The Big Bear is on Little Portland Street

On the brand strength and recognition scale Soviet Russia is right up there; one of the biggest and most successful brand communications exercises ever. A powerful and indelible pallet of colours, symbols, shapes, illustrations, type and Cyrillic script. A borscht of elements which can be served to transmit a very definite set of values and emotions.

I'm a huge fan of Russian print and poster works and I was very glasnost (sorry, couldn't resist that) to find, GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design, yesterday. It opened last week and it has some truly smashing work on display. If you work in communications you really need to visit this constructivist haven.

I want...

I want...

I want!

Never meet your heroes...

that's what they say. And you know what? I think they're right, because had I seen the Flowerpot Men and their mate Andy Pandy up close back then, the words 'Andy Pandy's coming to play' would have provoked a very different set of feelings, not to mention nightmares, pretty much like the one I had last night.

Today no one would put these monsters on the box. Not even after a couple of bottles of Baileys. Clearly the technological limitations of the average Ferguson set imbued them with a softness they most certainly do not have in the flesh. More Dead of Night than afternoon delight.

And to think that some protested that the colourful, rotund and benign Teletubbies were evil! Angels indeed in comparison. And if you don't believe me, go to The Museum of London and see them for yourself. You can sit on one of their comfy 50s sofas and watch episodes of the same on an antiquated set and take a stroll down memory lane as you survey the ducks on the wall.

You might think that kids today, having been brought up in the digital age and fed on a diet of CGI, would think they'd wandered into a stone-age cave. But no, they're mesmerised by it. I think it's the tone and pace of it, it's so different to 'their' entertainment landscape. But then, via the internet and sites such as YouTube, they are introduced to all manner of things, so perhaps it's not so alien to them after all.

 



I bet it seemed like a good idea down the pub...

 

Bloomsbury, London

The sun was particularly intense this afternoon, so I had wondered if the above was some kind of bad mirage. But no.

This company thought it was a good idea to name itself after a notorious herbicide, which is inextricably linked with a terrible conflict and infamous for causing health defects and has latterly been linked to the deadliest form of prostate cancer. Ummmm.

Rating on the fu*kwit scale of 1 to 10?
You decide.

Let's not forget...

But a surprising number of people do.

Saturdays with Dickie, Shirley and Mick

 

 

This was the shape of Saturdays for a big slice of my childhood. Only the pointy bit changed when ITV scrapped, U.F.O, their very cool Sci-Fi series and replaced it with their equally cool Sci-Fi series, Space 1999. And this pyramid of warm memories had been on ice until the death last week of wrestler, Mick McManus, reheated them.

I remember that as the top of the day whizzed by, the closing credits of Gerry and Silvia Anderson’s space-age epics signalled the approach of the infinite: World of Sport. It hovered over the day casting a big fat shadow that stretched from 12.30 to gone 5 and if you weren’t that interested in sports (as I wasn’t back then except the Big Occasions; the FA Cup Final; the Grand National and so on) it left you with a black hole to fill until 4pm, because that was when the curtain went up on the biggest piece of fiction of all: the wrestling.

The Partridge-esque titled, World of Sport, was fronted by Dickie Davies, a dapper chap sporting a Jason King-like moustache, bouffant ‘Mallen’-streaked hair and his signature fat-knotted kipper tie. The set was a gloriously un-PC collection of ‘dolly birds’ all tapping away at IBM Selectric typewriters, who stopped only occasionally to hand an efficiently removed piece of paper to one of the Pringle-clad blokes who always seemed to be wandering around as if looking for their car keys.

If you put a photo of him in front of me I wouldn’t be able to identify Ken Walton, but his voice is as familiar to me as my own. “Good afternoon, grapple fans.” He was the ‘voice of wrestling’: the bloke with the mic by the ropes. Even back then I had realised that wrestling was acting in trunks, but my Gran hadn't. She like many other grans took it all very seriously indeed. There were good guys and bad guys, it was both moralistic and entertaining and I think that was what she liked about it. You could take sides. Mick McManus was most definitely the bad guy and Big Daddy (the improbably named, Shirley Crabtree) was the good guy. Of course there were others, but those two, Ken Walton, her boos and hisses and the rustle of the gold paper wrappers of her Callard & Bowser butterscotch form the soundtrack to those Saturdays.

Your best memories are the things you can’t remember, until someone or something reminds you. So thanks Mick.

Wagner's rinse cycle

I always take in a big sniff when I walk by a laundry or launderette. All that starch, fabric conditioner and the minestrone of detergent whiffs; lemon, orange, jasmine and so on. They also emanate other smells like Perchloroethylene, that's dry cleaning solvent to you and me. And I'm pretty sure that the persons who spawned and sanctioned this were sniffing it in all day long. How else could you explain it?

There's an identikit picture of a laundrette: benches bolted to a Lino floor; an array of vending machines all inviting you to put money into them; and the remnants of brands long since lost in the wash, like the above.

FORCO. It's seemingly straight out of central casting, but the name is derived from the parent company, Forsyth, which was dissolved in the 60s so this sign has been here in the Barbican since this complex was opened in the late 70s.

Those vikings certainly make you feel that your smalls would safe in those machines. And I particularly like the wholly synergistic amendments made by the attendants using the medium of the Post-it Note. But, WTF? It's hard to believe that a designer or a naming consultant (mostly because they didn't exist then) went anywhere near this and Prontaprint and its ilk were yet to appear. So this is probably the devil-child of a printer. Or a mate who 'could draw'. Or someone who had access to Letraset's Action Figures and knew how to burnish them.

Time spent in these places is seemingly eternal and dead. One relies on the charity of others to leave behind entertainment for us in the shape of newspapers, mags, or graffiti if we didn't have the foresight to take our own, so there's a big opportunity here. 

At least in the Barbican they give you the horn.

JB. Jolly Bloody... good

So yesterday I'm walking past JB Sports on Ludgate Hill, which is a spit away from St. Paul's and there's the biggest and ugliest pile of crap on the pavement right outside their shop. It's a Bank Holiday and it's hot, so there's an amazing array of cans, lolly packs and salad bowls from the nearby M&S Simply Food. There's also an electrics/telecoms engineer's box there which provides a handy shelf for people to dump litter on.

For reasons we understand, namely, the IRA's activities in the good old days, there is a dearth of bins in the City and especially near landmarks like the aforementioned. But your average visitor is probably unaware of this, they probably just think us to be bad planners.

As we all know, one piece of litter attracts another and pretty soon you have a mountain of it, just siting there and primed to feature in the thousands of photographs and films being taken by the hundreds of people wandering around that part of the capital.

Being a brand-bore it matters very much to me what people think of this City and by extension our country. So I went into JB Sports and asked for a bin liner so that I could clear the mess up. Not only did, Zac, one of the young chaps serving provide me with the necessary, he also came out to help me having realised that it wasn't doing his shop any favours either. Brand awareness. Bless him.
I don't know what you're paying him JB, but it's not nearly enough. This young chap 'get's it', so he's a keeper, and feck knows you need all the help you can get.

Zac. Salute.