Drunken days of advertising

BOOK REVIEW: Get Smashed By Sam Delaney An insider's view of the seminal period in the UK ad business is an entertaining, if sometimes annoying, look at a male-dominated industry that was fuelled by booze and brilliance, writes Ray Sheerin

The full title of Get Smashed is Get Smashed. The story of the men who made the adverts that changed our lives.

And, like most UK advertising before the revolution that came about in the business in the 1960s, the title of the book is based on a pun. It refers both to the Cadbury's Smash TV commercial that coined the famous tagline "For mash get Smash" (voted the most popular TV commercial of all time in 1995) and to the excesses not just tolerated but celebrated in the advertising business at the time. Delaney quotes Dave Trott, then a creative at Boase Massimi Pollitt, on the subject: "We used to be there (the nearby pub, the Prince of Wales) from eleven in the morning until three in the afternoon, which was when pubs used to shut. We'd then get a cab over to Harrods because their off-licence was the only place you could buy a drink after three.

"We'd bring a couple of bottles of tequila back, get smashed and roll a couple of joints until the pubs opened again at seven. Then we'd stay there until they shut again at eleven."

Get Smashed charts a seminal period in UK advertising, from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Before then, the US dominated the advertising world. Bill Bernbach of DDB, the most influential adman of the time, was in his heyday, producing ground-breaking advertising that appealed to consumers' intelligence (like celebrating VW Beetle's unconventionality with a press ad headlined "Think Small") rather than bullying them into submission with bland messages repeated often.

Then in the 1960s, many of New York's best regarded creatives moved to London (Robert Brownjohn, Bob Gill, Bob Brooks, George Lois etc) and US creative hotshops such as PKL were establishing London offices, ushering in a new era of brave, brash communications. At the same time, television was just developing as a medium, one which very soon would hold huge cultural sway.

Over the next 10 years, the balance of creative power shifted to London, as a whole new breed began to see advertising as an attractive career. Prior to this, advertising had been a faintly embarrassing career choice, a crass mixture of selling and commerce, and drawing staff from a remarkably shallow pool. Delaney quotes Frank Lowe: "The creative people when I started were all Oxford graduates sitting behind typewriters. The account men were all from the army and the secretaries all had double-barrelled names and scarves tied around their heads". Lowe, a Mancunian who left school at 17, was one of those who broke the mould.

The great, late John Webster was another. Webster, one of the most influential UK creatives, found the environment intimidating initially: "Everyone spoke very well and it had the feeling of an old-boy network. Regional accents were considered lower class and I felt constantly inferior in the presence of these very clever people."

However, it was precisely because the mould was broken that UK advertising changed so phenomenally in the course of little more than a decade - attracting extraordinary talents from ordinary backgrounds, with people like Ridley Scott, David Puttnam and Alan Parker.

It is Parker who provides one of the better anecdotes in the book. When being asked by a French journalist what his father did for a living, he said "He's a painter". They said "How marvellous! What style does he paint in?" to which Parker replied that he only ever painted in one colour. "Great! Avant-garde!" came the journalist's reply. "No" said Parker, "he paints railings for the electricity board".

In fact, overall, this is a book of anecdotes. Sam Delaney's father, uncle and brothers work in advertising, and the level of access he enjoys to gossip and its sources is evident everywhere in this book.

Get Smashed will appeal to people who work in or are interested in the advertising business. But its appeal will not go much further.

All the accounts of excesses, hell-raising and general boorishness are lovingly recalled but it is a world which will be alien to most people now working in advertising, let alone those outside the business.

The work ethic, or lack of it, described will appear bizarre to the modern reader. As will the depiction of women in the book. It's a very male world and the few females to grace the pages do so purely as the subjects of some rather sexist anecdotes.

Not only that, but Delaney's writing style, while fluid, contains some irritating idiosyncrasies.

As well as being a journalist, he is a documentary writer and presenter. The result is that some of his writing has elements of the "docudrama" style, where he dramatises scenes rather than describing them.

He assumes an omniscient viewpoint when setting up narrative scenes, expecting readers to believe that he has full access to the thoughts of each of the individuals in the book.

For example: "John Webster stared out of his office window in frustration. He thought about the movie he'd seen the night before, Easy Rider".

The book is full of these and the irritation they cause accumulates. This is not only unfortunate, it is also unnecessary. It makes the book more difficult to read than it needs to be. The anecdotes he recounts would have been better without such stylistic embellishment.

While the foregoing may appear to damn with faint praise, the anecdotes are the best thing about the book. It casts no new light on the advertising business but it does have some excellent stories.

There is a particularly good story about Charles Saatchi, then a hot-shot creative at CDP, later a founder of Saatchi & Saatchi and now one of the UK's most respected art collectors. Ross Cramer, his creative partner, took him shopping one day to an art gallery to buy a wedding present for a mutual friend.

They ended up trying to choose between two small Miró etchings. "Which do you prefer?" asked Cramer. Saatchi just glanced at them and said "Let's get the one with the biggest signature."

Ray Sheerin is managing director of Chemistry advertising agency