Ads and art
Wilfred De' Ath
Thirty Seconds Michael J. Arlen (Faber with Farrer, Strauss & Giroux pp. 211, £5.50) One can easily imagine the sense of suppressed excitement, euphoria even, that must have pervaded the normally sepulchral atmosphere of the New Yorker office when this idea was first mooted: 'The anatomy of a TV commercial? No kidding? Great idea. Get on with it, Mike. Take as long as you like. Tell it like it is.'
But is it a great idea? Is there anything intrinsically different, or more significant, about the making of a 30 second television commercial than there is about the making of any other television programme — Panorama, say, or Crossroads? Wouldn't it be equally interesting, or boring, depending on your point of view, to know what David Dimbleby eats for breakfast as to know that top TV commercial director Steve Horn, 'a big man with a large, heavy-boned face, with a thick brown moustache that stops short of a handlebar, and with a similarly thick brown head of hair, brushed straight back' — the description is positively yawn' making— keeps bowls of fruit and platters of cheese and bottles of Perrier about him when he's working? Most of Thirty Seconds is written at this level.
If the best TV commercials are, as was stated in The Sunday Times by the television critic of the New Statesman, Julian Barnes, 'the Elizabethan miniatures of our gross technological age, art fully packing narrative, colour, emotion and message into the breakfast space', then surely the verbal depiction of the creation of a major television portrait — the recent ITV biography of Cardinal Hume, for instance — would be equally significant. Small may be beautiful but does that have to mean that short, in• television terms, is necessarily more beautiful? I have another criticism of Mr Arlen 's journalistic method which is basically that of saturation coverage, though the end product is still no more than a very long New Yorker article sandwiched between hard covers. It is this: the more he tells you, the less you want to know. Mr Arlen comes co at times like a 34-year-old dirty old mart. For instance, in a vaguely titillating passage in Thirty Seconds, he is at some pains to tell as how a blonde commercial model named Melodie is not wearing a bra so her nipples are clearly in evidence. Such passages are inconsequential enough, heaven knows, but isn't it even more infinitely inconsequential when we learn that the problem was solved by thS television director's wife having_ to take 01; her own bra and hand it over to the model So where (hies the director's wife buy her bras? And what did she have for breakfast: Where, in fact, is one going to stop? If this is really the new journalism, you can keep it., The final impact of Thirty Seconds is 01 total blandness. American television, as!!‘e, all know, is totally bland. American v commercials are, on this evidence, equallY bland, especially the director, Mr Big Horn. His wife, his crew, and his employees are bland. The people who appear in the TV, commercial are bland: s definitely a California look" ' says Linda: Horn's wife, of yet another ‘stunninglY 'Steve says: "I think it's more universal than, California. Like Cheryl Tiegs. Chen'. started as a California look, but she beearn' more universal." ' The people at the advertising agencY N.W. Ayer on Sixth Avenue at Fifty-Fourth Street, the 'new Madison Avenue' of New York, are bland. The clients (America!o). Telephone & Telegraph) are bland. The product — long distance telephone calls tp absent loved-ones — is particularly bland, The New Yorker, as we all know, is Harla, Mr Arlen is bland. His book is bland. Only this review of it, brought to you courtesy nobody except the editors of the Spectator's not I hope, bland. .
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