguishable outside the laboratory from the whiteness given by any other washing powder) because it contained a particular ingredient (also remarkably similar to the special ingredients in its competitors). That this particular sort of whiteness was in some way whiter than the other sorts. Subsidiary (varying from month to month); threepence off the packet or a variety of useful gifts to be obtained by sending in packet tops and postal orders to the value of roughly what the gifts would cost wholesale.

—That a particular jam, while it did not actually contain more fruit than any other jam, gave the consumer more fruit taste. Subsidiary: children loved this jam, and it was good for them, and they would reward with love any mother who gave it to them.

—That, by buying a particular sort of car, a man might both possess and impose upon others his own ideal vision of himself—or rather a sort of ideal Id, in that the car symbolized his sexuality and his power to hurt. The owner of such a car had not only the pleasure of power over others and power over things, but the additional narcissistic pleasure of being able to cosset, stroke, burnish, and generally pleasure himself in the person of the car every Sunday morning. Subsidiary: a high social status signified by his being seen to own such a car and the up-to-date gadgets that went with it. Subsidiary: a low mileage per gallon, considering the size of the engine.

—That British wine, made in Cornwall, aerated, put into tiny bottles, capped with gold foil and christened Pink Charmain offered to women in pubs all the glamour and luxurious associations of pink champagne at a fraction of the cost.

There were many other promises; the Agency had many clients. For each client the...