Dear Camilla Cooke,

I have been comparing Kevin07 T-shirts to those of presidential campaigns in the US, and I noticed that the T-shirts were priced lower in Australia ($7 versus around $20 in America) and that the design was more visually spare (for example, no portraits of the candidate, unlike the Obama shirts, and generally very little in the way of razzmatazz). I was wondering what your thoughts were on the design and pricing of the T-shirts, and if this reflects a more Australian approach to political marketing. I also saw a quote of yours in which you said the Kevin07 campaign used a lot of Australian-style humor which would not be found in the US – do you think this was reflected in the Kevin07 slogan and T-shirts?

Best wishes

Hi There

Yes – seems a bit strange now – all that work and he was gone in a few hours!

Happy to answer your questions. Political campaigns are very different in Australia due to cultural and consitutional differences. We have compulsory voting, so it’s less a question of motivating people to vote, and only a question of persuading them which way to vote. Fundraising is regarded with suspicion and raising money from individuals still takes very much a back seat compared to group or corporate fundraising. It is considered to be in poor taste if a candidate/party keeps asking its supporters for money, so it needs to be a subtler and less frequent request.

Obviously, we don’t have a president, and so anything that idolises the individual over the party is also considered as dubious. KEVIN07 (NB: this is allways in caps!) was regarded as a very American style approach, in fact, as it involved the cult of ‘kevin’. But there is an inherent joke (for Australians) in worshipping the name of ‘Kevin’ which is considered a very mundane name – anti-heroic in fact. And Rudd was just that – an ordinary slightly geeky bloke, so part of the success of the campaign was the incongrous juxtaposition of the candidate in question and the presidential approach – this amused Australians but also warmed them to Rudd as it was so tongue-in-cheek, which played on his self-deprecating humour (which Australians like). A great moment during the campaign was when he was asked by a journalist if he had set up a My Space profile simply to be cool – “Oh, we are already cool” he replied – very funny – he was the antithesis of ‘cool’ in the typical sense. Ironic humour is very big here.

The pricing on the T shirts relates to the fact that it was the Labor party, and as a party of the left, it was beholden on us to make the T shirts affordable. Anything else would haved alienated the hard core and could have been attacked by the press, so our brief was that they had to remain sub $10 (AUD). The T shirts were therefore not a fundraising device (we in fact lost money on each shirt as we had to have them made 100% in Australia using Austrlian cotton in the stitching etc. – anything made in the third world would have been considered a) un-Australian and b) potentially exploiting sweat shop workers). I can’t remember what the loss on each shirt was but I think a dollar or so. The purpose of the T shirts therefore was really around awareness and giving momentum to the movement of KEVIN07 – people wearing them in the street, in parliament etc. It was a PR/media initiative and got a LOT of coverage. We ran the ‘get shirtly’ competition on the website, and people sent in photos of themselves wearing the T shirt in landmark locations – we had hundreds of shots from across 5 continents, in front of everthing from the Taj Mahal, the Empire State, and Big Ben, to Uluhru and the sign post for ‘Timbuktu’ – a great social media initiative.

The reason for the logo only was that we were wanting to create a brand – KEVIN07 – so we kept the logo consistent and repeated it everywhere. It came to represent a movement, more than Rudd itself, and therefore had its own identity. We wanted people to use the phrase and refer to it etc. It was recognisable from a distance for example – we got runners in the City to Surf run in Sydney (iconic Australian event – largest fun run in the world) and you could recognise the logos on the TV easily from a distance. The other thing is that we needed to deflect from the presidential approach – Australians would have found a photo of Kevin on a t shirt rather nauseating.  The logo was used in all our advertising and all our digital media. It was more of a symbol than a slogan, and more stand out and memorable.

It is important to note, and I shoudl be grateful if you could reference in anything you publish,  that the success of the campaign was largely in the KEVIN07 name itself, with its assonance, and this was thought up by the advertising creative director, Neil Lawrence, who came up with the line in the first place and suggested it be used across all communications, and set up the logo. The T shirts themselves had a precedent in Australia, when the ‘It’s time’ slogan, that brought in Whitlam in 1972, was printed on t shirts (although only a small number I think were made). You might be interested to read http://www.theage.com.au/news/investment/an-election-collection-its-time/2007/11/05/1194117956557.html

I think there were about 80,000 t shirts out there – a small number in American terms but for a country of only 20,000,000 population who on the whole don’t do this sort of thing, this was a big number.

