Posts Tagged ‘Princess Diana’

The “Fairy Tale” Royal engagement, announced yesterday, prompted an outpouring of joy in this morning’s papers. The red tops in particular are euphoric, filled to the brim with jubilant headlines and rapturous copy. I suspect the coverage arouses hope that the event will provide succour to their declining readership and influence. Past trends suggest papers do sell on these occasions, but beware the thread of over-optimism.

Hypnotised by the acres of print and online clamour, I have become absorbed by the stratagems and apparatus of the rejuvenated Royal PR pixies. This was not a unrehearsed, impromptu public announcement. The manoeuvre was contrived and pre-planned and immensely successful. Gobbets of positive content were distributed by sources close to the couple as well as the disconnected, well-prepared Royal experts. There was no vacuous emptiness on display. The proceeding nine years of official and off piste snapped moments, images of the couples’ courtship were all recycled and resulted in a gluttonous feeding frenzy. In the information age, nine years is a lifetime, generating a huge amount of detritus to reprocess and attribute.

Back in 1981 two thirds of the great British unwashed thought a Royal wedding was a good idea. Can the same be said now? Will they be put off by the fact that, just as we see the flowering of sensible Royal PR, we are also enduring the PR cliche, the spew and slew of endless opportunist press releases, cashing in on the euphoria?
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There is a mood of incredulity in the media at Gordon Ramsay’s latest PR faux pas; an open letter to his mother in law, published in the Evening Standard. “This has to be one of the most painful letters I’ve ever had to write,” writes Gordon. “Listening to Tana in floods of tears reading your letter from you asking that she stays away from her family is so awfully wrong.”

Gordon seems to be struggling with the difference between real life and reality show life – it is bizarre to see the hard man of cookery TV exposing his dirty laundry rather than his ability to spew expletives. In terms of resolving a problem – in this case, the fallout after Ramsay sacked his father in law from the role of CEO of Gordon Ramsay Holdings – his letter is akin to sending a child into the cellar with a candle to look for a gas leak. It is hard to work out what exactly he intended to achieve by writing it.

Ramsay is emotional beast, most comfortable on TV. Why, if he must ask his mother in law to not reject her daughter, has he used an open letter to do so? If Ramsay is determined to conflate real life and docu-soap opera, surely he should be doing so on TV or, better still for all concerned, in private. Ramsay’s emotion and verbal communication skills are his prime weapon. Why, then, has he muzzled himself with a letter? Read the rest of this entry »

We are living in a karaoke media culture – everything we see is a pale, recycled copy of something that’s gone before and, worse still, this sincere flattery of icons and iconography past is being actively encouraged.

Miley Cyrus is heading off down the well-trodden path of over-sexualised image that has been presented 1000 times before and is well known to end in ruin at least half the time. Even Kylie has got in on the act, kissing Ana Matronic from the Scissor Sisters; a direct echo of Madonna and Britney’s “lesbian” kiss.

Prince Albert of Monaco is doing a karaoke version of his father by marrying an American celeb, who is a pale imitation of Grace Kelly. And then there’s the Princes, William and Harry: William is currently back with Kate Middleton, whom the press insist shares much in common with his mother, Princess Diana; Harry is off clearing mines in a bid to be like his mother. A Freudian could no doubt get some considerable mileage from the undercurrents created by the media’s presentation of them.
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And so Michael Jackson is to be put to rest – or his physical form is at least. There is no doubt that his name, his brand and his image will live on for as long as it makes money. Death is merely a chapter break in the life of Michael Jackson – it’s not a full stop.

Floral tributes for Michael Jackson in LA

The allegations of paedophilia that haunted Jackson’s final years have all but disappeared and now is the time for a show to close that chapter of Jackson’s life – a show to end all shows and to begin new ones. The funeral seems to be gearing up to be a show for people to demonstrate love and adoration for Jackson – but it also seems to be more about the people commemorating Jackson than about Jackson himself. Shaheen Jafargholi, who sang a Jackson song on Britain’s Got Talent, will be there, singing alongside Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey and more.

Like Princess Diana before, the crowds are gathering to mutually support each other at the Staples Centre and mutually assure that they forget the rough patches in Jackson’s life. But I’m more interested in the people who aren’t going to be there – David Blaine is in this country, Lisa Marie Presley is abroad. How will they be mourning?

The media gearing up for Jackson's funeral

There’s another funeral Jackson’s looks set to resemble – that of Phineas Taylor Barnum. It’s curious, given the freakish nature of much of Jackson’s life in the limelight, that his funeral should resemble that of the man who travelled the world with a freak show. But Barnum was canny enough to know that he was dying and well loved enough to get a copy of his own obituary a day or two before he died. It’s hard to imagine Jackson even countenancing the idea that he might die.

Here’s a report on the funeral of Barnum, written a little after the event over 100 years ago.

“The morning was cold, gray, and dismal. Nature’s heart, with the spring joy put back and deadened, symboled the melancholy that had fallen upon Bridgeport. No town was ever more transformed than was this city by one earthly event. On the public and private buildings were hung the habiliments of woe; flags were at half mast, and, in the store windows were to be seen innumerable portraits and likenesses of the dead citizen, surrounded by dark drapery, or embedded in flowers.

