INTERVIEW: Sir Alan Parker.

Sir Alan, where did you grow up?
I grew up in Islington.
Ours were the first council flats built after the war and I moved in aged about three or four.
Ironically, the flats overlooked the street where my Dad was born and brought up.
(My Grandad was the local barber and the family were evacuated in the war when a bomb hit St Mary’s Church close to their shop. He was also the local bookie—illegal then—and so they moved closer to Newmarket.)
Growing up, my home had 1 LP, (‘Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits’) and 4 books, was your home very Artsy too?
Oddly, we had a rubbish TV set, but an enormous ‘radiogram’, which was the prized piece of furniture in the front room. It was all shiny wood veneers and knobs– so we had a lot of music.
My Dad played the perfunctory Vera Lyne stuff and my mother played David Whitfield and Alma Cogan records.
She was also reasonably good at vamping on the piano and at Christmas she would thump out Ruby Murray songs: “Softly, softly, turn the key, and open up my heart.” I can hear it now. It was dreadful.
My Dad initially worked in the transport department at the Sunday Times, (basically a greasy garage in a mews behind the main building on Gray’s Inn road.)
But when I left home, he took early redundancy and became a house painter. My mother was a seamstress/machinist. She did ‘homework’ – knocking out boxes full of stuff – every week it was something different – our very own sweatshop ­– and she hated it.
Her sewing machine was in my bedroom and she cursed every minute as she angrily stamped away on the foot treadle. It made her very unhappy.
I was the first kid in the flats to get to the grammar school, which was Dame Alice Owens at the Angel — so I was quite a hard-working studious kid.
I was given a Telefunken reel-to-reel tape recorder for passing my GCE’s and became obsessed with making short plays doing all the voices and sound effects.
My Dad wiped them all one Christmas to record Frankie Vaughan songs.
What was the first ad you remember seeing?
Dennis Compton’s Brylcreem ads — probably as he and his brother Leslie played football for Arsenal. 
Also, I won a Dennis Compton cricket bat my last year at Primary school.
Did the arrival of TV have a big effect on you?
As I mentioned, our TV set was crap. We had a curious magnifying lens strapped to the front, which supposedly made the image larger.
When commercial TV started my Dad fixed up an ITV ‘convertor box’, with an aerial on the top, which gave a continually fuzzy picture.
If a door slammed the picture would disappear into a blizzard.
As a treat, I used to go to the neighbours next door to watch Hopalong Cassidy.
The first commercials I remember on ITV were “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”.

And “Murray Mint, Murray Mint, the too good to hurry mint.”

What did you want to be when you grew up?
When I went for the interview at my new school at 11, I said I wanted be an architect.
No idea why, except I was always drawing designs of houses for my mother.
What was the first job you were paid for?
I had a paper round when I was fourteen.
It was freezing at 6a.m. and I spent my first few weeks wages on an anorak, which my mother lined with fake fur.
Then, at sixteen I got a Saturday job at ‘Jolly’s Cooked Meats’, Camden Town.
I was in charge of the cooked chickens and did it for two years before leaving school. I loved the theatre of it all. I wore a white apron and had a long stick with a fork on the end to stab the chicken legs and breasts in the shop window.
I was very entertaining to the customers.
How did you end up at ad agency Maxwell Clarke?
After ‘A’ levels, my Dad insisted that I went to work as he was very much against university and he set about getting me a job.
At the garage he would bribe the Sunday Times executives extra gallons of petrol to anyone who would help his son get a job in journalism.
Consequently I ended up as a filing clerk on the Hospital Equipment News.
It was purgatory.
One of the advertising reps there had a friend at a small advertising agency called Maxwell Clarke in Holborn.
I went for the job out of desperation and was hired at £7.00 a week.
I’m guessing that the folks inside an ad agency back in 1960 either; trained at Sandhurst, owned a tie from a public school, had a double-barreled surname or letters after their name?
Curiously, the agency wasn’t the usual suspects you describe.
It was a rag-bag of losers, con-men and eccentrics – very few toffs.
It’s also fair to say that it wasn’t the coolest place in the advertising universe.
How did you finagle your way from the mailroom to the creative department?
After a brief stint in the mailroom, I was assigned to ‘Copy Forwarding’, which entailed taking the ad proofs around to be signed off by each department. Consequently, I got to know everybody.
The so-called ‘creative department’ consisted of a proper working studio (with airbrush and scraperboard artists perpetually high on Cow-Gum. fumes) two copywriters and two “visualisers”.
One of the copywriters, Len Weinreich, encouraged my interest in writing by setting me imaginary advertising briefs, which I did late at night on the kitchen table.
Also, one of the visualisers, Gray Jolliffe, was a great friend to me. (Fifty years later he still is — I had lunch with him today).
At Len’s and Gray’s urging, the management invented a job, ‘Junior copywriter’, for me and I was given a tiny wooden cubicle with dappled glass partitions, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and another fiver a week.