To sum up, the slogan and t shirts were not so much mimicry of American electioneering techniques, but a mild satire of them – and this is, in my view, what made them successful in Australia.

Kind regards

Camilla

I was given the title Using the power of a digital campaign to disseminate information about health to more people. Not being sure how relevant this was to an audience of writers, I added ‘And why you should care’ in order to focus on the writer’s role in the digital distribution of their work.

It’s obvious to most of us that social media has gone bonkers. I’d spoken to a related organisation, the National Prescribing Service, a year before, and they had all gasped when I told them that Facebook had reached 3.7 million, and of course it’s now > 8 million, Twitter > 1.5 million blaa blaa. In fact, I’m sick of hearing about ‘social media’ – it’s up there with ‘Australian working families’ and ‘we are facing the worse financial crisis since the great depression’ No! Really??!!! More interesting for this group are the health stats; health topics represent over 42% of Australian searches* and rising, 61%**of Americans consult the web on health and 41%** of them consult each other (non medical professionals) whilst (to quote the European Journal of Integrative Medicine in May 09) ‘the evidence for most of the recommendations [on health websites] is weak to nonexistent’.  So whilst ‘digital health’ is exploding, with the rise of health and ‘wellness’ websites, content, services and communities everywhere online, this is a haven not only for the cyberchondriac but also the cyberquack.

Looking at the ‘dissemination’ of health content and messaging online,  traditional digital media communications are being practised extensively by commercial and government organisations across the health spectrum; specialist health digital agencies are proliferating (for example Big Pink recently opened in Sydney) and we’ve seen great banner advertising from Panadol and drive to web from GSK (with the ‘get the facts’ campaign). A cursory glance in Google under ‘Menopause’ brings up quite a range of paid ads – the pharmas are in there with ‘Promensil’, Blackmores is there, and Wellspring are offering a herbal remedy for $39.95 that gets rid of the menopause in 24 hours (fantastic! I’ll take 2!). The government(s) are making great use of SEM (you can’t MOVE at the moment without seeing an ad for the swine flu vaccine) and are, reassuringly perhaps, coming up tops in natural search on a lot of specific health issues.

It’s not exactly ‘health’, but the recent Clearasil campaign (around digital ‘friends’ etiquette, running applications on both Bebo and Facebook) is fairly typical, and follows on from the Kotex U site that successfully engaged girls in conversations regarding teenaged female health. This sort of diversionary branding of content is becoming common and it’s a great form of branded content, providing relevant value added information and obviously, with applications and widgets, yielding lots of viral opportunities, but this now also falls into the area of traditional marketing.

Where it’s really at is, of course, the mainstream conversation in social media environments. “Authentic” is the new black. We’ve seen cheesy attempts at chatter (the recent Windows 7 party video from Microsoft made us all cringe but at least we knew it was fake). The Witchery ‘man in the jacket’ case was interesting, as it attempted to appear genuine (although I’m surprised if people thought it was – I thought is was about as convincing as the Godwin Gretch email, just a little too convenient and so self-consciously casual, but perhaps the fact that I’m an ex actress in advertising gives me excellent fraud credentials). Some of us were alarmed by the recent blatant agency advertisement for a paid job in astroturfing (or ‘social infiltration’). More sinister still are the ‘Champix/Chantix’ video testimonials (a drug by Pfizer used to treat smoking addiction that was subject to claims that it caused suicidal behaviour in some cases). Melissa Sweet pointed out in The Australian Prescriber last year that these appeared ‘spontaneously’ from across the globe on You Tube. Now, we don’t know if these are genuine or semi-genuine, but my point is that people will believe anything – you’ve only got to look at the continued success of horoscopes to see that. And they don’t interrogate the ‘evidence’ of any ‘evidence-based’ medical facts very deeply.

