Illustration by Neil Stewart
It wasn’t exactly Mad Men when I joined my first ad agency, right out of university, but it was certainly drunk men. Pubs closed at 2.30pm in those far-off days, and so at 2.40pm the agency would hear a rumble on the staircase and the sound of rioting coming from the lifts – the creative department was coming back from lunch.
We all had offices back then, copywriter and art director together in married bliss: an office with a large sofa to have a snooze on, two desks to ostensibly work at, a stereo system for playing Rick Astley, and a large Sony TV to watch directors’ showreels when bored. The post-pub afternoons were a time of drifting in and out of each other’s rooms to see what was happening. You could find a pissed party going on almost everywhere you went along the winding corridors of that 1930s building. Senior teams were the most popular of all: they had offices the size of hotel lobbies, decorated at great expense in whatever style they wanted – and, best of all, a fridge full of free wine and beer.
One copywriter, enraged by requested edits to his script and fuelled by a good lunch, staggered to the open window and threw his enormous IBM Golfball typewriter out
Favoured account men, the ones that got ideas sold, would be allowed to hang out if they behaved themselves, but often afternoon discussions would turn to shouting and clumsy violence. One copywriter, enraged by requested edits to his script and fuelled by a good lunch, staggered to the open window and threw his enormous IBM Golfball typewriter out. It dropped about twelve feet before being brought up short by the power flex still plugged in under his desk. As he was led away to get another drink, I was delegated to haul up the machine, now swinging lazily in arcs above the street and attracting worried attention from the people three floors below. It would have killed anyone it had landed on, of course. Not entirely sober myself, it took me some time to reel the monster in and haul it back over the sill, the offending script still flapping in the breeze. By this point the account man and the copywriter were declaring undying love and respect for each other and breaking into song.
Booze fuelled everyone and everything. Clients who’d come for meetings would be taken immediately to fabulous restaurants, where they would be rendered almost insensible before being put on the train back north. There were no mobile phones and no emails, so bosses couldn’t get in touch – not that they would have wanted to. Back then you were left to get on with your job, not micro-managed incessantly.
There is nothing quite so surreal in a restaurant as noticing that the staff are now laying the tables around you for evening service and it has got very dark outside
Money was no object: no-one spent their own – or if they did, they soon got it back on expenses. Down at the finance hatch you’d give your name and receive an envelope stuffed full of worn tenners, reimbursement for insane restaurant bills and (often imaginary) cab rides to editing suites and production companies around Soho. You’d actually walk to them instead – it was much quicker and you’d probably meet someone you knew on the way back and go to the pub.
And with so much money available, production companies were keen to get your business. My art director and I would shamelessly ring up the larger ones at around 11am and hint we might have a new commercial to make. Invariably an offer to discuss it over lunch would be forthcoming, and off we would go for another lost afternoon at someone else’s expense. There is nothing quite so surreal in a restaurant as noticing that the staff are now laying the tables around you for evening service and it has got very dark outside. Time to go to the pub, after the shock of fresh air on leaving sent you reeling to vomit expensive food into the nearest waste bin.
Vomit could be a real problem. One art director left the agency bar, where the drinks were a third of the price they were in the pubs, and returning for no good reason to his office proceeded to throw up impressively over a 10×8 transparency sitting on his light box – the result of a very expensive five-day shoot in Chile. This done, he happily went off home to discover late the next morning that the acids had eaten away the transparency – the only existing copy in those pre-digital days – and it was completely destroyed. This meant going back to Chile to reshoot, but no one seemed to mind: his only punishment was that he couldn’t go First class this time, or stay in quite such luxurious hotels.
I soon developed an abiding taste for fine food, as long as someone else was paying. I remember discovering nouvelle cuisine at Alistair Little in Soho. This was quite a shock for someone who three months earlier had been a student subsisting on baked potatoes and Guinness. The portion size was risible, of course, but the artistry was an eye-opener. I began to read restaurant reviews and suggest to people where I might be taken for lunch, rather than risk disappointment at their poor choice. At the same time I started to take an interest in the wine list and encourage the lunch “sponsor”, as we privately called them, to get in a few bottles of something nice and expensive to try with our meal. I began to learn about food and wine the only way you really can – by consuming a hell of a lot of it.
Gone too is Peter Langan, likely at any time to appear blind drunk at your lunch table in his eponymous restaurant before abruptly diving under it to molest the girls’ legs
Even so, the best lunches were always in Kettners. In those days it was a branch of Pizza Express, not that you’d have known that from the stately exterior or the grand decor inside. In the main room at any lunchtime could be found half of adland and a grand piano. Standing next to the latter, a jolly squiffy old Italian would sing opera while we ate our American Hots, smoked and drank furiously, and table-hopped to chat to film editors, photographers, directors, best friends and mortal enemies.
In the evenings Mel Smith could be found smoking cigars in the Champagne Room, and after 11pm Paul Weller and his Style Council would invariably roll up, their white towelling socks defiantly stating their commitment to the beat surrender. The prices were actually no different to a normal Pizza Express so it was all gloriously egalitarian, but very few tourists ever came inside. The exterior lead them to assume that it was a haven of fine dining and not simply a poshed-up pizza place. It’s all gone now, of course.
Gone too is Peter Langan, likely at any time to appear blind drunk at your lunch table in his eponymous restaurant before abruptly diving under it to molest the girls’ legs. He did it so charmingly and with such childish glee no one ever took offence. Besides, it meant he liked you. If he didn’t like you, that could result in ugly scenes: many famous faces, especially actors, found themselves on the receiving end of a Langan tirade for no very good reason, while we looked on silently, thankful it wasn’t us.
Of course adland has changed since then: lunch is now a sad wet sandwich snatched at a desk, and if you should come back to the office smelling of drink you’ll have HR on your case before you can say “half of lager”. All-day pub opening means the joy of marching mob-handed and drunk back to the agency has gone. Budgets have been cut, expenses are closely monitored. Individual offices have disappeared, replaced by bleak open floors where the creatives sit like battery hens waiting for the cull, quietly whispering their dreary ideas to each other.
No one is going to throw their iMac out the window nowadays, which may be a good thing, but the ads don’t seem as good as they once were either. Perhaps though they never were that good. Perhaps we were simply all too drunk to notice.
Nick Harman is a London-based copywriter, restaurant rater, food and travel writer. He is the founder of Foodepedia. Follow him at @foodepedia