In the coming months I proceeded to knock off dozens and dozens of (mostly small) ads.
The brown ‘job-bags’ would arrive, I’d read the brief, write an ad, scribble a visual or a cartoon, and plonk it back in the bag where it got passed on and became an ad.
It was more like working at Yo! Sushi than an ad agency.
When I was trying to break into the business I’d try to create ads like the ones I’d seen with the initials BBH, CDP or GGT underneath.
When writing ads on your parent’s kitchen table late at night, what was your criteria for a good one?
Len said to me from the beginning: “never forget who it is you’re talking to and write as you speak. Don’t preach, don’t show off and never be boring.”
I had the mantra pinned to my wall.
When did you hear about the creative revolution going on in New York?
For us, the source of good ads was always the New Yorker, which was also introduced to me by Len Weinreich.
It transformed how I approached everything.
Each new issue would be leapt on and you’d leaf through it to see the latest VW or Avis ad, which would take your breath away.

Nothing in British advertising by the then big guns: JWT, Mather & Crowther, Bensons etc, was remotely comparable to what they were doing in New York. Without knowing it, my heroes were Bob Levenson, Helmut Krone, Mary Wells, Ed McCabe, Julian Koenig and George Lois and I lapped up everything they did.
How did you go from the lukewarm Maxwell Clarke to white-hot American agency Papert Koenig Lois?
About this time DDB and PKL had opened in London.
Gray and I did a mock-up ad which we sent to DDB who were looking for staff. We tried to be very DDB by being ever-so-humble, with a photograph of the two of us, shot from above, on our knees, begging for a job.
It half worked in that I got an interview with John Withers for the vacant junior copywriter post.
Malcolm Gluck eventually got the job. He was more on John Withers’ social wavelength than me and as Gluck pointed out to me later, “John would never hire you: too many split infinitives.”
And so I wrote an ad to PKL. It was a pastiche of one of their successful Granada TV ads, “Dear PKL it’s time you met Alan Parker.”

I got an interview with the copy chief Peter Mayle who miraculously offered me a job for twice what I was making at Maxwell Clarke.
Its testosterone-heavy vibe and the number of people wandering around sporting cuts and bruises, lead to PKL New York being nicknamed ‘Stillman’s East’, (after the gym), was the London office like that too?
PKL had a legendary New York creative reputation of course and even a bit of one in London (having done some good work by Tony Palladino and Ron Holland, before they both returned to New York).
There were rumours of minor fisticuffs between the MD, Nigel Seely and Palladino, which, via the assembled creative imaginations at PKL and Seely’s facility for ‘porky pies’, eventually became a broken arm, split lip, and even, on one account I read, a dash to Middlesex hospital with Paladino bleeding from a cut throat.
How did you adapt from coming from sleepy Maxwell Clarke?
When I arrived at PKL it was a shock.
First off, the PKL I held in such high esteem was not the PKL I joined.
Weirdly, Koenig and Lois had hired a crazy guy called Joe Sacco to be the new boss in London. Problem was that Sacco hated creative advertising.
He was a loud, abrasive, New York bully who believed in hard-sell, Ted Bates kind of advertising.
He loathed DDB and probably even PKL.
We used to have interminable late night “think sessions” where the creative department sat in a large room throwing out ideas and being screamed at and lectured by Sacco.
I was twenty-one years old, mystified and unable to contribute.
I’d come from a quiet cubicle, six feet by six feet and suddenly was in a room with twenty experienced creative people shouting at one another, with Sacco yelling at me, “Kid what have you got?” I would stammer out an idea that I had scribbled on my layout pad and he’d interrupt with “No, not that kind of shit.” I was terrified.
What did you work on there?
I can’t remember how long I was there— I think months only—and can’t remember having a single ad produced.
It was a miserable experience.
To this day, I have no idea what Koenig and Lois were thinking. Why hire this nutcase Sacco?
Ever meet Koenig or Lois?
No, they never visited whilst I was there.
Apparently Koenig always visited Ascot and Newmarket, as the racetrack was his first love, but he never came near Sloane Street.
Which ads were pinned to your cork-board walls in those days?
I had no ads pinned on my cork-board. If you put something up Sacco would come in late at night and tear it down.
Why leave?
Why stay?
The best thing that happened at PKL was that I befriended the art director Paul Windsor who had been poached from CDP and was as mystified as me at the goings-on.
He already had quite a reputation and CDP wanted him back.
Consequently the two of us, as a “creative team” – the then new fashion – went for a meeting at CDP with Colin Millward and Bob Pethick and Colin hired us both straight away.
To be honest, it was Paul they wanted back, and indulged him by taking this young kid as his writer.
When Paul and I returned to PKL at Sloane Street, Peter Mayle was waiting outside the building. “Don’t go back, Sacco’s found out you’ve been to CDP”, (Peter had told him) “and has gone berserk. It’s bedlam up there.” Paul and I promptly took the train home and never went back.
Did you take any lessons from Peter Mayle with you to CDP?
Peter just kept his head down during this period.
He was almost apologetic about Sacco, as it was not what he’d signed up for either. Some time after Paul and I left, Peter eventually organised a coup with the help of Nigel Seely and ousted Sacco, who was recalled to New York and fired.
When Peter eventually gained complete control of PKL, he asked me to go back as creative director, but I had become firmly entrenched at CDP by then.
One morning in 1966, you turn up at the best agency in the country, scared?
CDP was not intimidating in the least — probably because Paul Windsor had already worked there and so he knew everybody — which made things very comfortable for me.
Also it was a very friendly, benign and calm environment. (Not threatening like PKL where Sacco would regularly throw coffee mugs at the wall.)
The creative department at CDP was the domain of one man: a dour, not overly articulate Yorkshireman: Colin Millward.

