Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life

by David Mitchell

  There are lots of bad things to be said about alcohol. It wrecks and costs lives, often because it boosts confidence. It gives people the confidence to argue, fight and rape, as well as to chat more at parties or enjoy karaoke. It makes people dependent on the confidence it gives, to the extent that they’ll poison themselves to get it. But it definitely gives you confidence – I know, I’ve had some.

  And the Courage advert is even admitting that there may be a downside to boozy confidence. Their beer, it’s telling us, is about to give the man the false confidence to say something that he shouldn’t. They’re not portraying it as lending confidence in a life-saving situation, like spinach for Popeye: “Let me have a quick glug of Courage and then I’ll be able to save that coach-load of schoolchildren from falling into the volcano!”

  God only knows the tearful, relationship-ending consequences of that man’s forthcoming bout of Dutch courage. Rather than glamorising alcohol, I’d say it’s a playful admission of some of its adverse effects, and rather more, in terms of candour, than the ASA has a right to expect.

  Incidentally, advertising standards also forbid implying that alcohol makes you more likely to have sex. What? I know that teetotal cultures do procreate, but I’ve no idea how. I accept that saying that alcohol makes you more attractive is dishonest – it doesn’t – but it certainly makes other people more attractive and, consequently, for better and worse, makes sex more likely.

  Why, I wonder, does the ASA think people drink alcohol? The taste? I tell myself I like the taste of wine and beer, but it’s impossible to separate it from the positive associations of feeling happy and confident and, very occasionally, getting off with someone at a party. Before I’d experienced any of that, I found it sour.

  If the ASA believes that alcohol is so harmful that its manufacturers should be prevented from citing its demonstrable appeals, wouldn’t it be fairer to ban booze adverts altogether? The current situation is like forcing car advertisers not to mention that cars get you to places quickly, only that they’re a nice place to sit.

  *

  Some time in the 1950s, in a Kellogg’s laboratory, some scientists eagerly gathered round a bowl.

  “They’re perfect!” the newest member of the team muttered. “Crispy yet indulgent, luxurious yet fun!”

  “Let’s just wait until we’ve added the milk,” replied an old hand. “They could still go the way of Malticles.”

  The others shuddered at the recollection of the research dollars that had been squandered on those apparently delicious roundels – insanely moreish, tantalisingly frosted and loaded with B vitamins – but which, within 15 seconds of contact with lactose, set into a hard grey matter which you could only extract by smashing the bowl. The US military had briefly taken an interest before discovering that the substance – nicknamed Maltrete – was one of the many materials on Earth too hard for human consumption but too soft to repel even the most half-hearted of artillery bombardments.

  “Hand me the jug,” the chief designer whispered. With trembling hands, he poured. They waited.

  “Our friends Snap, Crackle and Pop seem to have been somewhat smothered,” quipped the head of the Flake Crispiness Retention team, who had slunk over to see what the fuss was about. No one laughed.

  They watched.

  And then, disaster! “The colour, it’s not binding properly! It’s running into the milk!” squealed a frosting risk assessor. He was right. As they watched, deep brown bled sickeningly into the pure white liquid around it. The scientists exhaled in collective despair. The head of FCR slipped tactfully away, this defeat too rich even for his blood. Funereal silence descended.

  No one had noticed the head of marketing come in. “We can make this work for us,” he said …

  That’s how I like to imagine that Kellogg’s came up with the Coco Pops slogan: “So chocolatey it even turns the milk brown.” Hiding a product’s weaknesses in plain sight like that really takes balls. You’ve got to believe that the problem is so bad, so crucial, that your only recourse is to pretend it’s deliberate. They never pushed Corn Flakes with the tagline: “So filled with health-giving corn you can sling it at a wall and it’ll stick!”

  This sprang to mind when my eye was caught by a billboard advertising the new series of Britain’s Next Top Model, the TV show in which young hopefuls compete for modelling contracts. It had a picture of one of the judges, model Elle Macpherson, with the line: “It takes one to find one.”

