Storyboard (8 page)

“Might be something in that.”

“Couldn’t sell it to Hugh.”

“Don’t suppose you could sell it to Hoppness either. Do you mind if I think about it, love?”

And of course Sophia didn’t mind. She didn’t even bother to mention it to Hugh next day. After all, one was always talking shop in the Agency. It was the only thing advertising people had to talk about.

*

Christian had been unofficially approached, and went swiftly to work in unofficial ways. Hugh moved more slowly along the lines the Agency had laid down for what was called Creative Planning.

After the meeting in P.A.’s office, Traffic Control had issued requisitions, one for Press Planning and one for Television Planning. Hugh, Finch and Desmond Bast were each given copies of these requisitions; copy was to be ready by a certain day, and lay-outs and television storyboards soon afterwards. A note was made on the Progress Chart in Traffic Control that the requisitions had been issued. Sophia wrote draft copy on blue paper, and gave it to Hugh. Hugh rewrote it, still as draft copy on blue paper, and showed Sophia what he had
rewritten
. Then Sophia telephoned Traffic Control to say that the draft copy was ready. A Traffic Boy took the blue papers to Fidge Randolph in the Art Department and a carbon of the television scripts to Desmond Bast in the
Television Department. And a note was made on the Progress Chart that draft copy had been completed.

Fidge lost one of the pieces of blue paper, and phoned Hugh for a copy of it; he said that anyway he and Hugh must get together and talk about things, and Hugh said yes they must. Desmond Bast was away from his office, filming a television commercial about seamless stockings on the platform of the railway station at Alexandra Palace. Hugh and Sophia took a carbon of the piece of draft copy Fidge had lost, and went to see Fidge in his room. Fidge had produced a pack design in which the colours cerise and white were combined in an
interestingly
modern way like ripple ice-cream. “Of course, they’ll never be able to print it,” he said. He had also roughed out, in pen and wash, a press advertisement in which a pretty girl, wrapped only in a towel, was
leaning
out of a bathroom window to welcome a rather oversized bluebird. In the bluebird’s beak was a length of ribbon, from which depended a fantasticated wicker basket. This basket contained a tablet of Petal, the new cosmetic soap. Roses enclosed the whole picture. The words, “at last … for you …

exciting … new …”

were written small in curly writing at the top of the
advertisement
, and “petal—the
new
improved cosmetic soap” appeared in a condensed sanserif type, all in lower-case letters. “I think I’d like the headline a bit bigger, Fidge, if it’s all the same to you,” Hugh said.

Sophia said, “It’s not
bath
soap surely? She wouldn’t want to be Gypsy all over.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I don’t know. Would
you
want——”

“She’d look a bit silly if it stopped short at her neck. Magnolia or Radiant Peach down to the collar bone,
and dun beneath, eh? Ha!” Fidge had his father’s laugh—a sudden, short, Edwardian bark. “Don’t see why women shouldn’t paint their bodies anyway. They could do with it, most of them.”

Hugh said, “Sophia, has anybody tried this stuff?”

“You mean, have I tried it?”

“Yes, I suppose I do really.”

“No, I haven’t. I will.” Of course she should have done long ago. “Has Keith got any samples?” But this was only a face-saving question. She should have gone to Keith herself, and asked for a sample.

“If he hasn’t, you could buy some of the competition stuff. It must work in exactly the same way. Fidge, I’m sure you’re right about the roses. They do give a sort of luxury cosmetic feel to the thing. But couldn’t we have the headline a bit bigger, with some capital letters?”

“You don’t want caps for this sort of thing, believe you me. I mean, it’s got to have a bit of class, hasn’t it?”

Sophia knew, Hugh knew, certainly all the Senior Art Directors knew that, if you wanted class, you couldn’t use capital letters.
Vogue
and
The
Queen
almost
never
used capital letters. For real class it was sometimes better to make it appear that the whole page had been composed on the typewriter, and the photographs just stuck on to it. Hugh said, “But this is newsprint, Fidge, you know. I mean, it’s
Mirror
and
Express
stuff. We don’t want it to get lost, or do we? Perhaps just for the launch——”

Fidge produced a new rough from a large green
portfolio
, which, Sophia noticed, contained many roughs. In this advertisement there were no roses, no basket, no bluebird. Only the girl’s head and shoulders were seen; she wore no towel, and her breasts were cut off at the
demi-lune.
She had flung her arms out wide in welcome;
the words “E
XCITING
and “N
EW
!” ran into the tips of her fingers on one hand, “A
T
L
AST
!” and “F
OR
Y
OU
!” into the other. Petal, the new cosmetic soap in its modern wrapper, surged towards her out of the
sunlight
. “More
this
kind of thing, I suppose,” Fidge said disgustedly. “It won’t adapt in colour. You might as well know that now.”

