Posts Tagged ‘stunt’

If any politician was going to pull off the greatest stunt of a generation, it really had to be Tony Blair. And, by committing all the proceeds from his memoirs (as well as the £4 million advance) to the Royal British Legion’s Battle Back challenge centre, a project that will provide state-of-the-art rehabilitation services for seriously injured troops returning from the frontline, he has done exactly that.

The book can now be read guilt free, knowing that the proceeds will not be lining Blair’s pockets but helping soldiers returning from the frontline. It’s got all the talkability that Mandelson’s book lacked, it’s released in a season when most politicians are on holiday and the only serious competition it has for the front pages are Kelly Brook celebrating naked month by dyeing herself orange and parading in a series of ever-skimpier frocks and Joe McElderry coming out of the closet in the hope that it’ll shift a few more units of his debut album. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a good week for stunts – the Barefoot Bandit’s a classy effort, but a little over-complicated. More gloriously simple is Island’s approach to promoting Tom Jones’s new album of hymns, Praise and Blame.

Leaving the praise to the critics, who see it as an equivalent to Johnny Cash’s late bid for credibility, Island’s VP, David Sharpe, seems to have taken it upon himself to do the blaming, in an accusatory leaked email that suggests he would rather not have spent millions on a church album and wanted a repeat of Jones’s Sex Bomb stylings.

This was written in May, but leaked only now, in the week of release, just in time for the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and pretty much every other media outlet to get all hot under the collar about it and puff the album’s arrival in spectacular fashion in news and reviews pages.

Stunt of the week, without a doubt. But that’s not unusual, given that it was also the conversation of the week.

The tale of the Barefoot Bandit in today’s Times (currently locked behind a paywall, otherwise I would of course have encouraged you to click here) is, on the surface, a ripping yarn, a boy’s own adventure. A seventeen-year-old escapes juvenile detention and goes on the run across America for two years: stealing cars and yachts and using them to cross America; caught in people’s houses, naked, before escaping into the woods; leaving semi-anonymous donations to animal charities. The Barefoot Bandit, so called because a footprint was found at the scene of one of his thefts, has now apparently topped it all by stealing a plane and crash-landing it in the Bahamas. Hmmm. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that there is a total sense of humour failure endemic throughout the world when it comes to stunts like the ‘Balloon Boy’ incident, as the ongoing trial of the parents proves – they apparently pleaded guilty only after the wife, who is Japanese, was threatened with deportation.

Certainly, the need to think about wider concerns makes outlandish and outrageous stunts a more difficult prospect in this health and safety and desperately money-conscious world. Some years ago, a band wanted me to help them arrange to completely stop traffic in Piccadilly Circus so they could play a gig from a flat bed truck – I had to hold a hand up and say “what are we going to do if an ambulance comes through with a heart attack victim on board?” The need to stand back and question all possible outcomes is even more imperative nowadays.

As much as the Rupert Pupkinish hedonistic approach is appealing, for its ability to grab headlines and for the sheer thrill of pulling something extraordinary and outrageous off, the parents of ‘Balloon Boy’ are proof positive that care has to be taken and that serious thought has to be applied if you don’t want an initially amused and fascinated public to turn on you if even the smallest thing goes wrong. Fame for the sake of it can be a costly business.

If you want proof that stunts are an art form, your best bet is to head down to the Tate Modern’s Pop exhibition and take a long, hard look at the Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons exhibits. Here are two prime examples of early stops at one of the stations of the cross of Consumerism, part of its steady progress to becoming the prime 21st Century religion.

And proof is needed that stunts are an art form – they are making something of a comeback at the moment, but the latest examples – the Starsuckers film and Balloon Boy – are in need of a bit of spit and polish if they are to really shine. Despite all this, there has been not one mention of the master of the hoax, Joey Skaggs, the master Culture Jammer whose hoaxes have always had a pertinent point to make. This is a pity because the Starsuckers team could learn a trick or two from him.

Take, for example, Skaggs’s Celebrity Sperm Bank hoax from 1976. Skaggs organised a sperm bank auction in New York, then arranged for the sperm bank to be robbed with the semen supposedly being taken hostage. Or the Dog Meat Soup hoax from 1994, in which Skaggs portrayed Kim Yung Soo, a butcher who wanted to purchase dogs for food, to expose cultural intolerance and the media’s tendency to overreact. These are the stunts of a master and they are works of art.

There has been considerable attention for the hoaxes at the heart of the new film Starsuckers – the film’s makers created a series of hoax stories about celebrities that they then pushed on the tabloids. The aim was to point out how easily one could dupe journalists at the tabloids into taking patently ridiculous stories about celebrities and in this they succeeded. Reports of Amy Winehouse’s beehive catching fire, Avril Lavigne falling asleep in a nightclub and Russell Brand’s secret childhood desire to be a banker all made the tabloids – and some made it round the world.