  No, it doesn’t. While a great violinist might be good at judging other people’s violining, it doesn’t follow that being pretty in a way that is perceived to make the clothes you wear look good will make you skilled at spotting someone else with that attribute; or that someone short, plump or bent-faced shouldn’t be equally adept at finding the malnourished and photogenic – in fact, Oxfam photographers are probably best at that.

  This slogan isn’t like saying that a top chef is a good judge of a soufflé but that another soufflé is. Still, if you’re making a TV show about modelling, it’s good to have a famous model in it, rather than just aspirant thinifers of whom no one has ever heard. So, in the spirit of Coco Pops, they’ve drawn attention to the flaw and made it look like a deliberate feature – the TV format equivalent of a beauty spot.

  I like this kind of advertising. The motives may be dishonest but the technique is brazen honesty – to scream “This is the catch!” so loudly at cynical consumers that they perversely ignore it. Here’s a glimpse of how some products may be marketed in future, if this trend continues:

  Bendicks Mints: “Nobody would buy them to eat themselves, but they’re easy to wrap and pricey enough to make a respectable present.”

  Nestlé KitKat: “Pretend you care about babies in the third world if you want to. Just don’t come moaning to us three bites into a Mars when all that caramel really starts to cloy.”

  Online roulette: “If you’re even reading this slogan, it appeals to you slightly, which means you’re bound to piss all your money away somehow, so it might as well be on this.”

  McDonald’s: “Ever felt like putting on some elasticated jogging bottoms and really letting go? Why not today? Two years and 15 stone down the line, you can always bounce back via a fat-camp documentary on Sky.”

  British Airways: “No one is actually going to save the environment, so you might as well enjoy it while it lasts.”

  Payday loans: “If you were the sort of person who was ever going to understand compound interest, you wouldn’t be in this mess. We can literally put off the shitstorm until next week. I mean, next week! It’ll probably never happen!”

  Cancer Research UK: “Don’t think of this as chucking your money away altruistically, like with Amnesty. Face it, you’re never going to go to North Korea but, with your diet, bowel cancer is a very real possibility.”

  The Royal Opera House: “For people so cultured they have literally lost the ability to feel bored.”

  Channel 5: “It can’t all be ‘appointment to view’. Sometimes you’ve just got to have something on in the background. And I bet you’ve still got an inkling that we might show some crafty porn come 3am.”

  Pimm’s: “It may be unrelentingly sugary but you can drink it outdoors without looking like a tramp.”

  Twiglets: “OK, they’re pretty unpleasant, but eat 12 and then tell me you don’t want a 13th.”

  Petrol station coffee: “Of course you’re going to have to compromise on flavour! You’ve been compromising your whole life! You’re at Leigh Delamere at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night, exhaustedly looking for caffeine. Why start trying to live the dream now?”

  Conservative party: “Because, deep down, you know that posh people are supposed to be in charge.”

  Give blood: “Obviously you’re not going to and this campaign is wasted on you – just don’t go around thinking you’re any kind of saint, that’s all.”

  Ferrari: “Drive a Ferrari and most people will think you’re a dick – but in an envious
way, like they feel about Richard Branson, not a dismissive one, like with the chairman of a pressure group trying to block a wind farm development.”

  Pâté de foie gras: “Admit it, you always knew there was an upside to torture.”

  *

  Half of humanity has received some much-needed assistance from an unexpected source. Out of the blue, the makers of Lion Bar Ice Cream have leapt to the aid of men. Like maggots in a wound, they didn’t know they were helping – they thought they were just garnering some desperately needed publicity in an ice cream-unfriendly year – but they may have contributed to saving the world’s males huge sums of money and an even greater expense of time and effort.

  Lion Bar Ice Cream commissioned a survey into what sort of men women find attractive, presumably in the forlorn hope that “a man with his face in a Lion Bar Ice Cream” or “those hunks made ripplingly obese by an ice cream-only diet” would be among the responses.