Hugh did not comment on the absence of roses. “It does look more—more launchish, Fidge,” he said. “Of course, I prefer the other, but this does look more launchish.”

“What about television?” Fidge said. “I haven’t really looked at your script, but it seems a bit ordinary.”

Hugh said, “Well, it is. We only put it down on paper because we thought we ought to do something. I think we might want to go into testimonials for the follow-up campaign, but now that you’ve given us this visual idea for the launch——”

“Better get hold of Desmond.”

“Sophia, could you do that? Perhaps we ought to have a meeting in my room. As soon as possible, I should think. Keith keeps coming in to see me in the most pathetic way, and I never know what to say to him. Are you free this afternoon, Fidge?”

As they left Fidge’s office, Sophia said, “I don’t see that the launch commercial needs much alteration. That second rough of Fidge’s was rather like the scribble you sent up with the copy.”

“I don’t suppose he could understand that, though. I can’t draw, Sophia; you know that.”

“Just the same, it looked rather like it.”

Just the same, it was Fidge’s interesting visual idea, Hugh said, to get this welcoming element into the
commercial
, opening a window and letting the sun stream
in. “Symbolic really‚” Fidge said, “I thought we needed a bit of symbolism at the beginning there,” and Hugh agreed that Hoppness would probably approve of a bit of symbolism at the beginning, provided that it didn’t take up so much time that it cut into the ingredient story. Desmond said he thought he knew a girl who’d be really right for it, and casting was such a difficulty
nowadays
, and that he didn’t think it was something one ought to delegate to the production companies; of course, words were important, but he himself had seen good commercials ruined by bad casting, and some quite ordinary commercials which sold the product because the casting was right. Fidge said that, with all respect to Hugh, it really didn’t matter what story you told,
because
all advertising copy was pretty much of a
muchness
, as far as he could see; what mattered was the way you told it. Desmond said he couldn’t agree more. He said that when it came to shots of
soap,
he meant actual physical soap, when it came to making
soap
look
attractive
, he knew just the man to do it, and perhaps Hugh and Fidge did too; he was the man who’d done those beans and that apple charlotte. So it was agreed that the commercial would begin with seven seconds of symbolic announcement, and that then they’d concentrate on the actual appearance of the soap unwrapped, and mention in a general way the expensive ingredients that went into it, and make a particular point of how it left no ring round the bowl (though all the new ones said that), and then do a lather shot of its deep cream-cleansing, and then an end-result shot of glowing beauty, and then a further end-result-in-action sequence in which the beauty was seen at a night club with champagne and a Balenciaga dress, and that, said Hugh, would add up to about seventy-five seconds, so perhaps they’d better
start thinking about how they could cut it a bit without, of course, leaving out any of these essential elements. “Anyway,” he said, “we ought to try to keep a bit of time in hand, because Hoppness are bound to want us to put some things in.”

Desmond said, “It’s a pity we haven’t got a jingle. I suppose you didn’t think of that. A jingle always helps.”

“Doesn’t it rather add another element?”

“Well, it
does.
But look how well Camay have done with a jingle. And Knight’s Castile. I mean, I wouldn’t want just an ordinary sort of jingle. That would be death, of course. Not a jingle for jingle’s sake. More a sort of song really.”

Hugh said cheerfully, “I’m tone deaf, as everyone knows, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a sort of song if we can find room for it. Sophia, do you think you could write a sort of song?”

“Just a few words might do if they were set properly. I do a bit of arranging myself, so I could help.”

“A snatch of song for Desmond. It’s a pity we haven’t kept your bluebird, Fidge.”

“Oh, we don’t want
animals
,” Desmond said. “Only Disney could get away with that. Just a sort of song over the action, you know. A woman singing. Or a group. Perhaps a group would be better for the mood of the thing.”

“Single voice, please. You can’t hear the words with a group.” Hugh stood up, good-tempered and gray like a cat who has allowed you to stroke him for long enough, and wants to sit by the fire for a while. “I don’t think we can get much further at this meeting,” he said. “Shall we send you a new script for a storyboard when we’ve got something worked out, Fidge?” Desmond and Fidge left the office together, and Hugh said to Sophia,
“Do you think you could show me something soon? I suppose we could reduce the number of words if we left all the conjunctions out.”