But filmmakers’ aim, which was to expose how the whole of the news industry is running stories without checking their facts, has not been achieved. This was not a sublime act of Culture Jamming – celebrity journalism and hard news are quite different animals (most of the time at least) and the hoax story they tried to push on the media that came closest to qualifying as real news, in which G20 protestors were apparently planning to dump tonnes of sugar on Alan Sugar’s drive, was not picked up.

Telling everybody that it’s easy to pass off nonsense about celebrities to the papers is hardly news in itself – most reporting of the lives of celebrities verges on the nonsensical as it is and most people know this and don’t care, so far gone is their addiction to celebrity soap. The team behind Starsuckers are going to have to work harder if they are to achieve what they want.

Balloon Boy is another matter again. A family in Colorado claimed that they thought their son had been carried off by a weather balloon – he was found “hiding” in the attic after an expensive two hour cross country chase in full view of the world’s media. I suspect that this was a stunt by a publicity-hungry family of stormchasers keen to further promote themselves after appearing on American Wife Swap. I also suspect that the only reason that the police aren’t treating this as a hoax is to save face.

None of this has stopped a full-scale media hoo-ha and #balloon boy trending on Twitter. There’s been reams of analysis in the medi and newscasters claiming they’d burst into tears as a result, followed by a backlash after the six year old boy was found in the attic at home. As my pal Mark Solomons says: “He’s a falcon liar, that’s what he is. The father put the con in Falcon. It’s like the Bart-Simpson-down-the-well episode. If the balloon had been up any longer, they could have had Sting do a charity record.”

We know that the media are willing consumers of all kinds of storytelling, but it would be good to see more artfulness and careful thought going into any future hoaxes. More Skaggs less blags, perhaps?

Could the tabloid-friendly sight of Cristiano Ronaldo and Paris Hilton in a Los Angeles nightclub the night before the footballer’s Real Madrid deal was confirmed be a coincidence? Originally published on the Guardian website

Call me a cynical old publicist but I have to admit that I am hardly surprised to see Cristiano Ronaldo spread across the tabloids today with Paris Hilton tucked under his arm at a club in Los Angeles.

It’s a marriage made in franchise heaven - the world’s most expensive footballer and the headline-grabbing socialite together on the eve of Ronaldo’s ascension to the giddy heights of football godhood – and an act of sublime stuntsmanship. It cannot be a coincidence.

Bear in mind that Real Madrid is almost certainly banking on being able to get more than a bit of loose change back from Ronaldo’s £80m price tag – not to mention his mooted wages of £200,000 per week – on the back of selling shirts, and it makes perfect sense that Ronaldo is to be found in an American nightclub… the night before the deal is announced.

They want to hook the American Latino market, which is where the US’s huge soccer audience is to be found. They need Ronaldo to follow in the golden boots of David Beckham. What better way than to place him at the jugular of America’s uber-celebrity, Paris Hilton?

Rumour has it that the deal was put in place a year ago - Real Madrid have had time, then, to plan an assault on the media to hurtle their player into the celebrity stratosphere. Ronaldo’s nightclub dalliance is simply the first step on the road to turning him into the biggest brand in the world of soccer. Already today, by playing the Paris card, he’s knocked Becks off the tabloid front pages in his latest photoshoot in his grundies.

All the ingredients have been carefully crafted and placed in the Petri dish of fame. Over the coming weeks we are going to see a new mutant ogre celebrity emerge from the stew that’s been cooked up.

Football is less and less a game of two halves – it is becoming more like a 3D chess set. On the lowest level is the game itself. Above that are the great players and their wives and girlfriends. But on the topmost level are the superstar money-spinners like Beckham, who hardly even need to play football anymore to earn everyone a living – and now Cristiano Ronaldo is clawing his way up there too.

It’s game on for the press. The planning phase is over and the celebrity games have begun. You can forget the likes of SuBo and the reality freakshow turns – Cristiano Ronaldo is where the uber money’s at. This is the million dollar deal.

Whilst I have no wish to denigrate the sense of loss the families of the 150 or so people who have died in Mexico must be feeling, I suspect that the reporting of the supposed Swine Flu pandemic is more hysterical by far than it needs to be and may in fact cause more problems than it solves. We are conditioned to respond to such hysterical outpourings as if we are living a disaster movie, as reports of Mexico City coming to a standstill prove. But this sort of fear is nothing new.

Bear in mind that there was a swine flu pandemic frenzy in America 33 years ago. In February 1976, it was widely feared and hysterically reported that swine flu would sweep America. Instantly, the US went into vaccine overdrive, pushing the drug companies to create a panacea for the expected waves of death and misery. The US government pushed through $135 million to create the vaccine and, in the face of European scepticism, began a programme of inoculation in June of the same year.

By October, the vaccine had apparently killed more people than the swine flu and the US government was forced to stop production. Over the next three years they were forced to pay out billions of dollars in compensation and the costs of safely destroying the vaccine.

