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EPIC FAILS

DON’T TELL HIM, PIKE!

Cliff Twemlow may not be a household name but, to fans of the more esoteric end of the cult entertainment spectrum in the early 1970s and beyond, he is a giant of stage, screen, incidental music, literature – and bodybuilding. Indeed, to many in his hometown of Manchester he’s a legend who sits comfortably on the same pedestal as that city’s great actors, writers and musicians.

Cliff was a showman with huge enthusiasm for all his artistic endeavours. He was, in turn, a nightclub bouncer, music composer, stuntman, actor, pulp fiction writer and director. He ran a dinosaur-themed visitor attraction and was also rumoured to be great mates with superstar Richard Gere. As an artiste, Cliff had plenty of on- and off-screen credits: as an actor he lit up a number of straight-to-VHS films, including The Eye of Satan and Lethal Impact; and as a composer his lilting melodies added a touch of class to soft-core porn flicks like Mary Millington’s True Blue Confessions.

In 1982 Cliff decided it was time to bring together all his talents in one fabulous, blockbusting package. Inspired by the Steven Spielberg-directed film Jaws – where the small American community of Amity is terrorised by a 7.6 m (25 ft) long, man-eating shark – he proposed to go full auteur by writing, directing, casting, composing and even acting in a watery horror in which a small community located at Lake Windermere (in the Lake District) is terrorised by a 3.6 m (12 ft) long, man-eating… pike.

The ambitious film would require a budget far in excess of the peanuts that funded the type of films with which Cliff was more usually associated. One way of raising that, he reasoned, would be to plant the idea in the psyche of the nation. So he set out to convince people that the scenario faced by the protagonists of his screenplay could really happen – to anyone.

Cliff needed to do for the reputation of the lowly pike what Jaws author Peter Benchley had done for sharks. Generally speaking, pike grow to a maximum of 1.5 m (5 ft). Of course, it would be unpleasant to be at the wrong end of such an angry pike… if you’re a smaller fish. Most humans, though, will survive the rare nip on the big toe meted out by a pike if disturbed. But Cliff wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of a good idea. Asked in a local TV interview if his story was backed, even loosely, by evidence, he replied: ‘… the largest pike ever caught was 19 ft [5.7 m]. And pike can be dangerous, you know, there’s no two ways about it.’

As an aside, it’s worth noting that the worldwide success of Jaws served, in many ways, only to justify the wholesale destruction of all species of sharks. Benchley was horrified that his pulp thriller had such ramifications and became a vocal advocate of shark conservation. But with the best, or worst, will in the world, Cliff’s film was unlikely to impact pike stocks in any meaningful way.

The monster fish central to the film needed to be nothing short of awe-inspiring. Size mattered. Cliff needed to get the industry talking and investors opening their wallets, so he commissioned artist Charles Wyatt and submarine manufacturer George Coloquhoun (pronounced Ku-Hoon, by the way) to create two 3.6 m (12 ft) long pike models that had snapping, bone-smashing jaws and which could actually swim. Charles, who’d met Cliff by chance in a gym, recalls that ‘he commissioned me to make a sculpture of a painting of a huge pike I’d done. I didn’t really know what I was doing!’ George, meanwhile, was in charge of bringing the beasts to life. ‘We actually caught some pike and put them in a swimming pool so we could study how the fish moved.’

George’s submarine engineering skills resulted in two, fierce-looking model pike – one that was powered by an internal engine. ‘It was cutting-edge technology,’ says George. The BBC science show Tomorrow’s World agreed and ran a piece about the precursor to animatronics created in a shed in Cumbria.

As George and Charles sweated it out in the workshops, Cliff called a press conference to unveil the beast and announce a triumphant piece of casting: Joan Collins. This was quite something; La Collins was heading the Dynasty cast as the extremely glamorous vamp Alexis Carrington and the show, reaching the end of its first season, was a huge hit. Career-wise, going from the rarefied, sequined shoulder-padded world of Colorado oligarchs to being menaced by a fish in the Lake District either showed Joan’s commitment to not being typecast – or, more likely, a very generous fee. Whatever her motivation, Joan came to the shores of Lake Windermere to meet the press and show her support for the film.

Fixing an actorly gaze down at the cameras she said, ‘What is under the water has always been very, very frightening, sort of nightmarish… and people like to be scared.’

Andrew Wilson was a reporter for the local paper, the Lakeland Echo, when the media circus came to town: ‘Somebody rang me, I think from the hotel, and said “Joan is actually here.” She certainly performed brilliantly…’

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the pike, which refused to work on any level the moment it was placed in the water. Sensing disaster – and a good photo opportunity – Joan Collins spontaneously put her head inside the toothy jaws of the pike and gurned, glamorously, for the snappers.

