It was January 1992.
I arrived back at Watford College after Christmas and waited for my
creative advertising students to return in their new jumpers and socks. I
mulled over some possible new advertising briefs to kick off the New
Year.
Persil?
Potato Marketing Board?
Sell spiders as the must have pet?
A General Election was set for April 9th.
An idea hit me quicker than a right hook from Neil Kinnock.
Why not get the students to sell a political party?
Which one though?
I'd always liked the fun and the craziness of The Official Monster
Raving Loony Party. (MRLP)
They were the protest vote of the day and poked a big, dirty finger in
the fat ribs of disingenuous politicians.
As far as I knew the MRLP didn't have any advertising history.
This would be a first.
Let's get them more votes.
Think big!
Let's get them in to number 10.
The Loony Party was the brain child of Screaming Lord Sutch, a huge name
in pop music in the 50's and early 60's.
Lord Sutch was a satirical dark blend of Goth horror and rock and roll.
He sang songs like, A Monster In Black Tights, Purple People
Eater and Murder In The Graveyard. His biggest hit was Jack
The Ripper, a song recently covered by The Horrors and The White
Stripes.
On stage he would wield a big axe or knife and pretend to eat body parts.
Some of the session musicians who worked with Lord
Sutch included Keith Moon, Jimmy Page, Richie Blackmore and Jeff Beck.
With the emergence of The Stones,
The Beatles and The Who, the UK music scene lurched away from theatrical kitsch
toward serious guitar-led RnB. The kids wanted to jive to the Mods and gaze at
suited clean cut boys like The Beatles. Lord Sutch had to find a new audience.
And a new stage.
He turned his attention towards
politics.
In 1963, he stood in the British
parliamentary elections as The National Teenage Party. Back then the minimum voting age
was 21.
Teenagers were not allowed to
vote, yet they could fight for their country.
And the young 'adults' running the
country were involved in scandals like The Profumo Affair.
Lord Sutch challenged that hypocrisy and sought to empower the teenagers.
I called Lord Sutch's agent who fixed up a meeting in a Harrow pub.
Stupidly I asked how I would recognise Lord Sutch.
"Easy", the agent said, "He would have a large axe in his
hand".
A week later, I arrived at the pub and sat down with a trembling pint.
I was about to meet a guy who had been higher on the bill than The
Beatles.
Lord Sutch walked in.
Thankfully, he'd left his axe at home.
Instead, he clutched a well-used Tesco bag full of party leaflets,
badges, his party manifesto and bundles of fake £1 notes.
Why the fake money? Had he just won at Monopoly?
“We like giving people money,” he said. “We can’t afford to give away
the real stuff. Money is too expensive”
For the next 20 minutes he listened intently about my talented creative advertising students and I went through a carefully rehearsed marketing plan. I didn't want him to think I was some crusty academic who didn’t know what he was talking about.
Lord Sutch glazed over at the mention of the words demographic and a strategic
communications platform.
The vision of a UK multi-media campaign which embraced TV and
through-the- line marketing activity was met with a quizzical look.
I sounded just like a crusty academic.
Lord Sutch said, "Do what you want. It's up to you. Just
remember we don't have any money. We blew what we had on fake £1 notes."
Lord Sutch finished off his cola and said he'd come to the college when
we had some ideas. Before he left he did say one thing that stuck with me.
"Don't forget we are The Official Monster Raving Loony Party you
know".
He scurried out of the pub with his empty Tesco carrier bag.
The students were all excited about working on The Loony Party.
I told them we had to create a strategy based on a truth.
We needed a logical position.
Yes, it was a ‘loony’ party but underneath the lunacy was logic.
The party had a point to make.
They looked at me as if I'd just killed their grandparents.
Nobby, the college cat, was unimpressed and slept in the filing cabinet.
I read out some points from their Manifesto.
They advocated the use of Space Hoppers on the M1.
That was the Party's way of saying the motorway needed repair.
Heated toilet seats for pensioners.
Keep the elderly warm.
Passports for dogs.
Why should dogs be left behind when you go over the Channel for a break?
Turn the butter mountain in to a ski slope.
The over production of butter to pay European dairy farmers on output
was a waste of tax payers money.
Classroom 257 became MRLP Communications HQ.
The walls were
soon covered with ideas.
Lord Sutch’s final words from the pub were discussed.
His party were the Official Monster Raving Loony
Party.
Which meant that the other parties were all unofficial.
The politicians were all loony.
They just didn't realise it.
The Monster Raving Loony Party knew they were crazy.
They had the integrity and truth other politicians lacked.
The rest were all pretending to be sane.
A line appeared on the pin boards.
Isn't it time you voted for an Official Loony?
That was the platform.
The anchor of unarguable logic we were after.
The strap line to the campaign.
Every vote cast until this point was for a party that was unofficially
loony.
Some of the students were not convinced.
