Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  This is much more interesting, because it’s not about music, it’s about “riff-raff”. Wigglesworth wants to make “opera accessible to all”, and “all”, by definition, includes riff-raff. He sees this as the ENO’s mission. “Accessibility,” he writes, “is not really about the price of a ticket. For accessibility to be meaningful and long lasting it has to come from the work itself … When Mozart wanted to write for ‘the people’ he did so in their native German. He trusted that if more people understood the piece, more would enjoy it.”

  This makes sense, but I can’t help wondering how much riff-raff the ENO currently attracts, even with its populist policy of singing words the audience can actually understand. Obviously, I don’t know – I’ve never been there because of my irrational fear of hours and hours of boredom – but I find it hard to believe that, if I did go, I’d think: “Look at the riff-raff in here! The sooner they start doing operas in Italian and get the carpets steam-cleaned, the better. This English translation of La traviata they’ve put on is an absolute scum-magnet.”

  But I think Wigglesworth is basically right. He’s just slightly confused matters with the term “riff-raff”, because this isn’t about class, it’s about tribalism. The riff-raff here are people who see themselves as opera buffs, but who the anti-translation opera buffs would say aren’t proper buffs because they don’t like opera enough to sit through it when the words are gobbledygook – or aren’t proper buffs because they haven’t bothered to learn Italian and German.

  It’s like hardcore fans of an indie band despising newer fans who only got into them once they became successful. It’s not about music, it’s not about class, it’s about a group defining itself around something from which it derives a sense of moral superiority. In the middle ages, people like that founded monastic orders.

  And, to be honest, most of us are a bit like that. We all need someone to look down on. The pro-accessibility opera fans are looking down on the linguistic purists – for being elitist snobs, but also for being ignorant of opera’s history as a popular art form – just as much as the purists are looking down on them. They’re all having a lovely time feeling like they’re better than other people – just as people who believe passionately in egalitarianism instinctively feel like they’re better than those who don’t believe passionately in egalitarianism.

  Which means that the ENO’s policy on singing opera in English must not change. The bitching it engenders is vital to both sides of the opera community’s sense of self. Disagreeing about it is enjoyable and, without it, all that’s left to entertain them is opera.

  2

  Plenty of Dishonesty but Not Much Actual Lying

  Some thoughts on advertising, marketing, brand awareness and other techniques for eliciting custom.

  When I heard that the Advertising Standards Authority is proposing to crack down on gender stereotyping in adverts, I found my reaction interesting. I’m hoping you can do the same. But I must admit that I am pretty easily entertained. I’ve been known to watch golf if the remote’s out of reach.

  It was quite a negative reaction – I won’t deny it. There’s no point in being ashamed – it was involuntary. It’s like someone shouting “Heil Hitler!” in their sleep. It turns out that’s just who they are.

  But I was displeased by my displeasure. “Why am I having a negative reaction to that?” I thought. “Do I like gender stereotyping? Deep down, do I want boys to be ridiculed for wearing pink by bullying aftershave or power-bike brands? And generations of Bisto mums to be manacled to their granule-strewn stoves instead of building sheds or having affairs? And the global lager and lipstick corporations to herd our schoolchildren into two sets of preordained career paths like public loos? All so that advertising creatives can continue using the same domestic scenarios as their 1970s predecessors, thus freeing up time to take more cocaine?

  “And do I want it to be OK to imply that people who work in advertising all take cocaine, even though I have no direct evidence of it?” I thought. “Is that what I really want?!”

  I was revealed to myself as an under-evolved form of life, out of place in an ocean where all the other fish have a more up-to-date sort of gill. Like those people who say they “don’t mind gay people living together, but why do they have to get married?” And I always want to ask, “Are you 100% sure you don’t mind? Or is it just that you don’t reckon you’d get away with saying you do? If you travelled back in time to 1950, would you genuinely be saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we let gay people live together and have sex and stop making it illegal? I really don’t mind. By the way, if they start saying they want to get married, that’s a step too far’?”

