Paul Burke is an award-winning advertising copywriter
First of all, some poverty top trumps: I’m one of five kids. My mum was a cleaner and my dad was a labourer but only when he was well enough to labour. For much of my childhood, he wasn’t, so we had to subsist on state benefits, free school meals and clothes that arrived in bin
There was a time when people of colour were not adequately represented in British TV commercials. For many years, despite the UK’s growing black and Asian population, there were too few people matching that description in the commercial breaks. Advertisers’ commitment to diversity has quite often been a commitment to discrimination In the programmes surrounding
To anyone brought up in the seventies and eighties, the fact that so many Palestine Action protestors are themselves in their seventies and eighties is the least surprising fact of the year. These people were the original ‘Boring Old Hippies,’ those dreary teachers and lecturers whom so many of us had to suffer the first
I’m only surprised it’s taken so long. And that anyone could possibly be surprised by it. ‘Beautiful girl appears in ad campaign for fashion brand’ is hardly a revolutionary concept and yet, since Sydney Sweeney appeared in a new campaign for American Eagle and lit up the internet, there’s been quite a lot of confected
I’ve spent most of my working life producing radio commercials. You might expect me to say this, given my job, but when hosts read out ads on their own podcasts, I find it embarrassing. On commercial radio and television, viewers and listeners have always understood that the ads pay for the programmes and they’re fine with
I’m now officially Irish – the proud recipient of a shiny red passport. It arrived, with the luck of the Irish, in time for St Patrick’s Day. But as I gaze fondly at the words ‘European Union’ and ‘Ireland’ embossed in gold on the front, I do feel the awkward guilt of the hypocrite. I
If you’ve bought a card for your partner this Valentine’s Day, I would guess you’re more likely to be a man. This is because men are generally more romantic than women, which is something that’s widely known but seldom acknowledged. It’s actually quite a serious issue. According to a female counsellor I once interviewed, one
December is when about 90 per cent of Baileys consumption takes place, and yet nobody really knows why. I used to work at an ad agency called Young & Rubicam, and we had the Baileys account. We’d spend all year writing ads to persuade people to drink it at some point – any point –
At the former Chiswick Works in west London, I recently celebrated the Routemaster’s 70th birthday. I owe my existence to this majestic mode of transport. My mum was a conductress on a Routemaster – the No. 16 – which cut a merry swathe from Cricklewood to Victoria, right through the centre of London. My dad, like
If you’re of a certain age and you were brought up Catholic, you’ll remember ‘Good Friday’ as the most awful misnomer. It was the most miserable day in the Catholic calendar – the day we commemorated the death of Our Saviour. Any display of happiness or cheer was strictly forbidden on Good Friday. A dark
Radio is my favourite medium. Always has been. It doesn’t shout ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ in the way newspapers and screens do. Radio informs and entertains as you drive a car, paint a ceiling or perform open-heart surgery. And there was no finer, more creative and more enduring radio entertainer than Steve Wright, who died on
I’m writing this in a coffee shop. I write most things in coffee shops but I’ve never been to this one before. As I paid for my latte, I noticed the sign (below). Never mind Brexit or Palestine, I can’t think of an issue that will divide the nation like this will. People will immediately
In 1973, everyone loved David Bowie. Album buyers had put Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory high in the charts, while singles buyers had bought similar success for ‘Drive In Saturday’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Sorrow’. Then right in the middle of this, he released ‘The Laughing Gnome’. In truth, he probably didn’t. It was a twee little novelty song
Hard to imagine now but I was once a hot club DJ. I now need to go to bed on the same day I got up but once upon a time – in fact, hundreds of times upon a time – I dropped big tunes at famous clubs including Le Beat Route, the Camden Palace
A few years ago, I abandoned a five-year counselling course after just 40 minutes. Apparently, I couldn’t have a refund from the community college but could transfer to another course. I may have a writer’s fascination with finding things out but I have a strange aversion to being taught. Looking at the long list of courses
In practically every respect, I’m a useless human being. This is not the vanity of false modesty – I really am worse than most people at most things. I’ve never picked up a musical instrument, a golf club or a foreign language; I can barely boil an egg and would find it almost impossible to paint
We all know that the saddest words in the English language are ‘too late’. We also know that ‘procrastination is the thief of time’ and that ‘punctuality is the politeness of kings. However, since this piece was published a couple of weeks ago, many have got in touch to point out that, very often, ‘the
A few years ago, James Delingpole and I were two-fifths of ‘The Manalysts’ a clique of agony uncles employed by a women’s magazine. The idea was to provide five answers to each problem from five disparate standpoints. James was the trenchant intellectual, I was (supposedly) the metrosexual adman and the other three were a practising
If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages – that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t. Punk
Let’s play a game of word association. I’ll start: ‘skinhead’. Hmm. I think I can guess which words instantly occurred to you: ‘thug’ perhaps, ‘hooligan’ probably and possibly even ‘racist’? Yet for anyone who remembers the original incarnation of skinheads, another word will always spring to mind: ‘reggae’. If you believe that Britain’s love affair with
