The news last week that Derek Laud emerged from the Big Brother house to be swept away by his new PR minder Christine Hamilton was only slightly surprising, not utterly so. After all, they’re both professional Tories and endangered species like that need to stick together to avoid total extinction. All the same, the old ticker sank slightly on learning that we had been so effortlessly manipulated into reassessing the Conservative Party for the better via BIG BROTHER (for heaven’s sake). Is there no spontaneity? Is there any credibility or realness to anything? Or have the PRs and the planners and the bean counters and the ‘creatives’ grabbed every job in the engine room? I’m afraid so.
The truth is that a McKinsey ethos now runs through everything the theorists can get their hands on. The consulting firm’s famous adage ‘Everything can be measured and what gets measured gets managed’ is today as applicable to audience reaction on a reality TV show or ‘penetration’ of a celebrity’s appeal as it always has been to marketing Horlicks or lager. The history of PR proves time and again that what counts in the end is the credibility of what you have to offer, typified by the Rolling Stones this morning, who’ve never sold out, never set out to comply with anyone else’s agenda, and never lost touch with the music which has brought them the fame and wealth of latterday Chinese Emperors. Mrs Hamilton’s got cred, too, a lot more than her husband, if you ask me: she’s a strong and sassy Tory woman in the mould of Thatcher but with a sense of comedy instead of the bile. Lord Laud could do worse.
I thought about credibility yesterday morning too, when the shots of Hunter S, Thompson’s high-high-high-profile send-off reached our screens. We’re told Johnny Depp paid $2.5 million out of his own pocket for the explosions and the booze (and the limos? and the ‘security’?) as Hunter’s ashes were blasted out of a firework as tall as the Statue of Liberty. All this self-congratulatory detail meant to bolster our faith and give the event credibility naturally did precisely the opposite. The knowledge that Thompson, who actually shot himself last February, would have been disgusted at the band-wagon style, gave the event a sad and less than impressive image. Why did Johnny Wonka bother to boast of the cost, if it truly was him who paid? Or perhaps the celebs held an auction to buy the right to CLAIM it was their gift, and someone had to win.
Hunter S.Thompson would have gatecrashed his own funeral if he could, sprayed manure at the politicians and popped champagne corks and acid during the speeches. A fine writer and a member of the exclusive Shotgun Club, along with Ernest Hemingway, and Kurt Cobain ,his memory will endure somewhat longer than showbiz could ever be expected to remember.
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CREDESSENTIAL
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