“I’ll have a try.”

“You are brave, Sophia. Then we could go over it together.”

Sophia said, “Hugh, I thought I’d write to Deborah tonight. Have you made your mind up about——”

“The lodger? I’ve been thinking about it, Sophia.”

“What have you thought? I don’t mind, only I really ought to let him know soon.”

“You don’t think your friend would rather be
somewhere
more lively?”

“He isn’t my friend. I hardly know him. But if you feel——”

Hugh said, “I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing, Sophia; it must be irritating for you, I can see that. After all, the room is empty, and I should like to have a tax-free income from it. On the other hand, it is a little unsettling to take a lodger at my age. Like
getting
married. You don’t think he’d keep wanting to pop in for a chat, would he? When my mother was alive, we had a housekeeper who did that.”

“Hugh, just tell me if you don’t want him, and I’ll write. It’s only that I said I’d let them know.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry. You know I like thinking about things. How much do you think I ought to ask him to pay? I hope he wouldn’t get behind with the rent, because I shouldn’t at all like asking for it.”

“About three and a half guineas.”

“And tax-free. What a tempting prospect it would be if it weren’t so disturbing!”

“Would you like him to come and see you?”

“He’ll want to do that anyway.”

“I’ll ask him to come in when he’s in London. Then you can put off making a decision until after you’ve met him.”

“Oh dear, Sophia!” Hugh said. “What a managing sort of woman you are! You’re going to make a terribly bossy Group Head if you stay here long enough.”

*

Sophia lived in a very small furnished flat above a sweetshop in the Fulham Road. It had a bedroom, a living-room, a kitchen and a bathroom, but they were all tiny. Into these tiny rooms some large furniture had been crammed. In the living-room were a large sofa covered with red plush (now a bit patchy), a large arm-chair covered with brown plush, a large round polished table, and three large chairs with mahogany backs and leather seats. The bed in the bedroom was only a single bed, but if it had been a double bed it would have been larger than the bedroom. In the
kitchen
were a brown wooden table, a gas cooker, a painted wooden cupboard and a sink unit; Sophia had pinned on the walls some “contemporary” glass-cloths with
pictures
of fruit on them. Sophia ate in the kitchen even when she had company, and worked there in the
evenings
because the living-room table rocked if she tried to type on it. The living-room was for reading, and for entertaining not more than two people to coffee or a drink.

The sweetshop also sold cigarettes, and was owned by a Mrs. Lumley. Mr. Lumley had been dead fifteen years. Mrs. Lumley lived in two rooms behind the shop, and came into Sophia’s flat for an hour in the mornings to clean and do the washing-up. She was sixty-four years old, blind in one eye, and afraid that a cataract might be forming in the other. The sweetshop was not
efficiently
run. Mrs. Lumley was not quick or clever with change. In the course of a week, her total turnover was unlikely to be more than thirty pounds, and most of this came from the sale of cigarettes, on which there is a low profit-margin for dealers. She did not display chocolate bars or what are called “count lines” on the counter of her shop, although she had so little space for them behind and beneath it, because she had found that children stole them, and she could not see well enough to tell when they were doing so. Sometimes she was bullied by travellers, and might buy far too many Easter Eggs, which would lie mouldering in their silver-and-blue paper until long after Easter was over, and when she tried again next year to sell them there would be
complaints
. Sometimes she would refuse from timidity to stock a new line, even when the travellers explained that it would be heavily advertised on television, and then her customers would ask for it, and she would panic, and over-order, so that she was again left with stock after demand for the new line had died away. Every year, it seemed to Mrs. Lumley, the shop took less money,
although
it was difficult to be certain because she had never been able to keep accounts. Sometimes she
wondered
whether the shop were actually losing money, and were only kept going by the rent and cleaning-money she had from Sophia. Always there was the problem of stock, sitting there, growing older and less easily sold, and new stock having to be ordered and paid for while there were still bottles of boiled sweets and toffees and sherbet cushions and mints waiting to be bought. Mrs. Lumley opened later in the mornings than is usual
because
she had to do the cleaning, but she stayed open later too in the evenings, as late as she dared, and still so few people came to buy, and seemed, when they did
come, always to be asking for something she didn’t stock. She lived on tea and bread-and-marge and stale
chocolates
from the shop. In a year’s time she would be eligible for an Old Age Pension of
£
2 10s. a week, provided only that she gave up all her other work and did not tell the Pensions people that she had a lodger.