Lizzie & Sarah

Whilst flicking through television channels lastnight, I happened apon the best offering I have seen from the BBC in a long time.

Lizzie and Sarah is a one-off 30 minute drama from the makers of Spaced and Nighty Night. It's about two fiftysomething housewives who are completely unappreciated by their husbands. Very funny. Like the First Wives Club but funnier and British and less cheesey.



Its on BBC iPlayer and available until next Sunday (28th March). Watch it.

Learner Driver.

I am finally learning to drive! I had a lesson yesterday and now I am basically a 3 point-turn genius. I don't really understand reversing yet, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it soon enough. I have also successfully avoided hitting:

4 pheasants
1 squirrel
2 cats

I've discovered that driving is very difficult to get the hang of for maybe the first hour and then it is pretty easy. As long as you have good control of your feet and you're not blind, its actually enjoyable. I can't wait for the day when I don't have to think what gear I should be in and I can concentrate on singing along to some pumpin' jams.

What is most odd about me not having a driving license is that I already own a car. I have a 1992 Mini City in a lovely shade of Henley blue. My very helpful boyfriend is currently doing it up. As we bought it with crash damage, for a very good price. It should be ready to go by the time I pass hopefully!



When this beauty is ready to roll, I shall probably be the coolest road user around.

Will Ferrell

Now if you don't think this song is the greatest song ever...
I will fight you. That's no lie.

Why can't Will just make films constantly for my personal entertainment? I've been left high and dry since Land of the Lost and let's face it - it was no Step Brothers (there just wasn't enough room for activities). I have to keep watching clips of 'Bat fight' on YouTube to get my Will fill. Although I highly recommend this, I just want some new material to chortle to.

Love it or hate it

A recent news headline on the BBC news website caught my eye. A welsh family claim to have seen the image of Jesus in the lid of a jar of Marmite.

"When I first looked at it I wasn't sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought yeah, she's right - that's the image of Jesus."

After making me laugh out loud, this reminded me first of my God bothering sister and second of some recent adverts from DDB for a new Marmite cereal bar:






Love the ads, still hate Marmite.

6 Words

Another excersize we did with Roger Horberry: The six word story.

So the Guardian ran a blog competition for readers to upload their own six word stories:

Where the fuck's the door handle?

Life. I want my money back.

They also published a few from some more experienced writers:

Armageddon imminent. Make list. Tick most.
Ian Rankin

Found true love. Married someone else.
Dave Eggers

Big bang. No God. Fadeout. End.
Stephen Baxter

And here are some of my attempts:

Hit pheasant. Should have worn glasses.

Red wire? Blue wire? I'm colourblind.

We ♥ Ogilvy

Last Thursday Vicky and I made our way to London town to see a couple of agencies. Our first visit was to Adam & Eve in Covent Garden, where we showed our portfolio to a creative team. They were really helpful and went through each campaign telling us what they liked and what they thought we should change. They also gave us the great advice that it is OK to stalk creatives for book crits as they would've had to do it too at some stage. So watch out creatives, we're going to harass you until you give us a restraining order, or a book crit.

Next our journey took us to Canary Wharf to meet a female creative team at Ogilvy. They were both really friendly and positive and probably the most helpful people we will ever meet. Also, they said that we could come back the next day as we were visiting Ogilvy again anyway for our course. So we left extremely happy about the day's events and with plenty of ideas about re-doing some ads.

Friday came and we met up with some people from our course to go to a proper crit at Ogilvy. We met a team called Serge and Steve who seemed to have worked at just about every advertising agency going. They went through all our work and gave us feedback and definately didn't hold back. Its always good to get an honest opinion! They also suggested that the future for us graduates may not be that bleak. Agencies will undoubtedly be looking for cheaper employees - and what comes cheaper than a work placement team at £80 a week?

Once our crit was finished we went back down to the creative department at Ogilvy 1 to see our best mates in the world. We were shocked to discover that they required another look at our portfolio, which we had not brought with us! A journey to my home in St Albans and back (with book) ensued. Finally managed to sort out a photocopied portfolio for them (scary shit), and we should hopefully get some more feedback this week, hurray!

So all in all a very successful trip. We're already planning to visit both agencies again in Easter and hopefully a few more, if we can do enough stalking!

The Horberry

A couple of weeks ago I attented a copywriting workshop wit a man called Roger Horberry. Why am I only telling you about this now? Well I've had things to do and people to see.

Roger has a book:

(No you can't click to look inside, I just stole the picture off Amazon)

He got us to do some really fun exercises to get our creative juices flowing. One of which was to re-write a paragraph selling a product in the style of a celeb we would get at random. I was given the name of Peaches Geldof and decided to get her talking about wine...

"This wine is like totally epic, and like really fruity. It's got loads of grapes in it, not that I give a shit. I've got better things to do. It comes from Burgundy - my dads probably been there, he's like... really famous. You can buy it from Asda, I've never been there, but you could send your assistant? That might be cool."

I really think I captured the Peaches we know and love.

Roger also told us a few things about tone of voice:

It is content + expression + audience.

It is personality in print.

It is everything you don't have to say, but probably should.

He told us some other interesting things like how we could summarise text down into bullet points but it would take out all the character and tone of voice. He showed this by getting us to cut down famous speeches into bullet points - they were very uninspiring after that.

I would probably buy Roger's book if my Amazon wish list wasn't a mile long already. I still believe that I will one day win the This Morning competition, pay off my student loan and buy all the books I want. One day...