London's latest Banksy: graffiti artist's new work gets protection http://t.co/XQgbuYAN via @standardnews
Maggie Thatcher! Can you hear me Maggie Thatcher?!?
That’s one of my favourite pieces of dialogue. And I didn’t hear it at the recent premier of The Iron Lady. My invitation to this auspicious event obviously got lost in the post.
No, those lines are from a speech by Bjørge Lillelien, the football commentator for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. A friend recently introduced me to this hilarious footage on You Tube and I couldn’t quite believe it. Lillelien had a ‘moment’ just after his boys had beaten our boys (that’s the England football team) in a World Cup qualifier in Oslo in 1981.
Well they hadn’t just beaten our footballers. In Lillelien’s words, Norway had “beaten them all.” Switching rapidly between Norwegian and English, he taunted us with a roll call of all the famous English people he knew.
"Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, vi har slått dem alle sammen, vi har slått dem alle sammen [we have beaten them all, we have beaten them all]. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher [...] your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!"
You have to love this sort of passion for job. Well, actually I would but one thing in particular puts me off. He reminds me in his hysterical claims, of rather too many IT press launches over the years. You know the type: where the launch of a small piece of hardware is hailed as some type of cure for cancer.
A journalist friend of mine went to a press launch once, where the hotel lights dimmed and suddenly the crowd was deafened by the theme music from The Omen. At the climactic moment, the curtains were thrown open, the music reached a thundering crescendo and, when the stage smoke died down, an image slowly appeared.
It was a hub. Yes, that’s right, a wiring closet. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. Or cry. He rang me the next day just to vent his disgust at this outrage, but we ended up in hysterics over the whole thing because it was so genuinely funny. I was just thankful that none of my clients would entertain that kind of Cry Wolf-type behaviour.
It’s no wonder that journalists don’t take the claims of some PRs very seriously. Maybe the time has come to think about devaluing the stereotyped currencies of PR (the hype, the air kiss and the free lunch) and stabilising the rhetoric. Otherwise, we’re all in danger of being defeated. Mike King? Gareth Hunt Thompson? Maggie Zaboura! Can you hear me Maggie? As they say in English, in the bars of Madison Square Garden, 'Your boys took a hell of a beating.'
About the Author
Gina Sharp
Gina Sharp has always been ahead of the public relations curve. Not that she planned it like that. At 20 she talked her way into a job at one of Europe’s first high tech public relations firms, BIPR in London, where she became the agency’s youngest ever account director. She helped to create brands such as Epson, NCR, IBM, Neve Electronics, Bose, Sony UK, Sun Alliance, Shiva, Pace, Fujitsu and Sage. When the agency was acquired by the Shandwick Group two years later, it gave her the opportunity to gain wider experience, devising pan-European campaigns for multinationals. However, because Gina wouldn’t conform, she came up against agency hierarchy that she regularly sidestepped in her clients’ best interests. This approach did exasperate her management team and her in-house nickname of ‘the little revolutionary’ stuck. However, the clients appreciated the difference.
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