It wasn’t enough to save the film, sadly. A non-functioning fish was a huge turn-off for investors and the project was, well, dead in the water.

Undoubtedly The Pike was a disaster and significant setback, yet it feels churlish to call it a failure since Cliff Tremlow’s entire purpose seemed to be to pack his life with as much incident, enthusiasm, creativity and fun as possible. The final line of his autobiography, Tuxedo Warrior, declares that ‘it is far better to be a resident on the brink of hell, than spend a lifetime in a relentless pursuit of a mythical heaven.’ The philosophy of an epic winner, surely.

BRITISH B-MONSTERS

Had The Pike been made, would it have been as fêted as Jaws, the film it was inspired by? Likely it would have been ridiculed in the newspapers that could be bothered to review it and then forgotten, like the following selection of British B-movies that were actually made. Trog (1970) is the story of an ape-man living in the Home Counties, and a film so spectacularly stupid it features a scene in which the hairy beast dances to easy-listening jazz. Gorgo (1961) is a thinly veiled Godzilla rip-off about a giant reptile that terrorises London, and was made for about a quarter of the budget of the Chewits advert. Then there’s 1954’s Devil Girl from Mars, the salacious story of a Martian she-devil and her robot sidekick rounding up the male inhabitants of a small Scottish village for a breeding programme. And who could forget Konga (aka I Was a Teenage Gorilla, 1961), the tale of a botanist’s botched experiment on a chimpanzee. Why would a plant scientist carry out experiments on primates? You’ll have to watch the film for the explanation. Although, even then, trust me, it still won’t make any sense. The results of the experiment see London (or Croydon, to be precise) being laid to waste by a stuntman in a gorilla suit. By comparison, The Pike looks like a sane investment opportunity.

TWANG!! FAILS TO HIT TARGET

In 1960, Lionel Bart forever changed the face of British musical theatre history. Oliver!, his West End adaptation of Charles Dickens’ iconic novel Oliver Twist, took the capital by storm, before finding equal success across the pond on Broadway. It was a massive achievement in every sense, not least because Bart couldn’t read or write music. Instead he came up with the melodies and lyrics in his head and then hummed them to a transcriber.

With that glittering success under his belt, Bart turned his substantial talents to another classic figure of British literature: Robin Hood. The resulting musical, Twang!!, was a burlesque parody of the fabled outlaw and his merry men, featuring silly disguises, a ‘court tart’ and a Scottish villain by the name of Roger the Ugly.

Based on the success of Oliver!, the biggest names in British comedy, including Ronnie Corbett, Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor, were itching to don green tights. What could possibly go wrong?

Much, is the answer. Bart, an erratic figure at the best of times, was enjoying his newfound celebrity. He was drinking heavily and experimenting with psychedelic drugs, which may explain some of Twang!!’s absurd plotlines. The director was Joan Littlewood, a hugely influential figure in British theatre who had triumphed earlier that decade with Oh, What a Lovely War!, but a disastrous preview in Manchester in November 1965 led to her jumping ship. Last-minute script changes only served to confuse matters more, and the show opened in disarray at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre on 20 December 1965.

At the 11^th hour, Bart decided the play needed to be camper, and threw some transvestism into the mix for good measure. The conductor fainted, an electrical fault meant the house lights kept coming on and bickering actors and stagehands could be heard throughout. It was, by all accounts, an unmitigated and epic fail. The show closed within weeks, costing Bart his personal fortune and leading eventually to his bankruptcy.

IT’S NOT THE REAL THING

Coca-Cola is the best-selling soft drink in the world, and the world’s biggest soft drinks company, so how did they make what some industry experts reckon was one of the biggest marketing cockups of all time?

Instantly recognisable, Coca-Cola had triumphed thanks to slick marketing creating one of the most successful companies in the world, with a back catalogue of expensive and highly produced advertising campaigns. But the biggest marketing arsenal in the world is no defence when public tastes change. In the late 1990s Coke sales had begun to plateau as consumers turned their attention to healthier alternatives, like bottled water.

In 1999 Coke launched their own bottled water brand called Dasani. They’d been pipped to the post some five years earlier by their number one rival PepsiCo, whose bottled water brand was called Aquafina. But Dasani quickly became the second most popular brand of water in the USA. Coke looked to Europe and the UK, certain they could repeat the success. Britain alone presented a very tempting market to dive into – sales of bottled water here had grown by nearly 50 per cent between 2000 and 2004.

So it was that in February 2004 Coke’s waters broke in the UK. Dasani, baptised with a £7 million marketing splash, steamed onto the supermarket shelves.

