Missing media

Media fragmentation is a fact of the PR landscape but makes people concentrate on cliques and miss the big picture. Take boys’ magazines – they don’t cover boys. But things weren’t always like this. A letter in the February 1964 edition of the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) ends Do other readers leave their tortoises out during winter?

Sadly an energetic correspondence on pet hibernation strategy didn’t follow, which probably began the decline of the British tortoise, while the magazine died three years later as less arduous approaches to boyhood, involving beer, girls, rock music and radical politics, took hold.

BOP readers engaged in a constant rampage of bicycling, canoeing, and birds-nesting. In their improvised tents on Ben Nevis, they’d light fires, darn socks, scrutinise Ordnance Survey maps, whittle catapults and blow birds’ eggs.

BOP articles, therefore, were all about doing things: camping with a boat, racing model cars, grayling fishing and (yes) making diesel (You will have to do this in bulk), sending you down to the chemist for anaesthetic ether, nitromethane and amyl nitrate (If you explain what you want it for there should be no trouble in getting it).

Of course this was for model aircraft, not bombs. These were Great British Schoolboys, skinning their own rabbits, building bivouacs and radio sets, trainspotting and digging latrines at the slightest provocation.

This was an age when boys were not only expected to be polite and do well in exams but also to survive in the wild, arrest escaped convicts, expose international conspiracies and thwart rocket spies. Their dogs, meanwhile, would foil burglars and find the missing jewels.

Today the problem page would cover girls, skin complaints and fashion, whereas BOP focuses instead largely on legal matters, reflecting the hands-on approach of its readers: Did you realise that every time you threaten to give someone a good bashing, the chances are you are breaking the law?

The readers’ letters reveal a fellowship of taxonomists. One begins I collect weapons and I find it is a very expensive hobby, while others bring news of collected bones, nutcrackers, golf-balls and teeth. One pleads More Articles on Cycle Maintenance Please.

The fiction is 100 per cent adventure (Spotted Killer, Unseen Enemy), while the advertising has recruitment ads for the armed forces and banks among the tents, fishing tackle, cameras and gear (Save up the Libby’s milk labels and get a 4-inch blade sheath knife).

And while some boys who read BOP are now running our rabbit farms, blue-chip corporates and diesel supplies, others are our major criminals, rock dinosaurs and property tycoons. They helped to make The Dangerous Book for Boys by the Iggulden brothers a recent bestseller in the UK.

Great British Schoolboys are still out there, some of them in their sixties. Just because there isn’t a magazine for them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Taking the rap

Companies can learn a lot from governments, one of whose prime tasks is to take the blame for everything whether it’s their fault or not. While they take the credit for all good things they never admit to failure, in flagrant disregard of perfectly obvious facts. But we shouldn’t mind, because we’re going to blame them anyway.

While this is unfair, it's part of the social contract and based on fairly recent history: when “we” needed more data on the effects of nuclear weapons British armed forces were subjected to some of the quickest suntans in history; to test our chemical arsenal, taxpayers who thought they were volunteering to help find a cure for the common cold got something way beyond the healing power of Vick’s Vapour Rub or even prayer.

It's this kind of skulduggery that prevents us from buying Christmas presents for our leaders, or inviting them to baby-sit.

But until very recently we haven’t expected admissions of guilt or apologies. British Lite Culture is changing this – everyone’s a victim and the witch hunt has moved into the commercial world.

While governments can hide behind the social contract, what prevents companies from taking the rap – and they are blamed for everything from obesity to climate change and poverty – are lawyers.

Unfortunately they take it too far, so when corporate spokespeople confront the microphones and cameras their media training kicks in and they start to sound insincere, like government ministers. Speaking like Daleks from tortuous prepared scripts they haemorrhage brand equity from line one. And this is a shame because, as it happens, apologising comes naturally to the British.

Of course there's a catch: we’re happy to apologise profusely for anything, as long as it either doesn't matter or isn’t our fault. So our government is sorry about the rain, the cricket, slavery, the Irish potato famine, the extinction of Neanderthals and the species implosion at the end of the Ordovician, but not about taxation. And not (yet) about Dresden.

Companies do better when they recognise that when their spokesperson speaks, we see a person. When individuals own up, take the rap and apologise we admire them for it, and trust them more. Which companies don’t want that?

As far as the Neanderthals are concerned, they took the arrival of our Cro-Magnon forebears on the chin, in the neck and probably elsewhere, until one of them looked around and thought bugger it – I'm the last one. They were genuine victims, but with no government to blame they had it coming.

Advice to illegal immigrants

Illegal immigration is back in the news here with rumours of a new French refugee camp at Sangatte, so here’s some advice in case you were thinking of participating in this foolish activity as part of your 21^st century lite "portfolio" career.

HOW TO ARRIVE. Don't climb into the wheel-bays of a 747 bound for Heathrow unless you want to arrive dead. Immigrating to the UK without papers when dead is still an offence. Much better to come ashore in your beached sperm-whale costume and then sneak off during a lull in the attempts to save your life.

WHERE TO LIVE. Don't bother with the countryside, which is designed to look nice but is where foreigners who suddenly pop up with no idea how to behave are likely to be dumped in the threshing machine. The best bet is to live close to someone who can forge the mountain of paperwork you're going to need.

HOW TO BEHAVE. Obviously you will never be able to behave properly since you're not British so you can opt for either anonymity or a silly hat. The former route depends on a working knowledge of our language and an ability to talk about absolutely anything from a position of total ignorance, but is difficult to sustain because of all the CCTV cameras – 25% of the world’s supply are trained on us.

