Seasonal cheers.

This may sound daft, but we have our tree up.

Well, you know – most years, we get most of the way through December before decorating. This year, we figured we’d go for a cheering American-style month-long holiday season. Had my first mince pie; had my first listen of Christmas Crooners this morning.

But kicking off the festive sing-song is a piece of work that Tempo has spent half the summer playing with – for tonight, the ad is premiering.

At 8.50pm, The Euronics will perform their brand new electrical soul classic, This Christmas you could save – right in the middle of The X Factor on ITV1.

Do please watch and cheer on little Mr Plug and his band.

And I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my long-suffering downstairs neighbours when they hear that bleedin’ tune come at them out of the telly instead of the ceiling.

Just a MIN.

So, there are jobs. Then there are pitches. Then there are award ceremonies.

And then there are the things you’re trying to keep half a brain on in your real life.

As November spools past, I seem to have survived them all, even if nearly all of them have felt rather like some sort of pointless penance – like a time-wasting detention to just get through, so you can go home. Not to actually get anything for at the end. Just out.

Given the efforts involved in executing most of them, and the level of skill I and my team members all seem to have invested in them, it’s interesting that the one to feel like the most fruitful was the one where all I did was fall into someone’s car for five hours and get carried to a free dinner.

People always focus on the lunch. Turns out they should turn their blagging efforts to somewhere past tea time.

—

The MIN awards in Manchester this week came for me on the back of a long old week in the early-morning/late-night saddle. I was knackered, as Gel, Deb and Steve from Thinking Juice whisked me off to the North for a be-bibbed-and-tuckered freebee. And I knew that they were each just as knackered. So who, I wondered sleepily in the back seat, who exactly would be in any fit state to drive HOME again the next morning?

That I was able to swan around in a tux with them and be there when they came within a gnat’s hat of winning Agency Of The Year – before being allowed to take home the South West Agency Of The Year piece of trinketry – was an honour, I should say. Those guys can hold their heads up with anyone in a room full of UK agency creatives. In truth, I think they could honestly hold them a lot higher.

If any of us could hold up our heads at all by the next morning.

It felt like one of the more rewarding moments of the last few months, not because the award was for anything I had done, but simply because being with those you care about at little key moments are, I’ve long believed, the real gems to be grabbed on your life journey.

A noble and dedicated philosophy that has seen me passably rich in such things and otherwise working out of my bedroom at nearly 40.

—
After today, for various reasons, I essentially just want to go to bed. Having made it this far now seems like payment enough. It may sound defeatist – but firstly, I’m a lover not a fighter, remember, and secondly, if you’re not a believer in plateaus you haven’t climbed high enough yet.

Not a single one of the many investments Momo’s creatively made this year may bear fruit. Working your ass off isn’t enough to fight the force of some narrative directions. But that’s fine. There are following chapters.

Remember, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix seemed an interminable drag to read the first time. But it was essential to the rip-roaring plot denouement of the series.

Right now, I’m grateful for being given any chance to fall flat on my back for a moment.

High Noakes.

I stumbled across something quietly wonderful this afternoon.

Chewing over a new Monster Master Über To Do list after a hefty-ish week of mopping up various ends of jobs to go to print, I was scrolling around for some pleasant background entertainment when I found a little delight. Which induced a most unexpected little reverie.

In the smokey, dyed-diesel-plume wake of the news that the last British bastion of daring-do, splay-bursting, delta-nining chapdom has admitted a filly into its ranks, the BBC had placed some intriguing links on its homepage.

One was an interview with Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, the first female pilot to join the Red Arrows Ruddy Marvelous Aerobatic Display Team – a typically British forces kind of thoroughly nice lass who seemed at a loss to explain why none of the splendid female piloting talent of the RAF has donned the Reds’ flight suit and caught the keys to one of their little Hawks before.

The other was… a complete episode of Go with Noakes from 1976. The one where he flew with the Arrows for himself.

—

Clicking the Play icon, I didn’t quite know what to expect, after 35 years. But as the ledge John himself strolled into shot with trusty hairy TV partner Shep, in glorious 70s Filmgrainovision – doing that double act they always did of one of them spouting even, Yorkshire train-of-thought rambling while the other looked disinterested – I felt a lump rise in my throat.