  They didn’t quite get that, but more than 4,000 of the 5,000 respondents claimed to prefer a slightly scruffy fellow, with messy hair and even a beer belly, to the toned, groomed, David Beckham type, although I imagine they wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating a Lion Bar. The media spin on it is that “Women have turned against the metrosexual look”, presumably because there’s something very unattractive about a chap running after a tube train with a hard-on.

  “Fantastic!” male readers may now be burping from their sofas. “I’ll have another couple of pork pies and a Guinness. I knew I was over-washing!” And, indeed, these 5,000 women do seem very obliging: a fifth of them don’t mind “a bit of body odour”, 10% have no objection to man boobs and another 10% like their men to smell of beer. They like their men to smell of beer? That’s an evolutionary cul-de-sac if ever I heard one: “Oh yeah, pick the paunchy, pissed one – he’ll be there for you in a crisis.” It’s almost impossible to evade the conclusion that most of these women were on the pull.

  But these accommodating physical preferences aren’t why this study has helped men. After all, it hasn’t really made the fat and smelly an iota more attractive than they were before. What women want is still what it’s always been: either you or, more likely, not you. Citing an article in the Daily Express is unlikely to rescue any otherwise doomed, beery-breathed attempts at seduction.

  No, the reason this study is good news for malekind is that it’s being taken by the media as a blow to the previous trend, which it had itself created, towards male grooming, exercising and general body-image fretting. The results have been reported as if they contradicted what was formerly thought about women’s taste, as if preening dandies were the established norm of attractiveness and more traditional “manly” attributes a weird fetish.

  The media like nothing more than to be contrarian about their own manufactured consensus on which the paint is still not dry, just as a dog loves nothing more than chasing its own tail. Words spawn more words. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that: you’re reading a collection of a comedian’s opinions about the news.

  But it’s daft to suggest that everyone previously thought most women were turned on by men with fastidiously toned bodies, reeking of cologne, hair made Himalayan with “product”, dressed in gleaming Hugo Boss and generally showing every sign of effortful, self-absorbed vanity. That’s just what style sections have been telling people they thought.

  “Men are now expected to take just as much care over their appearance as women,” has been the line; “Come on guys, step up!” the exhortation. Men have supposedly been liberated from the etiquette of not being openly vain, liberated into a world of moisturising, styling and plucking, of miserably spending money to fight nature, all in the name of self-respect, a world in which women have been trapped for centuries.

  This was never much of a genuine trend – and the Lion Bar study shows it. The convention is still that men aren’t supposed to care too much about how they look. Any effort they put into their appearance should be hidden. A beer belly is not ideal, but is far preferable to unconcealed calorie-counting. Obviously, there’s vanity in this rejection of vanity but, crucially, it doesn’t involve a high spend.

  That’s what underlies those claims that everyone now thinks it’s fine for men to obsess about shoes, style their hair or have facials. Cosmetics and clothes manufacturers are giddy at the thought of doubling the vast sums they already make out of the weird and screwed-up social conventions about how women should look. They’re trying to sell more worthless crap, and to do that you need to invoke fashion.

  We men should be afraid. The forces of retail are ranged against us. The yoke of skimpy clothes that look sexy but leave your kidneys cold, expensive make-up, agonising shoes and youth-prolonging surgical roulette under which women labour is something we have avoided up to now, and that’s a situation we would do well to prolong. But how?

  Lion Bar Ice Cream has shown the way. We must fight retail with retail. We must show the merciless market that our slovenliness can be even more effectively monetised than the meticulousness it’s trying to foist on us. If we promise to spend as much on beer, ice cream, hamburgers, video games and reinforced obesity furniture as we would on cologne, moisturiser, hair gunk and jewellery, then the retailers of the former will defend us from those of the latter. The Lion Bar studies will see off the style sections’ trendsetting.

  And those 4,000 women are on our side as well. “Save yourselves!” they’re imploring. “It’s too late for us, but you could still avoid this fashion and body-image hell!” They’re right – it is too late for them. These customs are too ingrained: women will always be expected to shave their legs. Intellectually, I understand that it’s just an annoying, pointless faff but, like most men, and even though our forefathers must have happily fancied hairy-legged women for millennia, I find it a bit gross when they don’t. God forbid that most women should ever take the same view about back-waxing.