People are definitely searching for information on health, but they read (and believe) what’s in front of them, what comes up first in google, what their mates say on facebook. They buy miracle cures for $39.95. A University of Texas study in 2008 found that 5% of pages on breast cancer contained inaccurate information and that complementary medicines pages were 15 times more likely to be inaccurate.

So DO SOMETHING about medical misinformation. Medical writers should explain the importance of evidence-based sources in everything they write. Publishers of evidence based medical information should use good digital marketing to reach people.  Organisations should work with government to extend the use and awareness of a consolidated accreditation system and this should be extended to writers themselves. Make a virtue of the bewildering volume of medical content, and the public’s curiosity by giving them a symbol they can trust.

But why should medical writers do this? What relevance has it to them?  And my answer to this is; because they care. They wouldn’t have joined the AMWA, membership of which excludes any ‘person whose sole work is directed to the promotion of a product or a commercial organisation’. In other words, they are not in it just for the money, or they could have made a lot more.  So if they care, they should also care about being read, not just published. They should care about bringing evidence-based content to the fore to compete with all the other material that is successfully reaching a public increasingly thirsty for health information.

In this day and age, it is no longer a question of handing over material to a publisher who is then responsible for ‘disseminating’ it – job done. We are all publishers, we are all broadcasters. I’m probably one of the worst practitioners, but what I think or write doesn’t matter, what they write does matter. So my directive was: write a blog, tweet your articles, RSS your blog, tweet your blog, stream your tweets into facebook, follow everyone relevant, join every relevant group, comment and link, edit Wikipedia and Medipedia, write Wikipedia and Medipedia, bookmark all your work, and create a google virtuous circle. Social media is not a just a pastime for medical writers, it’s a moral responsibility.

*Hitwise July 08 (Australia)

**Pew Internet & American Life Project June 09

She is just about the right age, and all that fairness and perfect, transparent skin finally put to good use – echoing the pale, southern-belle complexion that Blanche would have fought to maintain beneath hats shielding her from the Mississippi sun, and later by skulking in the Hotel Flamingo in the afternoons, avoiding the light of day. Damn! But then, as if by magic, an email pops up ‘Last chance to see Streetcar’ – tickets for the last night, for which you pay a premium (donation to the STC) but get free champagne and an invite to the cast party – dress ‘black and white glamour’ – sold.

I’d never actually seen a live performance of the play before, but the reason it was so close to my heart was I’d played Blanche, 22 years before, when I was at uni. Obviously I’d been too young for the part, and I remember they spent hours making me up to look pretty much as I do today. I was also too young in an emotional sense; some of the moods and nuances expressed baffled me at the time, and I repeated some of the lines like an automaton. Watching it this time, I realised that 22 years has allowed me to witness or experience despair, denial, self-loathing, snobbery, jealousy, rejection, alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual chess, failure, ageing, and deep sensuality – not to mention the sensation of eyeing a young man longingly, before reminding myself that I’m old enough to be his mother.

So, how was it, with all that life behind me and an intimate knowledge of the lines to boot? Was I not tempted to leap onto the stage and shove Cate off with ‘no no, you’ve got it all wrong, let me show you’? As if! Needless to say her performance was excellent – very wide-ranging, thorough, as we’ve come to expect – and Jason Blake in the SMH agrees with me. The play is full of brilliant, camp humour, and she really brought this to the fore – her hypocrisy over drinking ‘I rarely touch a drop’, and her performance of the ‘ape’ speech brought the house down. Teetering and lapsing into hysteria, she lurched through the play, on the brink, foreshadowing the inevitable collapse.

My only criticism would be that she was a little too real. Her physique and demeanour make Blanchett a very strong presence – it is difficult for her to convey the brittle, fragility of Blanche, and the fairy dust she sprinkled constantly ‘Like an orchard in spring, you can remember me by that if you care’, ‘a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea,’, her fur stole and her rhinestone tiara, the dimmed lights  - to create the make-believe world into which she finally retreats. Blanchett strode rather than flitted around the set, and resorted to appearing insane, with violently shaking hands, in the final scenes. Blanche was the ultimate drama queen and actress, and even in extremis, wouldn’t she have retained some of that southern belle composure? Rather than clinging to the doctor who’s come to lock her up, wouldn’t she have taken his arm demurely, and looked up at him, a little coquettishly, her head on one side? Wasn’t the tragedy for Blanche that she wasn’t mad – deranged by circumstances – ‘deluded’ as she had been in her marriage? Wasn’t she the classic butterfly broken on the wheel of macho dominated culture – raped and subdued, put away, reflecting the harsh treatment of homosexuals that echoes through the play, and to which Williams was referring?  Seeing Blanche as ‘mad’ is a bit like seeing homosexuals as ‘unnatural’.

