AND ANOTHER THING
Recent research discovers Tinsel Tina
PAUL JOHNSON
Behind Tina Brown's appointment to edit the New Yorker, a move which fills many gifted writers with fear and distaste, lies that fateful force of our times, 'research'. The eggheads of the advertising world, noting the age profile of the maga- zine, argue that it needs more under-40 readers. There was a time, in the early 1980s, when research showed that you needed under-40s because they had more money to spend. Then further research in the late 1980s showed that in fact it was the over-40s, who had paid off their mortgages, who now had the money. Yet further research, in the early 1990s, shows that under-40s are again the ones to go for because, by the time readers get to 40, their lifelong brand attachments have already been formed. So in comes Tinsel Tina, to glitter and sparkle, and draw in the unattached youngsters.
A good deal of market research was pumped into the wilting body of Punch before it finally expired on the operating table. Will research dispatch the New York- er, no longer in robust health? I ask this after reading a pamphlet, Is Research Killing Advertising?, written by Simon Sil- vester, planning director of Burkitt Wein- reich Bryant. In it he argues that the cur- rent methods used by market researchers to test the effectiveness of a proposed advertising campaign of a prospective prod- uct are fundamentally misconceived. According to market research, he points out, the Rt Hon. Neil Gordon Kinnock should now be Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. According to market research, too, it would have been disastrous to use chimpanzees — associat- ed in the housewife's mind with dirty and unsavoury habits — to advertise a brand of tea. That's what research says; but we know as a fact that Neil is not in No. 10 and that chimps sell tea in prodigious quantities. Sil- vester gives other examples of highly suc- cessful ads which research would have vetoed. He concludes that research on prospective customers is based on the maxim 'Give them what they want' and that this is often deceptive because people do not know what they want. He prefers the alternative maxim of Lord Reith of the BBC: 'Give them what they need, and they will come to respect you for it.' He even advances for consideration the audacious advice of the man who terrified America with his War of the Worlds broadcast, Orson Welles: 'Don't give them what they want, give them what they never believed possi- ble.' If research had the answers, then we would all have an easy job — generals before battles, presidents before elections, writers before putting pen to paper. Research would hand a publisher his next best-seller on a plate: How Princess Diana Found God from Outer Space by Jilly Rushdie. But research is the short cut that gets you lost. As Silvester says, 'There is no substitute for sound creative judgment.'
Benjamin Jowett, the omniscient Master of Balliol, once laid down: —Research" is a mere excuse for idleness.' The dictum is indignantly repudiated by a million post- graduates all over the world. But I see what the Master meant. He was not complaining of lack of industry: most researchers, how- ever mindless, are industrious. What he meant was that research tends to be a sub- stitute for genuine hard thinking. Whether in the advertising world or in academia, it follows safe, well-worn, blameless routines, in the process producing what Kingsley Amis calls 'pseudo-solutions to non-prob- lems'. Jim Dixon's research into the eco- nomic effects of changing techniques in the 15th-century shipbuilding industry was mercifully never completed. But it adum- brated, with gruesome accuracy, countless PhD theses which, since Lucky Jim was published in 1954, have absorbed colossal sums of the taxpayer's money and now clut- ter up the shelves of the grander libraries.
In my trade as a historian, I have to note the availability of literally thousands of such pieces of research which find their way into print. I am even sent them for com- ment from dim campuses across the Atlantic and in the Antipodes; they arrive 'My gums bleed for them. . in frayed and exasperated Jiffy-bags. I don't wholly despise research students and minor academics. True, a hundred, two hundred years ago, they would have gone into the churches and might have even instilled virtue in the young, instead of teaching them how to deconstruct works of litera- ture and observe the zealous pieties of Political Correctness. On the other hand, their trouble-making energies, if not con- fined to the campus, might find an outlet — as Keynes said of capitalist greed — in far more constructive activities. There are worse things than research. Indeed, in per- haps one case out of ten, these obscure fac- tual grubbings can be transmuted, by men and women of letters, into genuine history. In any case, there is nothing you and I can do about it. So long as governments and voters are persuaded — by research of course — that higher education is the key to the absolute, then PhD theses will prolif- erate to absorb the money available to pay for them. Whether anyone ever reads them is irrelevant.
But sometimes, as I am sure Silvester also admits in his field, research turns up trumps. I have been studying a fascinating volume, published by the Tate Gallery, called Turner's Papers. It is by Peter Bower, a 'paper historian', whose knowledge of the manner in which drawing and watercolour paper was and is made, and the ways in which artists, and Turner in particular, used and abused it to achieve their effects, is truly awesome. Bower takes one deep into the arcane mysteries of laid and wove papermaking, of watermarks, dates, wire- profiles, sizing and opacity, fibre, colour and tone; and of rubbing, washing, scrap- ing, stopping-out with water and gelatine. and other vigorous means Turner used to torture and bully his paper into holding his tremendous effects. This kind of expert knowledge, helping one to explore the criti- cal but mysterious area where mastery of technique blends with overpowering imagi- nation to create great art, can only be acquired by patient expenditure of time and effort, in this case made possible by the generosity of Volkswagen, which financed the project. It gives one penetrating new insights into the way Turner worked, to say nothing of invaluable advice to humble watercolourists like myself. So research does have a point then? Not necessarily, Sir. For this is more than research: it is that elusive activity, real scholarship.
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