But one man was about to muddy the waters.

In 2004 Graham Hiscott, now business editor at the Daily Mirror, was a journalist for the Associated Press news agency. He was leafing through The Grocer – the venerable magazine of the food and drink industry – and came across an article about the launch of Dasani. It was a straightforward piece, but one sentence leapt out, describing Dasani as ‘mineral enhanced… tap water’. Graham could taste a story.

The perception of mineral water in the UK and Europe is that it’s drawn from a remote natural spring or a bubbling mountainside brook – not, as the Dasani story revealed, a tap in a depot in the southeast London suburb of Sidcup. Coke never made explicit claims that their water had been pumped from a mountain stream by cherubs and fairies – but their constant claims of its being purer-than-pure suggested some effort had gone to source it.

The natural, honest-to-goodness image of Dasani was sullied. And then someone worked out Coke’s profit margin. Dasani sold for 95p per bottle, each only 500ml (17fl oz). Thames Water, the original source of the contents via a tap, charged (at the time) 0.03p per 500ml. That’s a markup of more than 3,000 per cent. To the untrained, un-business, savvy eye of the consumer, it looked as if Coke were taking the p***. Fate, of course, then arranged for swathes of Surbiton to be flooded by a burst water main, the very same water main supplying the Dasani plant.

Consumers felt let down by a household brand name, and that ensured the story ran and ran. ‘It was only really when you began to get the public anger [that] you realised that this was a great story and Coke had made a colossal mistake,’ said Graham.

But even as they were fighting one media storm about the source of Dasani, another broke out just three weeks later. In the process of turning tap water into Dasani, calcium chloride was added for ‘taste profile’, and then ozone pumped through. The problem was that the batch of calcium chloride used had been contaminated with bromide, and the added ozone then oxidised it, transforming it into bromate, a nasty carcinogen. By the time Dasani was on the shelves, it contained 22 mg (0.0007/m) of bromate, twice the legal limit. Her Majesty’s Drinking Water Inspectorate constantly monitor tap water for bromate levels and by coincidence had tested the Thames Water being supplied to the factory at around the same time Dasani was launched, finding it free of bromate. So Dasani, the health-giving pure water, was actually just Thames Water to which Coke had added a carcinogenic chemical.

Coke immediately called back the half a million bottles already dispatched to retailers, and this recall is thought to have postponed the introduction of the water to the rest of Europe.

All in, the blunder was reported to have cost Coke in the region of £40 million.

It was like watching a slow-motion PR car crash, recalls marketing expert Allyson Stuart-Allen:

‘There was a 3,000 per cent mark up on Dasani. Now on the one hand you could say, “Wow, that’s fantastic marketing.” On the other hand, you have to defend that price position and to defend it you have to be more than just a purified water, you have to be something else.’

Coke argued that Dasani did have ‘something else’, but exactly what that was had been misunderstood. It wasn’t simply tap water; it was the result of a ‘highly sophisticated process’ developed by NASA to create the purest drinking water you could get. In reality, though, the process, known as reverse osmosis, was already a common way of purifying water, and featured in consumer household water purification systems, having been developed without the aid of the US Space Agency. Things were starting to feel desperate.

How does a $45 billion company make such a hash of a drink of water? Says Allyson, ‘With that sort of power comes a lot of hubris sometimes. Consumers are not foolish. They do know what’s going on and they will find you out.’

I’M BACKING PORTUGAL BRITAIN

Grassroots campaigns are often heartfelt, but they have a habit of being strangled by weeds (and spotlight-craving politicians).

It’s 1967. Britain is swinging. And so is the economy – at the end of a rope. With inflation rocketing and foreign exports tanking, Harold Wilson’s government have had to devalue the pound by 14 per cent to be in with a hope of competing with European imports. It’s humiliating for Wilson as he pleads no alternative to boosting output.

But five secretaries from plumbing manufacturers Colt Ventilation and Heating Ltd, in Surbiton, have a cunning plan…

On 27 December ‘the girls of the typing pool’ composed a collective letter to their boss offering to work an extra half-hour a day, for free, to do their bit for the economy and British-made products. ‘We’re Backing Britain,’ they typed, in the process coining a pretty marvellous, media-friendly, rallying cry. The management didn’t need persuading to take an offer of free labour (what management would?) and the week between Christmas and New Year being traditionally slow in terms of news, the story was a belated gift to the tabloids. So enthusiastic were the columnists and features writers who picked it up from the newsdesk that by mid-January 1968, 3,000 companies had announced that their workers were pledging to skip tea breaks to improve productivity.