I was also a little disappointed with the messenger boy scene – a young messenger enters and a slightly (as always) inebriated Blanche struggles with herself not to seduce him. (Interesting that Blanchett also played Sheba in ‘Notes on a scandal’, the story of the teacher who was exposed and fired for having an affair with a student, as was Blanche). There is a great lilting lyricism in the southern language – it rises and falls very musically, and I felt they could have enjoyed it more. In this scene, she quizzes him ‘and [you] stopped into a drug store? And had a soda? Chocolate? ‘ ‘No, ma’am, cherry’ ‘Mmmmm…Cherry!’. In the film, Vivien Leigh managed to inject so much into ‘cherry’. However, what comes across in Blanchett’s interpretation is the very sordid nature of this scene, and the depths to which Blanche has stooped – and perhaps Cate was right not to make light of that.

And I agree with Peter Cross -  where was New Orleans? There was little sense, other than that stated, of the overwhelming heat – ‘100 on the nose and she’s soaking in hot tub’. I remember seeing a play about fisherman once, and the director had insisted on putting a lot of fresh sardines on the radiators before the audience entered, so that the whole theatre would smell of fish to set the scene. A little extreme perhaps, but we could have done with a bit of Cajun spicy chicken.

At the party afterwards, they projected the black and white movie onto the wall, without sound. Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando were almost impossible acts to follow. Part of Leigh’s brilliance was perhaps that she was Blanche – even so far as her own mental condition causing her to resort to the ‘kindness of strangers’ as it took hold. It’s a brave move for a Sydney company to take an American play on tour in the US, but just as the yanks have conceded that Australian leading actors are more than worthy of the Hollywood red carpet, so  I think they will respect this tribute to one of their greatest and most disturbing masterpieces.

I was lucky enough to work on the KEVIN07 digital campaign last year, and in my initial recommendations, I was trying to persuade the ALP that for the first time, they’d be able to reach, educate, converse with & influence at a grassroots level – at a fraction of traditional media costs. I realise this turned out to be more prophetic of Barack’s campaign than Kevin’s. Notwithstanding, I’m very proud of what we did (not least that we were the first to run a political campaign mobi site, kevin07.mobi, a technique then “copied” in obama.mobi!) but the Obama campaign took it to a whole new level.

Obviously, the democratic nature of the digital world (you don’t get much more “by the people,of the people and for the people”) means it lends itself to the more left wing party; as Obama said in an early video email “We want to change this country from the ground up” (before inviting people to donate $5 for the privilege of entering into a draw the prize to which was dinner with him – and yes, he did have dinner with the winners – you can see it on You Tube). In Australia, the differences in the digital campaigning symbolised the difference between Howard and Rudd – the past and the future. In America, where time had moved on (so digital campaigning was, in and of itself, a given), the digital channels were more symbolic of the movement for change itself, which they both mobilised and facilitated.

Having said which, the difference in digital attitudes between the two candidates was stark, which Obama’s team exploited in their ads, and Mark Soohoo (on McCain’s e-campaign team) epitomised by saying “John McCain is aware of the internet”. In this one sentence, Soohoo branded McCain as a man no longer of our time. The internet is not something you are merely ‘aware of’. It’s a fundamental part of our economy. Just imagine if, when questioned during the recent financial meltdown, Kevin Rudd had responded: “I am aware of the banks.”