—

That was my childhood. My safe, hopeful, much-loved childhood. And how I got away with enjoying it as such for the whole time, I’ve never worked out.

But John Noakes’ safe, clear tones – friendly but tinged with just enough adult authority, mixed perfectly with the constant possibility of a dry, silly quip – were a huge comfort to a generation of us exploring the world around us from the safety of gently irradiating new colour televisions.

I learnt more about the Red Arrows from this gloriously be-side-burned, be-sensible-haircutted 30 minutes than I remember from any other time. Why, I didn’t realise it was so easy. They’re making it up on a stick and a wink way more than you’d think up there. John even did it. Which means I now really want to do it.

“Here” said his pilot, “take the stick. Forget the rudders, they’re just there to rest your feet on. Now, put it hard over… Whoop! Heh-heh. There. You just did a roll. Easy eh?”

Hell, yeah. Letme-letme!

As he then watched the jolly fine chaps open their season with a display over Whitby bay, I thought of all those childhood memories of standing on similar cliffs at Bournemouth, waiting for the nine red darts flash overhead from behind us in a suddent screech at precisely On Time O’clock.

And as I saw a little 70s chap sitting in his Dad’s arm, in little shorts and a little home-knitted jumper, I couldn’t help picturing a very similar little chap of a very similar age, in a very similar little outfit sitting expectantly in the crook of his own daddy’s arm, some 300 miles south, that same afternoon probably. And I felt an echo of the same comforting thrill of formative times.

It was wonderful.
This was the same daddy, incidentally, who would, upon hearing the Black Dyke Mills Band strike up with the gloriously whimsical theme tune, always say: “Ah there are the Black Mills Dyke Band again.” Every time.

Then I remembered when Go with Noakes secretly filmed at my school, just a year or two later. And I kind of wished the BBC would post up that episode, to see if I recognised any of the big-haired, be-flared youngsters from the year above me at St Katherine’s CE Primary, who got to go do the adventure exercise circuit up on Hengistbury Head with television’s nicest, pre-Ant & Dec double act.

I may e-mail them and ask for the whole bally series to go up.

Mean time, check this out for yourself. It’ll get you high on the funny reality of your childhood. Because it wasn’t just a pre-digital age daydream. You were there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml?all=2&id;=5328

I remember 1989.

Twenty years. I guess it seems that long.

So much has happened since the Berlin wall fell in a colourful spill of people, but it’s also kind of gone fast. In fact, I wonder whether the intimation in Jon Snow’s tone tonight was that it’s hard to imagine a world with the cold war now – a fact perhaps astonishing after so little historic time. Whatever, Channel Four News gave tonight’s celebrations in the German capital a slightly misty-eyed lead story status. And rightly so.

It’s poetic to suppose that of all European nations emerging from the 20th century, Germany should be the one to give the world one of the most potent symbols of reconciliation – that footage of teenagers dancing on the Brandenburg gate in November 1989.

Or was it Wind of change by The Scorpions?

Anyway – no, east and west are not fluidly one country yet. Not in the fullest sense. And I’m not sure if they can be – no slashed wound heals without a scar where the tissue knitted back together. But the practical cost, as in South Africa, is still worth paying. Surely. Living apart is ultimately more unsustainable than working together. It just is. Your identity has to be strong enough to cope with the change.

And I’m pretty sure most Germans think the same in the end. They’re very sensible people. They made Wind of change the 10th best selling record in Germany of all time.

—

I remember reading something in a text book while still at school, some while more than twenty years ago. I remember that reading it at that time seemed a little shocking. Just bold. Ballsy of the writer, I thought.

Because he said something almost blithely about how history warned us that the Berlin Wall could not possibly stay standing for long. That one day it would surely fall.

Now, if you weren’t around then, this statement will probably seem self evident. To be filed under ‘Duh!’ – along with other statements, like: ‘Cod sci-fi TV soap Defying Gravity walks a fine line between likeably daft and annoyingly stupid’ or: ‘Gordon Brown’s government is already putting things in boxes’. It’s just obvious.