They didn't like the long strap line.
We shortened it.
This time vote for an Official Loony.
We had an idea!
Something clear to execute.
The most interesting and simple executions came from Dave Askwith,
Andrew Fisher and Neil Riley. Andrew and Dave wrote some very simple posters
including a tactical ad for April Fools' Day.
They also had the brilliant idea to visualise the Manifesto.
Dave illustrated each policy and designed a new font called Loony Serif.
Meanwhile, I got in touch with a friend of mine, Dave Brown, a former
creative director of advertising agency Collett Dickenson and Pearce. (CDP)
Dave had a TV production company. It turned out he was keen to make
films for the party and saw our brief as a creative opportunity to add
something different to his show reel.
By the end of February, we had the presentation.
From the big TV ideas down to the T shirts and badges.
We even had the Party Manifesto ready to mail out inside a marble bag
punctured with a gaping big hole.
The bag carried the headline, Have
MP’s Lost Their Marbles?
Lord Sutch arrived at the college in a gold Rolls Royce and parked next
to The Principal's Fiat Punto.
He was regally dressed in leopard skin trousers, a gold shiny jacket and
his trademark top-hat full of fake money.
The car's stereo system boomed out Lord Sutch's new single, Monster
Raving Loony to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory.
We made a red carpet out of layout paper, crudely coloured with an
orange marker.
Lord Sutch entered our room to a rapturous round of applause.
We presented the work. He sat there, with his agent, chuckling
away.
No questions or points were raised.
Lord Sutch was the perfect client.
"Great. Run it all", he said.
Lord Sutch offered to sponsor one of the students to stand for
election in a nearby constituency.
Dave Askwith volunteered straight away and decided to stand under the
name of Dr Jekyll in Maidenhead.
The incumbent MP was one Mr Hyde.
Lord Sutch was soon back in his car with 25 smiling students waving him
off.
The writing of the campaign was the easy bit. The hard work was about to
begin.
We needed to pull in favours, get the work produced and in the media.
Without any money.
If creative ideas are strong enough people will always want to come on
board. A recent film of the time Field of Dreams was our inspiration.
Write The Ads And They Will Come, appeared on the pin
boards.
I made a lot of ambitious promises to people I didn't know.
To the production company who said they would print the poster elements:
a promise that once my students got in to the industry they would put work
their way.
To the poster company who gave us a free billboard for a day: a promise
that the billboard would appear in the national press and the poster company
logo would be seen by millions.
Meanwhile, Dave Brown had been talking to his TV production mates and
had wangled a free day's shoot in a studio.
We had one viable script written by student copywriter Neil Riley. A joke
about Opinion Polls featuring opinionated Polish people who all agreed the only
hope for the UK was The Loony Party. We had 100% backing in our Opinion
Poles.
Then, something rather fortuitous occurred.
The Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, had given a pre-recorded radio
interview to the BBC.
The interviewer pushed Mr Kinnock for answers and clarity on Labour’s
policies.
He pushed him too far.
The Labour leader lost the plot.
Kinnock's diatribe quickly became an incoherent, angry rant.
After the interview Kinnock realised his faux-pas and immediately sort an injunction to prevent public broadcast.
Unfortunately for the Labour leader, Dave Brown had managed to get hold
of the tape.
Dave wrote a brilliantly simple script which juxtaposed the radio
interview with TV titles proclaiming that Kinnock was genuinely far too crazy
to be considered as a politician for the Monster Raving Loonies. He was an
unofficial loony.
Kinnock and Opinion Poles went in to production.
We then had to work out how to get the films screened.
This was decades before Youtube, remember. I called the manager of an independent
cinema in Huntingdon, John Major's constituency.
Me: Hi. How many people do you normally get on a Monday night?
Cinema manager: We are playing Star Trek 4. Maybe, 14. 15 if we're lucky.
Me: I'll guarantee a packed house if you do one thing for me.
Cinema manager: What?
Me: Show the very first Monster Raving Loony Party cinema commercial.
Cinema manager: How will that get a packed house?
Me: All the ticket holders on the night will be given a free mini gig by Screaming Lord Sutch and his band in the cinema foyer.
Cinema manager: Okay.
Me: I'll get on to the local press and radio station and tell them that this is an exclusive gig. They'll get to meet and greet Lord Sutch. And they'll see the world's first showing of his cinema commercial.
I'd taken a bit of a punt on Lord Sutch being amenable to the idea and free on the night. Fortunately, he loved it and he took off to polish his axe in readiness to woo the Star Trek crowd at the local cinema in Huntingdon.
While Dave Brown was shooting the two cinema commercials, the students were
printing the elements that would make up our main billboard poster for April
Fools Day. We had to print dozens of different shapes.
We assembled all the poster elements on the floor of the College's main
hall. We marked out the dimensions of the billboard, 20ft by 10ft, and I
viewed the giant jigsaw puzzle coming together from the above balcony.