  I’m being unfair. We’re all a product of our times, aren’t we? I suppose that’s the point of the ASA plan. To improve the times so as to improve the product. (Of the times, that is – not the ones being advertised.) Deep down, no one’s really responsible for a single thing about themselves, I sometimes think. Genuinely. It’s all just preconditioned responses, knee-jerk reactions and involuntary spasms – our whole civilisation nothing more than a pile of rotting corpses whose gaseous emissions give the false impression of farting a recognisable tune.

  So I didn’t get the Visit England gig. Apparently, they were looking for a more upbeat approach.

  The thing is, I don’t want to be just a product of my times – which I expect is very Generation X of me. I want to feel there’s some timeless, rational identity that makes me who I am, not merely the fact of being born male, middle-class and British in 1974, and so, at an instinctive level, not very, but a little bit, sexist. Riddled with the flaws of when I was made, like a Leyland-era Jaguar’s propensity to rust.

  I don’t want to accept that, having in all statistical likelihood passed the midpoint of my life, I’m getting bitter and anti-progressive and crotchety because I’ve twigged that one day I’ll die. I don’t want to become automatically contemptuous of all attempts to make things better. Or not yet, anyway. At some point, that might be fun.

  And this ASA initiative, outlined in a report entitled “Depictions, Perceptions and Harm”, is certainly an attempt to make things better. As Guy Parker, ASA’s chief executive, put it: “Portrayals which reinforce outdated and stereotypical views on gender roles in society can play their part in driving unfair outcomes for people.” True, fair enough, good initiative, sorry.

  But still, it feels somehow incongruous with the spirit of the times (a risky thing for me to say as I metamorphose from whippersnapper to coffin dodger). It feels as though, with the world sliding towards extremism, war, environmental collapse and corporate tyranny, adverts implying that women are more likely to cook or men more likely to repair cars are the least of our worries. Not that there’s anything wrong with addressing the least of our worries. It’s better than not addressing any of our worries, and it’s not as if the ASA is in a position to sort out the situation in North Korea.

  But even just in the field of advertising, sexist stereotyping is probably a relatively minor worry. Advertising is, after all, the main way the world’s increasingly rapacious, unaccountable and under-taxed corporations communicate with their human prey. It is how they encourage us to regularly self-baste for easier subsequent consumption.

  This is an industry which famously seeks out the young – advertising slots on youth TV shows are always at a premium – because young people, though usually less affluent, are more easily parted with what money they have. It’s the same reason a mugger targets a little old lady rather than a City trader. Unless the City trader happens to be a little old lady. Pardon my stereotyping. And if so, ker-ching for the mugger! He wasn’t expecting a Rolex! Which may be some consolation as he confronts his own unacceptable assumptions. Or her own.

  The principle by which the ASA has long operated is that adverts should be “legal, decent, honest and truthful”. But they often aren’t. They are, almost invariably, legal and truthful. They seldom explicitly libel or lie, and they don’t last
long if they do. But decency and honesty are certainly not being upheld in an environment where, for example, payday loan companies freely plug their catastrophic products. Stopping them perpetuating gender stereotypes while letting them drag people into downward spirals of debt seems like fiddling while Rome burns – or prohibiting the perpetuation of gender stereotypes while Rome burns.

  That doesn’t invalidate it. It’s a worthwhile gesture, a determination to draw a distinction between what our society stands for and what it actually is. A nod towards standards we’d like to uphold in happier times, like dressing for dinner during the blitz. It’s aspiration, not hypocrisy.

  But I’d hate a sudden disappearance of gender stereotyping to trick us into believing adverts are necessarily decent or civilised in other ways. They may soon be sugar-free, but they’ll still be laced with strychnine.

  * * *

  A victory for truth or a victory for pain? That’s the question everyone’s asking. I’m talking about Nurofen, of course. The Advertising Standards Authority has banned one of the company’s TV adverts for implying that Nurofen Joint & Back capsules really know their way around a woman’s body.

