There are very few good adverts these days, since the internet democratised self-promotion. Everything’s so serious. Where are the Smash aliens? Where are Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins? Where are the PG Tips chimps (I know, I know). Instead we get strange people advertising themselves.
There’s this one bloke who advertises himself on YouTube – you may have seen him; I honestly don’t know how these ads are placed. There’s no apparent logic in it. I mean, I went on to watch a video of George Michael singing Rufus Wainwright’s Going to a Town and there was this bloke shouting something about Powerpoint presentations. Not the warm-up act George would have chosen, I’m sure.
Imagine if you’d saved up your hard-earned for a ticket to see George Michael at the Albert Hall and on came a bloke shouting things like, “Stop using bullet points in Powerpoint presentations!” I reckon you’d want your money back. You certainly wouldn’t go home humming it.
This week Gary Lineker got into trouble for expressing his opinion that the language used in the Government’s latest immigration plans was akin to that used in Germany in the 30s. He didn’t mean that they’d written it in German, he meant that it had Nazi overtones. Had he directed his scorn at bullet points in Powerpoint presentations, he might have gone under the radar, but comparing anything to Nazi Germany is guaranteed to spark outrage, the assumption being that nobody these days would dream of behaving in any way that comes close to that abhorrent regime.
But that’s not true, is it? An unhealthy love of authority lives on, from the grandees of Whitehall to the numpty who gives the safety briefing before you go paint-balling. You know, those people who finish every other sentence with a silent “…you idiot”. But authority is the ultimate Catch-22. Because most of us don’t want it, we tend to let the people who do want it have it, and then we realise that they are precisely the people who should never, ever be given it.
Anyway, I struck my own Linekeresque blow for the world this week by responding to Powerpoint man after he had barged in on my George Michael experience. Maybe I shouldn’t have risen, but when someone shouts at me not to do something that I wasn’t doing anyway, I tend to bridle. So I put pen to paper and, after numerous drafts and redrafts, I honed my point down to the following: “Dear XXXX, XXXX off! Yours sincerely, Everyone.” I thought I’d take the moral high ground by adopting a more amenable tone than him.
It didn’t work, though, because next time I went on YouTube, there he was again, and this time he was shouting, “Don’t – do – presentations – from – inside – your – head! (you idiot)” I tried to form a mental picture of myself trying to give a presentation from inside my own head, mouthing soundlessly through my eye sockets to a baffled audience, and I had to concur – it would never work. But then he went a step further: “If you’re inside your head you’re dead!”
This worried me because I’d gone on to watch a video about mindfulness meditation. Now he was telling me it could be fatal. And that’s how authority works: through fear. It begins with seemingly innocent, everyday things like bullet points and it escalates, until you’re afraid to even think.
