We should resist the globalisation of smells.
From London to Delhi, stench is truth
Every Sunday night for the past couple of months, I have been going back in time. I have been in the early 1960s. Sharp suits, womanly curves, and hair that went one way or went the other, and damn well left a line if it changed its mind. I’ve been watching the drama Mad Men on BBC4, and I’ve been gripped.
Not so much by the plot. More by the general ambience. Don Draper and his crew are advertising men on Madison Avenue, and they ooze a certain style. They make you want to mix drinks at lunchtime and grab the secretary’s arse. Stick a hanky in your top pocket, folded razor straight, and tie your tie backwards with the thin end down. They all look so gleamingly good that you can almost smell the Brylcreem.
Except, of course, you couldn’t. Not if you were actually there. All you would smell is stale smoke. They all smoke, all the time. While they eat, while they sleep, while they argue, while they kiss. That office of theirs must have been like last night’s house party, all the time. One of them even smokes a pipe, for God’s sake. And the women, too. Sidle up to Draper’s servile, baby-blonde wife, and behind all that fluttering chiffon you’d probably find she stinks like the mumbling old tramp at your bus stop. You don’t see smells on television. You forget how they work.
Hence those Lynx advertisements. If you didn’t know, would you ever figure out what they were for? The women don’t even twitch their noses. They just follow the guy, hypnotised, as though the musk in the cans was that Attract WomenTM pheromone stuff that they used to sell out the back of Viz and Private Eye. Remember them? ‘In seven out of ten tests, the woman headed straight for the chair!’ So confusing, for the teenage boy. Muddled, lusty thoughts of furniture.
I read that they are doing well in India, those Lynx advertisements. The humour translates, the Benny Hill fantasy is one of which the Indian man approves. According to reports earlier this week, Asia is the next frontier in the deodorant wars. Lynx, which they call Axe, is the subject of a major Unilever marketing push. Currently, only 7 per cent of Asia uses anything, and even fewer in India. It’s a big market.
They’ve cracked Russia already, by focusing on paranoia and women. Tell a Russian woman that she uses far less roll-on than anybody else, even a Brit, and she minds: she buys. In Asia, they’re targeting the men. ‘Asia is a market we have never really cracked,’ some fragrant Unilever bigwig told the Times. ‘They don’t think they smell, but people everywhere smell.’ To disagree would set us on a dangerous path. And yet I have been to India, several times, and I have smelled many, many Indian things. Food, incense, diesel and s*** are the ones which stick in the mind. Unless I am blanking it out, the human body didn’t make much of an impression.
At least, not in that sense. There is a familiar, sickly sweet fug that hangs over the city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, which I sniffed at, and wondered about, and didn’t figure out until I wandered down to the burning ghats. That’s where they wrap the corpses in white shrouds, burn them on pyres, and tip what remains into the Ganges. It doesn’t smell like person. It smells like bacon. For years afterwards, my flatmate used to find me hovering dreamily over the stove, so transported by our sizzling breakfast that I could almost hear the rickshaw hooters and the temple bells.
As a species, I suspect we are close to being olfactorally illiterate. We don’t know where we are, and we don’t know what to expect. Smells can leave us punch drunk and reeling, or they can slip under our conscious radar altogether. In seven out of ten tests, maybe they can send us straight to that chair. And maybe the age of the nose is just beginning. It will be reborn noses that ultimately do it for cigarettes in Britain, not banning fags from shop displays. We’ve been out of the Mad Men miasma for many years, but wearing your suit on an evening out has only just stopped meaning a trip to the dry cleaners, or a week of smelling like Charles Kennedy. Suddenly, we are learning how one urinal pineapple cube can flavour a whole pub. I wonder if our deodorant sales are dropping off, too?
Who knows how London will smell in a decade? But wouldn’t it be sad if it smelled just like Delhi, and Tokyo, and Maputo, and Murmansk? Resist, Asia! To lose touch with your smell is to lose too much. They look great in Mad Men, and their lives are awful. That’s the point. Stench is truth. It is not to be sniffed at.
So Alastair Campbell did not, at any point, remind Andre Suard that he was ‘only a f***ing hairdresser’. Is this not a shame? It seemed like the perfect distillation of the clash between the worlds of Tony and Cherie Blair.
Downing Street has descended into farce, entirely because Cherie has built her own circus Cabinet of freaks, cranks, groomers and spivs, as some sort of grotesque shadow of Tony’s own. Campbell has inadvertently lied to the press and it looks like he might have been found out. And in the middle of all of this, he is called up to value the view of the man employed to make Cherie’s hair look like a good wig rather than a bad one. Who wouldn’t be on his side? It is about the most sympathetic he has ever been.
And he denies it. I can’t figure out why. It doesn’t make him look any better, and it doesn’t make Cherie look any worse. Maybe he just felt bad for Andre. ‘I always liked him,’ Campbell said, in his denial, ‘and was always grateful when he saved me a timewasting trip by cutting my hair in Cherie’s bathroom.’ What a time it was. So much human clutter, so much drama. So many people storming in and out of rooms, with slamming doors and strange personal ties. And now we have a new PM with no meat on his released expenses beyond cleaning bills and a Sky TV subscription, who seemingly governs the country all by himself. What does he do all day?
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