The brilliance of Obama’s digital campaign was not its size, but what he did with it. From the very beginning, across every touch point, it was about lead generation. He slowly and consistently built up his database over time. He then cut and sliced it, analysed it, and targeted the relevant segments. You will notice that, despite the highest turn out in electoral history, and gaining control of the Senate and House of Representatives, he did not get an overwhelming % of the popular vote (53% to McCain’s 47%) but that’s largely because he targeted, appropriately, all his efforts and funds on swing voters within swing states. In Florida, he identified 600,000 African Americans who had not voted in the previous election, and sent them a targeted communication to get them motivated. A Republican commentator a few days ago on CNN, pointing out the uplift Obama received from the Oprah Winfrey endorsement, said that Obama’s volunteers had “captured the email addresses” of everyone who attended the Oprah rally (as if this was in some way “unfair”). And as he amassed the names, so he put them to work. I like to think I coined the phrase “one click canvassing” but Obama facilitated the viral impact through digital channels like no one else – even creating an iPhone application that automatically trawled contacts for those in swing states, to help supporters communicate quickly, and showing a perfect understanding the immediacy of mobile. And as the database grew exponentially, so did the donations – like he said – from the ground up, dollar by dollar he out-did the Republican fundraising machine so emphatically that he was able to walk away from public financing and the restrictions it imposed. And this is where it gets really clever – Obama changed the game. The quality of his digital and direct marketing was such, that he was able to outspend McCain by up to 4:1 in TV advertising, and blow millions on a 30 minute ad that then dominated the media for 24 hours in the crucial last days. And there’s more. The database he developed gives him significant leverage in government. As David Von Drehle said last week in Time Magazine, it will give him particular sway with special interest groups: “a capital that used to be impressed by the Bush family’s thousands-strong Christmas-card slit boggles at the millions of names in Obama’s digital address book”. And of course, the outer skin of his digital onion was the communications generated by his army of digital volunteers and support organisations themselves – congratulations to moveon.org for the best personalised viral ever.

I like to think the considered, systematic, long term, rational and logical way Obama executed his digital and direct marketing strategy is symptomatic of his overall approach. And who would have thought that so much could come from digital and direct marketing, which in fact ended up funding their traditionally more glamorous cousin, above-the-line advertising? Perhaps digital has come of age – perhaps this is our moment; for the first time, during the campaign, there were far more views of Saturday Night Live (thanks to Tina Fey) that weren’t live at all, but online. So what is the likelihood in the future of digital and direct rather than above-the-line driving strategy? About as likely as an African-American entering the White House? Yes we can.

What is striking, however, is that, despite the availability of technology and huge volumes of data intelligence, marketers are doing little in a digital context to target content according to a user’s profile; database marketing has been very slow to arrive digitally, despite enormous potential.

Looking firstly at users’ desires to control content themselves, this is endemic in post web 2.0 culture. Whether we’re bookmarking, social bookmarking, setting up our i-Google page, adjusting our RSS feeds or using any other similar gadget or functionality, we expect to be able to streamline content to our own preferences and timeframe. This is inextricably linked to self-expression, and individualising our own content, whether that’s pimping our social network profile page or simply exuding ourselves into blogs. So making all the content for and about ourselves is a given. The actions we take leave a trail of choices and preferences behind, so why aren’t marketers using this rich vein of insight and tailoring content?

To some extent, they are. Behavioural targeting using adserver delivered messages is now pretty regular practice in online advertising. That means that messages can be sequenced through banners depending on a person’s response (or lack of it), whether or not they go to the advertiser’s website, what they do there etc. This is very powerful in a direct response/online sales context, as it means that the lowest hanging fruit in terms of prospects (those who went to the website but for some reason didn’t purchase) can be pursued around the web with ancillary messages aimed at clinching the sale. But outside the advertising context, how good are brands at targeting messages?

One medium that delivers more traditional 1-to-1 techniques is email, which has taken the mantle from DM, and most email marketing solutions worth their salt now have the ability to generate a highly tailored email, by reading a user’s profile dynamically (both ‘hard’ data, like geodemographic, as well as behavioural – response and transactional history) and delivering the email on they fly, often ‘triggered’ to go out at a specific moment in the individual customer or prospect’s lifecycle. But many big brands are still sending broadcast emails.