His first impressions of you, when presenting your first work to him: ‘Trying to make a name for yourself are you son?’.
What were your first impressions of him?
Although a very shy and quiet man – he never raised his voice — Colin was the undisputed boss.
No one undermined his authority.
Not Saatchi, Cramer, Salmon Godfey, Brignull, Wight, Collins, Parker, Windsor, anyone. We all bowed down to him on the fourth floor, as they did on the floor below where the account men resided.
John Pearce deferred totally to Colin’s judgement, as did Frank Lowe who took over from Pearce.
Colin said ‘this is the ad’ and if the client didn’t approve it, John Pearce promptly fired the client. (It rarely happened).
The creative department at CDP was a narrow, un-flashy corridor on the fourth floor, with small unassuming offices either side.
It was very sparse and matter of fact: very un-chic.
If you got some work into the D&AD book perhaps Colin would allow you a cork wall. But that was the only décor allowed.
All of us thought Millward’s judgement absolute.
He had immaculate aesthetic taste, but was always urging us to be braver with the ideas.
(A few of Colin Millward’s ads below.)

The art directors were in his image — usually ex-Royal College of Art, great technicians and artists – but the writers were an odd bunch of misfits (Saatchi, Salmon, Weiland, myself etc) who didn’t fit comfortably in to any box.
Colin encouraged all sorts of disparate people who he thought could stretch the conventional parameters of advertising.
His early instincts were visual, but he more and more encouraged the development of ideas.
Also he could spot a phony idea from the other end of the corridor.
He would stop by your office and see ten scribbled ideas pinned on the wall.
He’d silently look at them, shuffling from ad to ad, pull a face, dig at his nails and then leave saying, “Not easy is it?”
Invariably you’d take down the ads and start again.
It was as if he willed you to do better.
(‘Alan Parker’ by Colin Millward.)
He’s been described as the most influential British adman of all time. Why?
I suppose simply put, because under his guidance and supervision, in a very short space of time, so many people made so many brilliant ads: a body of work that has never been
”We spent years putting Harvey’s Bristol Cream on a pedestal and Parker comes along and sells it off of a barrow.” – John Pearce. At what point did you feel confident enough to write as people spoke rather than in the dry vernacular that was commonplace in advertising at the time?
To be honest I always wrote that way. It goes back to Len Weinreich’s advice: “never forget who it is you’re talking to and write as you speak. Don’t preach, don’t show off and never be boring.”
As I became more attuned to the Bob Levenson turn of phrase it influenced my writing, as did John Withers’ revolutionary work for Remington shavers in London.
He was the first to put the DDB bite into British copywriting – only with a more colloquial British vernacular — this was a real break through.
Of my Harvey’s ads, apart from ‘Iced Cream’ my favourite is “A christening is a great day for a little tot.”
The baby in the ad is my daughter—now 50, with three kids of her own.

I’ve seen quite a few ads credited you you and Ron Collins, were you a team at CDP?
No, Ron was in John Salmon’s group.
Colin never knew what to do with Ron.
He was very talented, but too lippy for his own good and not too popular.
He lived near me in Sheen and our kids went to the same school and so he and I did a tiny bit of freelance work on the train home — one for the local Sheen kids’ clinic, which got into the D&AD book.
We even made up a name of a fictional advertising agency to make us sound authentic.
We wanted something that sounded New York and ethnic. We were on the tube and Ron had a Jewish cookbook and so I opened it and, flicking through, I picked out three words, which became the agency: Kartoffel, Schnitzel and Krupnik.

Ron even did a letterhead to look like PKL, complete with thin sans serif face. We were offered a lot of work, but we didn’t exist.

Two of your BFFs were David Puttnam and Frank Lowe, ever think of starting Parker Puttnam & Windsor or Lowe Parker Windsor?
I think Puttnam always had aspirations other than start an advertising agency.
He was always re-inventing himself. He still is.
I think, as my own work developed in commercials and film, it naturally put me on a different trajectory.
In hindsight, I would have been better off financially if I’d had started an agency back then — and since sold it on a few times over, like many of my contemporaries!