The lesson to be learned here is that hysteria is not a good basis on which to push through a barely tested drug – given time, a vaccine could be found, but if it is rushed through on the basis of the media whipping up a storm of fear, there is every chance that more lives will be lost. It’s time to start preparing a preventative, certainly – but not to allow a partially-tested cure out onto the market.

The trouble is that, now, the media is assisted by the internet, and fear can spread far more quickly and virally than it could in 1976. This is a crucial difference. Bad news has always sold better than good news, but with sites like Twitter pushing out news almost as fast as thought, the possibilities for mass panic are ever more nebulous and far-reaching. And any snake oil medicine man out there wanting to push flour and tar water cures onto a fearful populace is able to do so with much more speed and impunity.

At what point, then, is the media going to have to consider some sort of censorship to avoid mass panic? They’re currently feasting on the story, but they need to stop and consider the ramifications of this unchecked feasting – if it leads to deaths from untested vaccines, there’ll be hell to pay, especially if the pandemic doesn’t pan out, as happened in 1976.

It’s not only the media who need to stop and think before allowing fear to wash away reason. We all need to stop and think; wasn’t a bird flu pandemic due to wipe us all out a couple of years ago? Weren’t there supposed to be Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? What became of the doom-laden financial downturn the papers reported on last October? OK, things are pretty damned tough financially at the moment, but they’re not as bad as October’s fearful reports would have had us believe.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be careful about Swine Flu; it just strikes me that the biggest pandemic at the moment is media hysteria – which is turning out to be considerably more contagious than the virus they’re reporting on. The speed of web-based media extensions like Twitter only plays into the powerful hands of PR people with dark ambitions. This isn’t a disaster movie, not yet, and I hope it won’t get that bad, but there needs to be a pause for breath before we charge headlong into border controls and lockdowns to prevent a pandemic that may never happen.

The best form of censorship is self-censorship in these circumstances – we should think before we tweet. It’s either that or hiding in our attics with paper bags over our heads, sending out evermore hysterical Twitter messages warning neighbours to keep away.

Bearing all this in mind, I intend to undertake what many could see as the most dangerous stunt in the world. It’s not the bullet catch, nor is it the water chamber escape or the buried alive illusion. The real mind-bending stunt of the day is risking life and limb by licking a Mexican piglet. I’ve licked a pig before, as the picture proves. I’m happy to do it again.

This could, if the hype is to be believed, actually be more dangerous than having 900 pounds of concrete broken off my chest with a sledge hammer while lying on a bed of nails and should not be tried at home, as much as anything because it’s hard to get hold of Mexican pigs.

I will perform the stunt – for anyone who wants proof that there’s no point in being scared by rumours of a pandemic, only by the pandemic itself – on one condition; they have to prove to me that they have purchased a copy of my book The Fame Formula: How Hollywood’s Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry (out now in paperback). If this strikes you as a scam, just remember; there are far worse scams to be pulled, by people far less scrupulous than myself, if you allow fear of a flu pandemic which may never come to fruition to rule your life.

My Google alert threw something interesting up this morning: KFC officials used an armored car to move a scrap of paper from one secure location to another on September 9 th, guarded by a former New York police detective.

Why? Because on it, Col. Harland Sanders had scribbled his original recipe for quick-to-prepare chicken, a trade secret so heavily guarded that supposedly only three KFC executives have access to it at any one time, two that know the recipe and one who keeps the keys to the safe. They’re not allowed to travel on the same plane, car or train together in case the secret is lost in some calamitous accident or chicken-hungry bandits kidnap and torture the secrets out of them.

Why did KFC decide to move the recipe now? According to the PR pixies at the company, it was necessary, after 68 years, to upgrade the protocols and safety procedures surrounding the recipe. This is possible, though it seems likelier that it’s simply a publicity scam, a chance to crow about their chicken and get the fast food-buying public into a flap about the product.

I have my own theory, based on their suggestion – I think that the brand were more concerned that the true salt and preservative content of the recipe doesn’t get into enemy hands and that this handy publicity scam, which sees the recipe away from its original home, location and return time unknown, allows a period of grace whilst the key-holding executive, who was surely in cahoots with Ronald Macdonald, is eased out of his position…

Hats off to Electronic Arts for having the balls to stage a marvellous publicity stunt. You know they are onto a winner when a stunt is branded “irresponsible” by MPs. The PR caper was to give away £20,000’s worth of fuel at a petrol station in north London as part of a promotion for a new video game Mercenaries 2. Of course, the stunt angered residents and local politicians for causing gridlock during the morning rush hour, but that’s was the aim.

A £20,000 spend to get an average video game talked about in newspapers and forums is money well invested – especially with that all-important “irresponsible tag that served Grand Theft Auto so well (though that is a far better game). Let’s see if this scam can actually persuade gamers to shell out for a poorly-received diversion.

Whatever the outcome, I am sure the great Jim Moran – and even Harry Reichenbach – would approve..