And what of customised content on brand websites? Ironically, this was probably more sophisticated back in the 90s. Just before the .com bust, global brands were writing blank cheques for personalisation engines for their websites. Companies like ATG or Broadvision were selling very expensive licences to products that allowed brands to personalise content according to user profile and business rules. The problem was not technology, but resource. What the brands quickly realised is that they would have to create a lot of content to satisfy the different segments and profile permutations, and neither this, nor the writing of the business rules ongoing, had been budgeted for – so the technology lay gathering dust, like a Ferrari parked in a garage.

Models that did well were not based on set business rules, but typically driven by stats – collaborative filtering engines, such as Amazon’s, automatically identify correlations between content items, and proffer the item most likely to please the purchaser. This is content-to-content driven, however, and not based on anything other than the user’s purchase history.

For a database marketeer, the lack of action has been frustrating. The true power, whether in email, your own website, online advertising or (now) mobile, is in reacting intelligently to preferences inherent in user behaviour as well as, where possible, their hard profile or transactional history. Clients have clung to traditional data on the whole, demanding that they have to base it on the 5% that enter details in a registration form rather than the 95% that don’t. Even where there is hard profile data, it is rarely used to customise content online.

The problem may lie in the age of the clients. Many direct marketeers are comfortable with the idea of targeted content through direct mail, and of building models to determine what the content should be. However, when you suggest doing this digitally, they look nervous, particularly if you suggest it can be done anonymously. I worked on a project recently where click data was found to be far more predictive of purchase propensity than traditional profile, and (in the case of that enlightened client) the model was deployed accordingly, and digitally. So will the financial crisis push clients to consider ever more efficient forms of direct marketing, and will personalisation in digital media finally come of age? The answer is yes, when the digital generation of clients takes the reins, but there’s still some old codger in the background to tell them what propensity modelling is.

The advantage of more obscure or arthouse movies is that you do get to go to the more refined cinemas (like the Twin Academy in Paddington) where you can have a glass of wine in the foyer, rather than a frozen coke – although Amanda was the only one to enjoy this as our Prado-full arrived in the nick of time (despite stirling driving by CC). William McInnes (leading man) and Peter Duncan (director) loitered with Amanda, and then came up front to introduce the film. I was nervous – another Australian movie being talked up, I feared, in an attempt as always to boost the national industry.

However, my concern was misplaced. Whilst the film began on a downbeat, with the (not entirely attractive) John (William McInnes) being seen in mundane, solitary farm drudgery – getting up, making tea, shifting bales, tinned beans and sausages, bed, repeat – it lifted with the bizarre arrival of Tahmeena (Monic Hendricx) in nothing but a blood-spattered raincoat – injured, delirious, and stumbling up John’s (very long) drive. The story is predictable; he provides assistance reluctantly, they distrust each other, they can’t communicate, they learn to trust, she learns English, they fall in love. In fact, the story had already been produced in a Dutch film (‘The Polish Bride’) in which Hendricx had already starred (hence Dutch funding for ‘Unfinished Sky’!) where you substitute Polish for Afghani interloper, and Dutch for Queensland farm. But despite being a little obvious (in the genre of ‘unlikely love stories’) it is delicately handled thanks to the balance of John’s humour with Tahmeena’s intensity; McInnes’ performance is good and convincing, but Hendricx is excellent. My Farsi is not what it was, but as an Afghan she is very convincing, making it seem like her native tongue, and managing to draw us in despite not speaking any English throughout the film, apart from some rudimentary phrases as taught by John. The Q&A with McInnes, Duncan and Overett (producer – ironic name as they always end up burned out don’t they?) was fun if a little long. Duncan was a typically boring, inarticulate director (how do they ever communicate with their actors?!) and McInnes was amusing, although not as amusing as he thought he was. Questions from the audience included tedious and obvious rants about asylum and immigration laws – Duncan actually fielded one of these rather well, when asked why he hadn’t done more about the slave trade ‘I made a film about it – I make films – I’m a director not a politician’ – or words to that effect. Quite right. I was worried that no one from the TFC was going to ask a question, and even more worried when Lavinia put up her hand. I think perhaps I should write TFC guidelines for such circumstances, but suffice to say for now, perhaps a) best not to ask questions if you’ve been asleep through most of the film and b) personal remarks relating to sexual performance best avoided.