“Nor was this all. The people on the street and in the windows of their houses seemed to be thinking of but one thing–their common loss. The pedestrian walked slower; the voices of talkers, even among the rougher classes, were more subdued, and in their looks was imprinted the unmistakable signal of no common or ordinary bereavement.

“The large church was not only filled, with its lecture-room, a considerable time before the hour set for the services; but thousands of people crowded the sidewalks near-by for hours, knowing they could only see the arrival and departure of the funeral cortege. The private services at the house, “Marina,” near the Seaside Park, which preceded the public services in the church, were simple and were only witnessed and participated in by the relatives and immediate friends.”

More preparations for Jackson's funeral

It will be interesting to see how long the current state of post-Jackson euphoria-in-loss lasts – a lot of smoke went up over the allegations that marred his final years. Will any of it be blown away in the coming months? One thing is certain; if a brand is powerful enough and has enough money behind it, anything unsavoury can be made to disappear, as the fixers at MGM proved in the 1930s.

I’ll close with another quote from the report on Barnum’s death:

“When, in 1889, the veteran brought over his shipload of giants and dwarfs, chariots and waxworks, spangles and circus-riders, to entertain the people of London, one wanted a Carlyle to come forward with a discourse upon ‘the Hero as Showman.’ It was the ne plus ultra of publicity. There was a three-fold show–the things in the stalls and cages, the showman, and the world itself. And of the three perhaps Barnum himself was the most interesting. The chariot races and the monstrosities we can get elsewhere, but the octogenarian showman was unique. His name is a proverb already, and a proverb it will continue.”

Jackson was, without doubt, a huge brand at the heart of a huge, freakish circus and was the most interesting thing in it – as the recent outpourings prove. But will Jackson become a proverb – or just a bogeyman? Only time will tell.

“Dying is an art,” wrote Sylvia Plath, in her poem Lady Lazarus, and the very public final weeks of Jade Goody are reinforcing Plath’s point remarkably well. Jade Goody has moved on from the unthinking, mouthy persona that brought her to national attention with a sudden aplomb, becoming, in her need to make a better life for the two children she will be leaving behind in the wake of her terminal cervical cancer, an iconic figure whose death will mark the end of an era of celebrity in Britain.

Jade Goody

There are notes of disgust registering around the country that she’s intending to let a film crew follow her through her final weeks as well as to her wedding, assuming it happens before she is too ill to cope. There shouldn’t be; this is a woman dying as she lived. She is, in many ways, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, in that all she knows is a life in front of the camera and all she can do to ensure the future for her children is to make as much money as quickly as possible for them in the only way she knows how; on television and in the press.

It’s telling that she has made it clear that she wants to ensure that her children are educated; this is the woman who came from difficult, uneducated beginnings to make a career in the celebrity industry, a woman who created a new life for herself on Big Brother and took on the personality the tabloids created for her, only to watch them turn on her with more vigour when she rose above the cheap insults that were initially levelled at her. She’s not the brightest of women but, tellingly, she knows it. And it’s her attempts to make amends for her mistakes that have endeared her to the British public. She is finally taking control of her life in the spotlight in a way that she wasn’t able to do when she first found herself in the arms of fame.

She is a most human celebrity and it is to be hoped, for the sake of her children, that she will be remembered for her late transmogrification into a role model; according to The Guardian, the swift and vicious spread of her cervical cancer – and her brutal, well-publicised honesty about it – is responsible for a massive upsurge of requests for smear tests. This alone drives home what people think about her. She is ‘one of us’, albeit ‘one of us’ who has become an industry in her own right. She is fallible but not above trying to make amends for her failings, even if that means doing so in excruciating detail in the public eye.

“There is a charge//For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/For the hearing of my heart…” wrote Sylvia Plath, again in Lady Lazarus. And: “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see//Them unwrap me hand and foot/The big strip tease.” Jade Goody has run with this idea and made a positive of it; where Plath was contemplating her attempts at suicide, the ‘big strip tease’ of Goody’s final weeks is solely about taking care of the future for her children and may well see her reborn in the public’s collective memory as someone who rose above the pain and despair and did some good.

Goody is not succumbing to Gwili Andre’s lonely and miserable mode of death, alone in her flat consumed by the fires taking root in her piles of cuttings. She has not allowed fame to make her bitter. She is taking what remains of her life and transforming it, seemingly aware that she, like so many celebrities before her, from Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana, will be frozen in the moment by her early death. Of course she’d prefer to live to see her children grow old rather than die in front of the cameras, but what she’s doing is right for her and what she thinks is right for her children.

If it disturbs you, do not watch or read the reports, but do not try to prevent Jade Goody from choosing the manner of her death; she has finally proved that she deserves more than that.