  The commercial shows a lady with back pain taking a tablet, followed by a graphic of the Nurofen symbol moving through her body to her painful spine, where it then stays, pulsing with relief. Its route is direct – it doesn’t take any wrong turnings, misapplying its goodness to, say, a pain-free elbow, thus creating a weird zone of anti-pain so that the woman has to bang it on something to restore balance – and, crucially, it doesn’t just send ibuprofen all over the body so that anything that happens to be hurting, be it ear, knee, throat or bladder, does so slightly less.

  The ad is implying, the ASA has ruled, that Nurofen Joint & Back is a specifically designed joint and back medicine which makes a beeline for joints and backs, where it demonstrates its special joint-and-back-ameliorating knack. And the ad shouldn’t imply that, because it’s not true. Nurofen Joint & Back is basically just Nurofen, which is basically just ibuprofen. (Even within the world of the advert, how the tablet knows that the poor woman has back rather than joint ache is unclear. Perhaps it just got lucky and would have gone on to a nearby joint if the back had seemed OK.)

  This ban surprised me, because it feels like painkiller adverts have always been like this – a bit like the credits to a Bond film, but with throbbing. The shape of a lady has got home with a headache, sinus pain or the telltale redness in her silhouette throat that heralds a cold. Paunchless outlines of humans containing livid pain zones have long been “neutralising” those malevolent glows with counteracting soothing glows in the same colour as the advertised product’s branding.

  That’s how painkillers are pitched: clean, targeted, medicinal. “Feeling crap? Drug yourself up a bit!” is not a slogan that’s caught on. “Try smothering your body’s warning system with a chemical – hopefully everything will have sorted itself out by the time it wears off!” just doesn’t have the reassuring pharmaceutical feel that’s vital in building brand confidence.

  And brand confidence is important here. The likes of Nurofen, Solpadeine and Panadol aren’t just selling whatever their various active ingredients are. Those can be purchased for a fraction of the cost. Boots sells packets of 16 ibuprofen tablets for 35p; the same number of Nurofen Joint & Back capsules costs £3.79. So what is Nurofen doing to justify charging ten times as much? It’s selling more than just ibuprofen; it’s selling an idea, a feel.

  “But that’s just for idiots,” you may be thinking. “That’s how they part the headachy fool and his money.” Unfortunately, and surprisingly, experimental data doesn’t quite bear that opinion out. Ben Goldacre, in his book Bad Science, explained that a study of branded and unbranded headache pills found that “the packaging itself had a beneficial effect”, and one comparable in magnitude to whether or not the tablets contained any actual painkiller. So “Whatever pharmacology theory tells you, that brand-named version is better, and there’s just no getting away from it.”

  This confusing manifestation of the placebo effect seems to mean that, if you have an inkling the branded version of a painkiller will work better, then it will feel like it does. And, in the field of painkilling, something feeling like it works and something working are precisely the same thing. Sadly, if you’re sceptical enough to associate a painkiller’s efficacy only with its active ingredient, this added brand-confidence-induced pain assuagement won’t work on you. As with a deathbed atheist who suddenly misses the solace of religion, your analytical outlook on the world precludes such comfort.

  Obviously, this puts a different complexion on the profiteering of the branded tablet. I still reckon it is profiteering, fundamentally. I think the scheme was just to overcharge for painkillers – the fact that it caused an extra placebo effect is a happy accident rather than the conscious launch of a new alternative therapy to be administered by advertising agency. Nevertheless, it’s profiteering that’s coincidentally doing good. There are side effects: it makes people feel better.

  There are quite a few products in the Nurofen range – as well as normal Nurofen, Nurofen Express and Nurofen Joint & Back, there’s Nurofen Migraine Pain, Nurofen Express Period Pain, Nurofen Tension Headache, Nurofen Sinus Pain Relief and Nurofen Sinus Pressure & Headache Relief – and they’re all basically just ibuprofen. But RB UK Commercial, which owns the brand, says: “Research has shown that nine in 10 people search for products to treat specific symptoms, such as joint and back pain, and seven in 10 say pain-specific packs help them decide which product is best for their needs.” So could it be that buying a generic painkiller that happens to have the specific pain from which you’re currently suffering written on the packet makes you feel like the pain is more effectively killed? It feels more medicinal. It’s almost like you’ve been diagnosed.