Consensus as our (rather nice) Vietnamese dinner afterwards was that it was a good film, and good news for Australian films. Amanda and I have subsequently had chats with a film producer we know, and he has shed some interesting light on the state of the film industry. He sent us thru some Bergent research that shows Australian movies don’t do that well here due to lack of publicity and perceptions that they are not entertaining, uplifting, escapist but “’I’m so depressed’ – they’re too deep”. He also sent a couple of articles,  indicating that the secret to international success has always been co-distributorship with other countries (cf: Green Card, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, ) but that the FFC here is averse to it, and that they have mismanaged investment and funding, meaning that with a few exceptions (Shine, Rabbit Proof Fence) locally produced films have flopped. He also said that the reason Australian actors are so over-represented in Hollywood elite, is that a lot of B movies are made here which the actors get the experience in – and casting agents only go for experience, so they will watch B movies to find people. In the UK, it’s more ‘all or nothing’ so the actors don’t get watched by casting agents so much. I suspect there is a need for Australia to tailor its films to the US audience and sell Australia (see the success of ‘Four Weddings & a Funeral’, ‘Love Actually’ from the UK – essentially just selling English class & eccentricity to yanks). It will be interesting to see whether “Australia” is just that right blend of up-beat, escapist romance – it certainly looks it.

Finally, it was very nice to meet Michelle’s mother in law, and do feel free to bring any ‘guests’ along or invite people generally. Men are also allowed, but please send photo in first.

Well, Round 2 was certainly a great antidote to the rather grim, beheading round 1 movie; a romantic comedy of sorts, “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” was the most wonderful pastiche of itself, at once sending up and embracing the ‘screwball’ pre-WW2 comedies, and managing to blend very flippant wit and slapstick with sombre reflections on love and war, without being too syrupy. Amy Adams was suitably (and irritatingly) flitty as the almost absurd ‘Delysia Lafosse’, with a fantastic line in satin undergarments – in fact, the movie was worth it for the underwear alone, although I think Lavinia’s motivation to rush out and buy a pink cami is misplaced (after all, you really need Amy Adams’ figure to carry it off). And Frances McDormand was superb – faced with a caricature (a beyond dowdy governess, a reverend’s daughter, called Guinevere Pettigrew, I ask you) she made her very plausible. The film has been accused of mis-casting her in a part ‘Emma Thompson could do in her sleep’ but actually I think this is the point – no great method actor, although highly competent, ET would have perhaps been too glib – what France McDormand does is to make her real – she plays the part very straight, and not too OTT, so that whether she’s pretending she smokes guitars or eating cucumber intended for her face pack, it’s believable. Similarly, when she is ‘transformed’ by the fashionista Edythe’s crew, she doesn’t become the swan of fantasy, but looks more like the Queen Mother (in drag, in fact). So when she does deliver profundities on love and loss, they are not nauseating, or sentimental, but genuinely poignant.

And what can a vicar’s daughter & spinster bring to the superficial & decadent world of celebrity and fashion? Why, integrity, of course, and that’s just what she does. The film seems to be about the vagaries of fortune, not only the bad luck and coincidences that befall Miss P, but the fine line between wealth and ruin not just she, but also Delysia and Edythe both profess to walk. Miss P accepts with resignation the twists of fate that occur (usually costing her a meal) during the 24 hours, but it is her knowledge that one must take a stand, and stand up to fate, that makes her the rock she is and saves the day. Understanding the hideous lottery of war, she persuades Delysia that instead of letting an (again, very realistic) 19 year-old upper class twerp decide her destiny, she should take it into her own hands and off to NYNY. After all, it is only when Miss P takes control and refuses to ‘play the game’ that Joe actually falls for her. Ciarin Hinds adds a certain gravitas to the film (and sexiness, in my view, but when I mentioned I thought he was hotter than the young pianist Michael, everyone looked at me as if I was suffering a vitamin deficiency). And Shirley Henderson’s performance as the melancholy Edythe also helps stop the film being merely a farce – her silent tears as she threatens Miss P are enigmatic (although possibly her party trick – after all she played Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and Bridget Jones’ friend who kept blubbing about a nasty boyfriend). And true to it’s 30’s genre, the film had to end with a glorious one-liner – ‘You know Joe, I haven’t eaten for a very long time’.