Initially the movement was spontaneous and homespun so, naturally, politicians wondered what they might get out of it. Ted Heath, the Tory (and opposition) leader, hopped on the bandwagon followed by Prime Minister Wilson. Business leaders weren’t far behind. Publisher Robert Maxwell launched a simultaneous Buy British campaign. He was passionate about all this, he said, failing to disclose that all the books he published were printed in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, the trade unions warned that the campaign was just a smokescreen for unpaid overtime. But that fell on deaf ears. And so, thankfully, did Bruce Forsyth’s excruciatingly naff – but very catchy – single ‘I’m Backing Britain’. It was rushed out to fanfare the movement and, in the spirit of things, everyone involved, including Bruce, made it for a reduced fee. It sold 7,300 copies and failed to chart.

Economically, experts said, the campaign was woefully naïve. It simply didn’t add up. But for a brief moment it did have a bit of Dunkirk spirit, a feeling that the nation was pulling together and enjoying a collective experience not felt since, well, Dunkirk.

Badges, stickers and T-shirts were everywhere and festooned everything for the first months of 1968. London wholesaler Scott Lester ordered thousands of white T-shirts screen-printed with the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ slogan. But, it turned out, the shirts had been made in Portugal. Lester said, ‘We can’t find a British T-shirt which will give us the same quality at a price which will compare.’ D’oh!

‘I’m Backing Britain’ disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. The slogan remains in parlance only as the punchline of a joke, most famously Spike Milligan’s quip: ‘I’m Backing Britain – over a cliff!’

UP IN SMOKE

Cigarette advertising was banned on British TV in 1965, but cigarette manufacturers W.D. & H.O. Wills probably wished it had been much earlier. In 1959, a period in British history where you were in a minority if you didn’t smoke, they launched a new brand, called Strand. The campaign centred on a costly TV advert that, to this day, still stands out for its artistry. It had a dishy protagonist, known in the script as The Lonely Man and in reality played by actor Terence Brook, a dead ringer for Sinatra. Wandering the empty streets of London at night, he stops to light a cigarette under a streetlamp. ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the tagline over a cool, downbeat theme jazz riff. It’s not clear why he’s mooching around in a trench coat in the early hours, but he looks good doing it. If you smoked Strand, the ad wanted you to know, you would reek of cool. The advert certainly struck a note with the public and brand recognition was extremely high. But something stank about Strand. Sales were a disaster. Most people who saw the ad translated its message into something akin to: ‘Smoke Strand and you too can be a depressed, friendless loser.’ The ad’s soundtrack, called ‘The Lonely Man Theme’, was recorded by the Cliff Adams Orchestra and reached number 38 in the hit parade.

THIS DEAL SUCKS

When a company synonymous with vacuum cleaners decided to branch out as a travel agent, the result was an unmitigated disaster. Britons were swept up in Hoover’s too-good-to-be-true special offer – and resorted both to hijacking and to Trojan horses to get their money back. Even the Queen was sufficiently miffed to whip back her Royal Seal of approval.

In 1992, the British division of Hoover had a surfeit of white goods, which they were desperate to shift. So they came up with the bright idea of offering two, free, round-trip airline tickets with every purchase of a Hoover product over £100. While the promotion was good only for trips inside Europe, canny customers realised they could make savings on flights.

Hoover didn’t have their eye on the ball, though, and leapt from misguided to moronic by extending the offer to US destinations. In 1992 a one-way ticket to the USA averaged £200, but Hoover were offering a pair of returns for £100. That made no business sense whatsoever. Their adverts acknowledged as much, running with a tagline that chuckled, ‘Two return seats: Unbelievable.’ Unusually for advertising, this boast turned out to be completely true – just not for the right reasons. More than 200,000 people bought Hoovers they didn’t really want.

Hoover’s European sales increased dramatically; their bottom line did not. Realising too late the calamity of the offer, Hoover refused to honour it. This incensed the public. In Cumbria, a Mr Dixon hijacked a Hoover branded van when a repairman from the company called to fix the dishwasher he had bought to fund a family holiday to the USA. Dixon refused to hand back the van until he got his tickets – and became a national hero overnight. BBC consumer rights show Watchdog became obsessed with the story and sent in undercover reporters to Hoover HQ. A grass-roots consumer group called the Hoover Holidays Pressure Group was formed and bought enough shares in Hoover’s parent company to attend shareholder meetings and pressure them to pay up.

When that failed, the group took the company to the courts, making headlines throughout Europe and the United States. The court cases went on for five more years, costing Hoover £50 million and such a devastating drop in reputation that their owners, Maytag, were forced to sell off the company to an Italian competitor, Candy.