  *

  In the summer of 2010, there were two major nominees for the title of World’s Most Hated Company: BP, for filling the Gulf of Mexico with oil, and Ryanair, just for being Ryanair. It was very clear to me at the time which one I preferred …

  A recent newspaper advertisement for Ryanair has a big picture of Robert Mugabe shaking his fist, under the headline: “Here’s EasyJet’s New Head of Punctuality”. This sends out a confused message. I’m no Zimbabwe expert but I’m fairly confident that the main charge levelled against Mugabe isn’t one of unpunctuality. It’s no more meaningful an insinuation than saying that Kim Jong-il is Virgin Atlantic’s new head of catering or that Mel Gibson has been taken on by Thomas Cook to handle its IT.

  And while Mugabe’s an evil man, there’s no reason to think that, had history panned out differently, he mightn’t have made quite an effective “head of punctuality” for an airline. If what people say about Mussolini and trains is to be believed, a bit of murderous megalomania doesn’t go amiss when it comes to getting transport services to pull their socks up.

  But we’ll never know how he’d have got on because Robert Mugabe isn’t easyJet’s new head of punctuality at all. It’s not clear whether he even applied. Apparently he really, really wants to stay on as president of Zimbabwe. It would have been an eccentric career change – like when Alastair Campbell moved from handling the press for that unsuccessful war to doing the same for a rugby tour that went even worse. But maybe, like Campbell, Mugabe would have been glad of the comparative rest. EasyJet, for all its faults, isn’t as unpopular as the government of Zimbabwe. It’s not like it’s Ryanair or something.

  Ryanair is the unashamed villain of the corporate world. Other companies probably do worse things but Ryanair is the only one that delights in stepping into the public eye wearing an opera cloak and laughing maniacally. This horrendously unfair advert is typical. The sole basis for associating its rival with a brutal kleptocrat is a couple of quotations from newspapers both quoting the same third source claiming that easyJet’s flights from Gatwick are “less p
unctual than Air Zimbabwe”.

  Michael O’Leary and Ryanair realise that this will seem underhand but they also know that their customers don’t need to like them. They’re running a “no frills” airline and have worked out that frequent flyers subconsciously consider civility and fairness to be frills. “These people will keep their prices low,” we secretly think, “even if they have to treat us like cattle and stab their competitors in the back to do so.”

  This approach is unusual and refreshing. Most companies persist in trying to persuade us that they’re nice and care about charitable causes, the obesity epidemic, equipment for schools or the environment. But these are publicly traded corporate entities, so they’re incapable of caring – they’re merely trying to make money for their shareholders and believe that this affectation of human feelings will help them to do so. Conversely, Ryanair has attracted customers canny enough to know that a public company can only have mercenary motives but who are happy to do business with it anyway.

  BP has not reached this level of corporate development. In common with most other oil companies, it spends a lot of its marketing budget assuring us that it’s obsessed with alternative forms of energy – that walking on to a BP forecourt and asking for petrol is like trying to buy a VHS cassette at an Apple store. “Petrol, you say? Not much call for that these days. Wouldn’t you rather a quick zap from a solar panel or wind turbine?”

  This strategy led the Today programme’s John Humphrys to ask a silly question: “Isn’t the reality that so long as the oil companies are as greedy for profits and nothing else as they are, this problem is not going to go away?” he said, with reference to the issue of replacing oil with renewable energy. It’s silly because it only demonstrates Cynicism 1.0: he knows these corporations aren’t as eco-committed as they claim because they can still make money out of oil. But he implies that a time might come when plcs aren’t “greedy for profits and nothing else”. Cynicism 2.0 is realising that it won’t and that we can only properly harness the power and wealth of oil companies for developing sustainable energy sources by creating a business environment in which that activity is as profitable, or looks like it will become as profitable, as drilling for oil.