Which was a great moment for us to set off to “Vino, Vino” for some Italian nosh. It turned out not to be very aptly named as the wine took a while arriving (although in Spanish, of course, it means “She came! she came!”) and they seemed to try and make up for this by serving us portions each large enough to feed a family for a month. Most of us gave up half way through, apart from Lavinia who, undaunted, proceeded to finish off not only her plate but everyone else’s – one can’t help wondering if the HRT is having side effects. Despite my warning everyone that it wasn’t either clever or funny for any of us to tell Sian what childbirth was really like, Babs and Christin went on to regale her with stories of their own labours (although having been shown some videos at the hospital (yuck!) she handled it well). We all agreed that ‘Miss P Lives for a Day’ was a jolly good wheeze, and I hope there were not too many that were disappointed we didn’t see ‘The Painted Veil’ (which would also have been a good follow on from ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ – the latter being about losing your head, the former about losing your bottom in a cholera epidemic). And “She Came! She Came!” gave us all 10% discount vouchers for a future visit, although if we redeem them I think we should ask them to reduce the portions by at least that percentage. Big improvement on car-pooling this week – I came home with 4 people, so the only emissions we need to worry about now are Lavinia’s.

After enduring the apparently interminable trailers (and agreeing, in whispers, that the film version of “Mamma Mia” was NOT a priority for the club – what was Meryl Streep thinking?) we settled down for the main event – a fairly serious spat between Natalie Portman (Anne Boleyn) and Eric Bana (rather implausible Henry VIII). Feeling a little battered and ravaged, we bundled into ‘Kelly’s Bar and Grill’ afterwards for the (aptly named in this case) post mortem. We all ordered a glass of wine, needing something to cheer us after the scenes we had just witnessed, apart from Lavinia who asked for a Benedictine – since Kelly’s was fresh out, she settled for a Pernot and lemonade. I was just laying into ‘Why on earth was a Croatian Australian with black hair and smouldering brown eyes cast as the fat, ginge Henry VIII?’ when Fran piped up that she actually knew Eric Bana, and his charming wife, which gave us all a bit of a celebrity rush, and we turned instead to the historical veracity of the plot. I challenged the timeframe based on the age of Elizabeth at the end (it turns out I was wrong – Elizabeth was born in 1533 and her mother executed in 1536 so the child actor was about the right age), and Tana seemed to know something about Catherine of Aragon’s age and the sequence of events (she later admitted she’d read the Phillippa Gregory novel itself, so this wasn’t general knowledge but ‘cheating’). Babs informed us that she is able to recite the names and dates of every English king and queen, which is a fun thing to store up for our next meeting. We agreed that Christin Scott Thomas was marvellous, and that after a rather implausible first half, Natalie Portman’s descent into desperation was very impressive. It also struck us that making love in those days was rather hairy (literally) what with beards, implausibly long hair and all that humping on furs, and that childbirth was unspeakable and aren’t we lucky to be in the generation we’re in. (Not voiced, but secretly felt by all, was relief that the sex scenes did involve Eric
Bana and not someone who actually looked like Henry VIII). The conversation changed generally towards the topic of incest, thanks to Meg who brought up the recent case of a woman who shacked up with her father – considered opinion seemed to be ‘yuck’. Lavinia, a little left behind and teary at this point after a few too many pernots, had to be reassured that Natalie Portman wasn’t actually beheaded and will probably live to see a few more Star Wars generations. Anyway, we split the bill (apart from Lavinia who had forgotten her wallet) and parted company cheerfully agreeing we should see something a little less miserable next time. Imogen and I smugly car-pooled it home whilst the others, no doubt, emitted large amounts of CO2 on their return journeys.

As to the name of the club, I thought it appropriate given the first film we went to see (after all, you don’t get much more topless than Anne Boleyn) and also, being the internet marketing expert that I am, our My Space page or any subsequent website is going to have infinitely more hits if we use the word ‘topless’ in the text and megatags. Obviously, this will mean that for one of the sessions this year, we will of course have to go topless, but due warning will be given, and Lavinia is excused.