Once we had them in place we marked their position so we could translate
this to the same area of the billboard on the day of posting.
On April 1st at 5.00am, I met up with Dave Askwith and Andrew
Fisher at the blanked out poster site. Calls
to the press were made beforehand to invite them to the 10.00am launch.
All three of us sprung in to action and we were up and down the ladders
like psychotic decorators in overalls. with Go Faster stripes.
By 9.30 the poster was up.
The finishing touch was to cover up the poster so we could do a grand
reveal to the press.
I had raided my mum's attic, took all her old curtains and sewed them
together to create one billboard sized curtain.
The poster was soon covered in a patchwork of velvet, paisley and floral
patterns held up by string tied off at the back of the poster.
The line IT'S CURTAINS FOR MAJOR was daubed over
the curtains. (Yes, it was an obvious and not very portentous as it turned
out.)
Lord Sutch pitched up at 9.45am.
“Love the poster”, he said. “It's curtains for Major. Love it.”
I explained that he was looking at the wrapper and he would have to cut
the string to reveal the actual poster.
"You mean there's another poster behind this one. Great."
We waited. And waited.
No one turned up.
It was 10.15am and the area was deserted.
The only attention we'd received all morning was, in fact, from a
Government official who jumped out of his Jaguar and threatened to have us
arrested for vandalism to a poster site.
The poster was in fact opposite the Labour Party's Head Office in
Lambeth, so we did expect a little conflict on the day.
We explained we were on Official Loony business.
Andrew and Dave mentioned something about the Tory vandalism to the
country.
The irate official went off in a huff threatening to call the police.
Suddenly a handful of cars and motorbikes appeared and within seconds there was a large group of photo-journalists staring at our curtained wrapped poster.
Lord Sutch’s rough voice boomed out of the megaphone as he announced his
very first billboard to the world.
He took the scissors and cut the string.
Nothing happened.
Dave clambered up the back of the poster site on the wooden framework
and feverishly cut at the string like Norman Bates on amphetamines.
The curtains fell to the ground to the joyous music of clicking cameras.
In the evening, I drove down to the poster site expecting to see it
vandalised by Jaguar car man. It was intact.
A group of Spanish tourists were posing beside the poster taking
photographs and uttering the word ‘loco’.
The next morning, April 2nd 1992, 7 days before polling day, I walked to my local newsagent and scanned the national papers on the counter.
The billboard poster shouted loudly from the front page of the Daily
Telegraph.
We had an audience of 1 million at a cost of a few pleading 'phone calls
and dubious promises.
Of all the promises I made I failed to keep one.
The poster company didn't get their PR.
Their logo had been cropped out of the press image.
The poster also appeared in The Independent and was mentioned on Capital
Radio and CNN.
How did the cinema manager do?
He got a full house. All the
local Trekkies beamed up to the cinema. They all loved the gig and the ad. (The
manager played out Kinnock, Opinion Poles wasn’t ready in time.)
The Trekkies weren’t the only ones to love the ad.
Dave Brown entered the cinema ad in to an Awards competition. The
best ads that have never been seen.
It won the funniest TV ad of the year as voted by judge Jasper Carrot,
the renowned Brummie comic. (Dave was given a cheque of £2,000 which helped
recoup some of the production costs.)
We all learnt a huge amount about the real world of
communications.
The students delivered some great creative work which helped Lord Sutch
and his party gain some notable P.R.
Dave Askwith, A.K.A. Dr Jekyll, managed to poll 147 votes from the good
folk of Maidenhead. (Today, Dave runs
his own creative consultancy. He worked for the party in the 2019 election.
Andrew Fisher is a Creative Director in Sydney.)
During those three short months of 1992 I came to know a little more
about David Sutch.
I visited him in the pubs he played and regularly chatted to him over a
cuppa.
I came to know him as a lovely, lovely man.
He was gentle, kind and caring. And deeply passionate about his
role in politics. He tried to bring attention to things that were being ignored
by the established parties.
And what better way to bring attention than to embrace humour.
He genuinely wanted to make things better for folk.
His party never won a seat. The most votes he ever got was at a Bye
Election in Rotherham when 1,114 voters put a cross against his name.
However, the passing of time has proved David Sutch was a visionary.
You can now take a Degree in Rock Music.
You can now take your dog abroad.
The voting age is now 18.
And the Winter Fuel Allowance helps to keep old people warm.
We still can't use Space Hoppers on the M1 or ski down a mountain
made of butter.
Maybe one day.
Seven years later, on June 16th 1999, David Sutch hanged himself with a skipping rope from the top of the stairs in his late mother's house.
He was 58 years of age. He'd left a note on a calendar which
said. depression, depression, depression. It's all too much.
He was a big loss in so many ways.
David Sutch 10/11/1940-16/6/1999
