Press Conference guerilla-style, or: The magazine diploma goes Viz for a day
Posted on Nov 30 2006 | Tagged as: Work
Between James taking a phone call at the start of the conference; James getting up and walking out, only to wander back in again ten minutes later; Jon setting his phone alarm and chucking it under someone’s chair, the alarm being a looped recording of Alan Partridge exclaiming, “I am hung like a donkey”; my incessant cough (not affected, but usefully real); and Kristian’s tangential questioning I think it’s fair to say that we achieved in this Press Conference exercise pretty much what the Boss had asked us to do: make a nuisance of ourselves
The exercise pitted a group of about six magazine students and the same number of newspaper people, in a Press Conference-style scenario, against a handful of Public Relations trainees, who were taking the role of government ministers presenting the Stern Report.
I was mightily impressed with their ability to evade questions: they’ll go far.
Until…
The guerilla tactics paid off. Flustered by our misbehaviour, the lady playing Gordon Brown fell for Kristian’s nonsense question: “Since methane is a greenhouse gas, are you planning on introducing a personal pump tax?”
Her response: “It’s an international problem. We wouldn’t rule anything out at this stage. Taxes will be considered.”
Cue our story, Tax-mad Brown full of hot air, replete with puns on his “silent-but-deadly policy of stealth taxation”, pondering on whether the tax would be a flat rate or “pay-per-trump”, and a Beastie Boys paraphrase (guess…).
They’ve made a formal complaint. We might be banned from the next exercise.