What is the best present could Prince Charles hope to be unwrapping on his 60th birthday, today? He will get many, but I suspect that the period of calm that has prevailed at Clarence House over the last five years, interrupted occasionally by the binge drinking bouts and going-to-parties-dressed-in-Nazi-regalia adolescent antics of his 20-something sons, is the one he will be valuing most, as it will allow him to celebrate his birthday in relative peace.

For decades, the Prince, as part of the Royal Family, one of the biggest brands going, has suffered the slings and arrows of outraged and outrageous press coverage. He was, for a long time, damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. But things have changed of late; the Prince and, more importantly, the people he has surrounded himself with, have reengineered his public, charitable and state image and reinvigorated the Duchy Originals commercial brand as a going organic concern, despite the occasional hiccup over high salt and fat content, which has seen the Prince marry successfully his public and private concerns.

It’s a long time ago, now, since the Gymkhana days of the 1950s, when the Royal Family were closed for business at the weekend, and it is strange to think that there really was a time when one could phone up on a Friday at 5 p.m. and find that the pearly-necklaced debs who ran the public face of the Royal Family had all shuffled off to Gloucestershire and would not be back in until Monday.

That changed with the arrival of Princess Diana and the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981. Diana’s cataclysmic arrival marked a sea change in the press – it was the beginning of the soap opera days and it took decades for the Royal Family to understand what had happened, let alone begin to cope with the consequences. It marked the beginning of the Heat and Closer era, where an unhealthy interest in the minutiae of a celebrity’s life was the order of the day.

The Royal Family simply couldn’t cope with this massive increase in daily interest; nor could they cope with a press who were less and less willing to kowtow to their way of running brand Windsor. Suddenly men like Kelvin Mackenzie at The Sun were refusing to play ball with brand Windsor’s cosy PR agenda. Princess Diana and, later, Fergie were “hold the front page” news. As a consequence, Diana and Fergie got to grips with the new PR agenda far more quickly than Prince Charles and the rest of brand Windsor.

This just amplified in the wake of Charles and Diana’s separation in 1993. Diana was a masterful player of personality PR, as the interview with Martin Bashir proved. Revelation after revelation tumbled like lead onto the head of Charles – his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles being the most damaging one, along with the reaction to Diana’s death from the Royal Family, which was out of step and out of tune with the rest of the country.

Since then, the people behind brand Windsor and particularly Prince Charles have been trying to re-brand their clients and understand how modern PR can be made to work for them. In the last 10 years, most celebrities have come to recognise that they are brands, but if you’d said that in the 1980s you would have been ignored and, in the case of brand Windsor, laughed out of court. It helps that the heir to the throne has always engaged in good works, but resentment, for many years, was never far from the surface of the popular press.

The last five years have seen something of a sea change in the perception of the Prince and his dealings with the world. His sons are part of this – apart from the odd fancy dress faux pas, they have inherited their mother’s easiness with the press. But the real power behind the man one step away from the throne is Paddy Harverson, who was appointed communications secretary at Clarence House in 2003.

There is no doubt that the Prince has needed people around him who recognise the importance of the brand, given the changing nature of the press and the rise of the importance of branding. They had to find someone they could trust, someone who was not part of the Royal Family’s usual coterie, so they brought in Harverson, whose reputation as a man who could make the best of troublesome situations preceded him. Working for the Royal Family is not the most rewarding job in PR. They needed someone with the skill to manage the most difficult of situations.

Harverson is certainly a man who understands how to manage difficult brands, supercharged egos and constant press attention – he left his job as the FT’s first sports correspondent to become the inaugural communications director at Manchester United, arguably the second largest British global brand after the Royal Family and equally full of different, difficult and diverse characters. He oversaw the departure of David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand’s drugs test and a great deal more in his three-year tenure at the club. Since 2003 he has set up an entirely new era in communications for Prince Charles and his sons, whilst maintaining a discreet low profile, again in a post especially created by Clarence House for him.

It was an inspired choice; in the last five years, he has managed the press relating to Harry’s Afghan trip, William’s relationship with Kate Middleton and, most importantly, the slow embrace by press and public of Camilla Parker Bowles in the run up to and wake of her marriage to Prince Charles, keeping a careful eye on breaking stories all the while.

Much of the antagonism towards Prince Charles and Camilla has dissipated on Harverson’s watch. Although there are still problems – as one might expect from the Royal Family – the focus has shifted away from them – the press now deals more with a prince who has married the woman he truly loves, whose work with the Prince’s Trust is much admired, whose opinions on green issues are, on the whole, respected.

Make no mistake, there will always be problems – Harverson has two boisterous, highly privileged young men to deal with and the honeymoon period of Charles and Camilla’s reintegration into the public’s affection is definitely over. If Prince Charles is to take the crown he needs to avoid the elephant traps that will always be there, waiting for him.

With Harverson looking out for him, however, Prince Charles has finally become the sort of man the British public might accept as their next monarch – quite a feat, given the travails of the 1980s and 1990s – and that really must be the best present a PR man can give. As long as Harverson keeps a weather eye out for the traps and doesn’t leave, everything will be fine, barring some horrendous revelation. Harverson would, without doubt, be a tough act to follow.