  It’s often said that a strength of alternative therapies such as homeopathy is that its practitioners, because they’re in a private healthcare environment, have time to listen to, and express concern about, a patient’s problems, in a way an overstretched NHS doctor doesn’t. The listening and concern alone make patients feel better, which is why homeopathy is an ideal treatment for anyone who doesn’t quite feel 100% but isn’t actually at all ill.

  Perhaps Nurofen’s targeted packaging works like the homeopath’s avaricious affectation of interest: it somehow provides a fraction of the benefits of homeopathy. Not a fraction of the absolutely-nothing-helpful-at-all that homeopathic remedies contain, but a fraction of the placebo effect brought about by having your ailment solemnly acknowledged.

  All of which makes me slightly regretful about the ASA ruling. Those ads are inaccurate, so they probably ought to be pulled. Then again, if you’ve got a bad back, might not the thought of an angelic branded light, heading straight to the bit that hurts, be medicinal in itself? It might not be how ibuprofen works, but perhaps soothing animation, like confidence-building branding, is a vital part of how Nurofen works. The ads, the packaging, the £3.79 are arguably part of the treatment. The advert isn’t misrepresenting the medicine – it is the medicine.

  * * *

  There are two types of cosmetics, in my analysis. Lipstick and mascara. Oh, and blusher. Hang on: and powder and eyeliner and moisturiser and perfume and hairspray. Blimey, there are loads. And styling mousse and hair dye and spray tan and unnecessary surgery. Do shaving products count? Maybe. Hats? No. Even tiny, sparkly impractical hats that don’t keep the rain off? Fascinators and tiaras and coronets and the like? No, I think we’re entering the realm of clothes and jewellery. What about stick-on sequins? And moustache wax? I’m thinking of changing my look.

  But there are, I still think, two types of cosmetics. You can remember it like diabetes: type one is naturally occurring, and type two is something you’ve clearly done to yourself. Except, obviously, nothing is naturally occurring in the field of cosmetics. So type one is what appears to be naturally occurring (ie a lie), and type two is the open truth
. Concealer on the one hand, painted nails on the other. Or actually on both, as a rule.

  Lipstick is generally type two: a lipsticked person is not usually claiming that’s their natural lip shade. If they were, people wouldn’t buy different lipsticks to go with different outfits, which I’m pretty sure they do. And no one thinks they’re implying that, after some nuclear mutation incident involving a chameleon in a lab, they now have the power to change their own skin pigmentation. No one impishly asks if they can also swivel their eyes independently of each other, or pick up snacks with a rapidly emerging mega-tongue. Everyone accepts it’s lipstick. They might say, “Nice lipstick.”

  Cosmetic surgery, meanwhile, is obviously type one. No one’s going to say, “Nice surgery.” It’s not a sign of taste and self-respect to have gone under general anaesthetic and been selectively carved to reverse what our culture considers to be the uglifying effects of getting older. It’s supposed to look like nothing has happened, even though it’s often obvious something has. So it’s rude to mention it.

  People who get facelifts just want to look like they haven’t aged. They’ve secretly paid money to look lucky. Then again, they were lucky to have the money. But that’s why bad cosmetic surgery can make someone seem so ridiculous. The spurious claim they’re making about their biological good fortune is further undermined by the indisputable evidence that they didn’t even catch a break in their choice of surgeon.

  The reason I’ve been musing along these lines is that, according to a recent news report, perfume is changing cosmetic types. You’d think it was pretty solidly type two. Deodorant might be type one, a denial of our inherent BO, but people who smell of perfume or aftershave aren’t seriously claiming it’s exuded organically. Ambulances would be called. Nevertheless, the latest fashion in perfumes is for them to be hardly detectable by the human nose. As Ben Gorham, one of the creators of a new minimalist scent called “Elevator Music”, put it: “The idea is that its wearer is noticed, not the perfume.” Perhaps it comes with a free comedy hat.