But, really. Back then the wall seemed immovable. Utterly. A symbol of a status quo beyond any challenge. This writer’s worldly wisdom seemed simply audacious to my 15-year-old self; back then, the only way to combat the Berlin Wall from Bournemouth was to buy a nuclear bunker for the garden. I remember seeing them for sale at the Hurn air show, next to the only just retired Vulcan bomber.

And yet, just a month after my 19th birthday, down it came. Surprising everyone – not least of which the important handful of soon-to-be-former soviet state heads, which duly rolled in the coming two years.

—

Annoyingly, I almost got to go to Berlin that summer. Some church thing. I could have seen the wall in all its terrifying actuality for myself to marvel my kids about years later, if I’d been put on the right list. Or if I’d had kids.

I ended up in Düsseldorf. Singing hymns in the town square or similar. And, weirdly, Caroline happened to be passing through the city with her family at exactly the same time; I remember calling her from a phone box and almost being able to meet up. But not.

Not a great ‘I remember 1989’ story, I know.

Still, to celebrate, 20 years on, I’m going to Düsseldorf without her again next week. Re-live the important personal moments. ..Of how we weren’t in the right place at the right time on at least a couple of counts.

While I’m there, hunting for that phone box, I may also see if I can squeeze in some site visiting with Jules for our client’s show.

Either way, I know one thing. I still want to wave a flag when I see that footage. Or when I hear the 10th best selling German record of all time.

Yes, I remember it well.

Well, no. Of course I have no idea where I was on the actual night. I mean it was ages ago…

Global outlook.

So I’m sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City.

I don’t know how I found myself apparently pretending to be an international, ex-pat-type business person – I’m just a simple-minded creative. I like titting about with words and tunes, and sitting about with chums and coffees. I can hardly suddenly successfully convince everyone I’ve actually been some big shot serious person underneath it all, all along. Can I. Really.

So what am I doing in a hotel in Kuwait City?

Well, I can’t be sure, but it rather looks like what I’ve been doing is planning how to muck about with creative stuff for some undeniably nice people I’ve spent the last couple of days sitting around tables of food and coffee with, while trying not to come off as someone pretending to be some big shot serious person. That and making a lot of jokes, obviously.

And it also looks like I’ve found myself in the middle of a significant chunk of work out here in the desert. Between all the wonky English jokes, Julian and I have put together a very serious proposition for our emerging friends out here. It’ll stretch us – it’ll stretch me. But I went out on my own to enlarge my outlook – and I’m looking forward to us helping each other do just that.

—

The thing about the real global outlook – the one getting on with itself, far outside the tiny ring-fenced reality of the Nick Griffins of this world – is that it doesn’t in fact look like the sleekly soulless Business section of your stock photography website. You knew it wouldn’t – nothing human could possibly exist there. There in that God-awful eternity of hand shakes and thumbs up and hour glasses running out and people in suits punching the air. But I’ll bet even you didn’t realise the new global economy would turn out to be quite so… tacky.

The new world order would appear to be a steakhouse restaurant chain in the lobby of a business hotel chain, themed in a plastic version of the Wild West, administered by Koreans in chaps and stetsons, frequented by Arabs in kafirs and Nikes, and cleaned by the people of the Indus. Observed by middle-aged English businessmen who’ve married Thai women and retired to Dubai. Soon to be invested in by Russian gangsters. And speaking Mandarin.

Is this more or less frightening than 1984? Is it more or less stupid sounding now than the idea of Communist conformity or Nazi purity?

The outlook for the global economy is as multi-coloured as a tasteless fast food logo.

But it’s free.

And it makes us open our eyes to eachother.

Because the reality, when you sit down in the plastic Wild West and engage it in conversation, is human shaped.

The differences between people can be perspective changing – especially if you don’t want to get arrested. But I’m coming home at the end of the week reminded that the reason a simple-minded creative like me can float his little business boat on this bewildering, complex sea of change is because of the similarities underneath the stetson brim. Or the kafir folds.

A person you like is a person you like, wherever you find them. And I like this.

Even if piped karaoke covers of pop favourites forces my fingers into my ears while I’m sitting there, I shall continue to keep my eyes open.