The silly hat strategy is better since it marks you out as a maniac or a fly-fisher and people will generally avoid or humour you.

WHAT TO DO. While getting a job sounds like a good idea remember that summer is on its way and you're in time for the cricket season. It would be foolhardy to give up your rare position of being in England with nothing to do and yet not technically unemployed. So spend May through September at major cricket matches. This saves you the trouble of constantly being in touch with developments during the Test Matches. If you are a man you absolutely have to know what's going on. Total strangers will say:

* Did they get any reverse swing before lunch?

* Is Flintoff hungover or what?

* Pietersen was never leg-before

* Why are you wearing that silly hat?

* Are you an illegal immigrant?

It's funny how perceptive we can be.

Perhaps it would be better if you simply joined a multinational PR firm and asked to be seconded here. That way you don’t need a silly hat, and you can sell the sperm whale idea to a client.

The playground of the vanities

Since children don’t vote in the UK, they’re at the mercy of government whim and widely vilified as obese, inarticulate, feckless and violent.

This is because in British Lite Culture, spin and targets, rather than substance, are the reality, since it’s easier to manage numbers than people. So children must not be educated – they must hit education targets, and government spin demands that most of them do.

Thus the charms of the quadratic equation, the Petrarchan sonnet, the gerund and Boyle’s Law are, insultingly, considered beyond today’s young people, so it’s goodbye to interesting stuff and hello to media studies, raffia work and PR.

Young people get straight A grades in this rubbish and go to university since the target says that 50% of them must.

Simultaneously, statistics show that children are overweight, although they look OK to me, and this is apparently due to their diet, rather than the almost total lack of facilities for, or incentives to, exercise.

When we were sending kids up chimneys and down coal mines, their rights were zero but, in addressing this, our politicians went too far. Today, children’s rights are these:

• To remain silent, sullen, morose

• To bring in a note from your mum saying you’re too ill to play rugby

• To behave as badly as you like without sanction

• To be unconstrained by rules of logic, grammar or spelling

• To dress like an oik

• To own a dog which lives on a diet consisting exclusively of homework

• To eat nothing but gloop.

Perhaps these problems are linked. While people sentimentalise their schooldays, there has never been a Golden Era for school lunch, which remains the only meal for which you would automatically adopt the brace position. In their classic book Down With Skool, Willans and Searle summed it up with a section entitled: “Skool food – or the piece of cod which passeth understanding”.

Proper food is to school meals as Chanel No 5 is to a nerve-gas attack, and our children have had the common decency and will to live beaten out of them by a relentless diet of random meat products, chips and algal swill.

So the obvious solution is a dramatic upgrade. Jamie Oliver’s campaign was right but didn’t go far enough. Schoolchildren fed on devilled langoustines, filet mignon and fine claret will not risk expulsion or failure. They will hang around for a glass of Remy, perhaps a decent cigar and a chat about the Outward Bound syllabus and the Latin Poetry Competition.

Why we got Madonna

The 1931 edition of the "Woman's Own Book of the Home" has fallen into my hands, and it shows how far women's focus of attention has shifted over the years - and why. The book is arranged alphabetically:

• Apoplexy - treatment of
• Bedstead - to clean a brass
• Calf's Head - to boil
  

Flipping through its 400 pages caused several of them to fall out so I searched for a remedy, finding only "Books - to preserve from insects" (white pepper and powdered alum). There is no cross-reference from "Insects - to keep out of books", but instead "Insects on Plants - to destroy" and the catch-all "Bugs - to kill". All in all it's a fairly disappointing publication for insects.

For the quite ordinary citizen however it has, with a few notable exceptions, everything. There's all you need to make your own bread, soap, deodorant, toothpaste and cough medicine, plus how to cobble together a sponge bag from an old hot-water-bottle.

But your food is rudimentary - Oatmeal Gruel, Boiled Cow Heel, Turnip Tops and Toast Water, which is made by leaving a slice of toast in a jug of water overnight (Strain before serving. A nourishing drink). And with no National Health Service, your healthcare is largely down to you. Needless to say it's all-action stuff and not for the squeamish:

• Leeches - to apply
• Tapeworm - to remove
• Anthrax - how to treat
  
• Diarrhoea - an Egyptian cure for (it involves pomegranates)

While you're expected to battle sickness on a broad front, it's a different front. Cancer ought to come between "Camphor - uses of" and "Candied peel - to make" but I finally tracked it down to a very short section on "Tumours". While this is often quite helpful (badly fitting corsets account for a number of cases), the facing page has a piece on cultivating nasturtiums which is twice as long.

So, today's obsessions are largely missing. On sex, there's nothing to guide you from The Wedding Reception to Breast Feeding, and little on image and beauty, since there were more basic things to attend to:

• Eyebrows - to make grow
• Hair - to prevent its falling out
• Knock Knees - to straighten (don't ask)

As well as what now seem to be omissions, there's plenty of advice which must surely be wrong - for example The simplest form of fire extinguisher is the hand grenade and, in the unswerving campaign against insects, A fresh bunch of nettles hung up in the window will prevent the entrance of flies.

Only a few years after this book hit the shops the superwomen who used it to manage their lives and families will have taken World War 2 in their stride. But with all this to get on with - and there's plenty more - it's really no wonder that women eventually decided the hell with it, and started becoming bond traders, PR consultants, astronauts and Madonna.