Bad language


The picture is of my father, George, one of his sisters and a niece.

Handsome, isn’t he?

He was also a man of the most sublime eccentricity, and I suspect I am getting more and more like him.

He was a publican and, as my mother informed me, a sinner when he got too close to one or two of the barmaids. As she put it, “George loved the ladies, and the ladies loved him.” In fact I’ve long suspected that he and my younger brother – also called George – were both very friendly with the lovely Gertrude. And she was lovely, too.

Anyhow, being a bit of a booze-hound, the old man tended to be in a filthy mood in the mornings, which he dealt with very logically by making sure he had something to moan about. If he couldn’t find anything obviously amiss in the kitchen or the bar, he would solve the problem by turning on the wireless (this was before the days when they called it the radio).

He knew he would always find some music he loathed on what was then called the Light Programme (there were only three BBC programmes in those days and this was the most frivolous).

As soon as he heard a singer he disliked (usually a woman) he would snap, “Yowling bitch!” and turn the machine off, satisfied that all was ill in the world and standards were on a gratifying decline.

In a similar way I delight in prowling through the reviews – paying especial attention to the ludicrous prices – of top restaurants, usually pausing to wonder why the former are so often illiterate and the latter so absurdly high, and occasionally muttering things like “pshaw” and “grasping bastards”.

Nobody qualifies on both counts more than Gordon Ramsay, a man whose deployment of an extraordinarily limited number of words never fails to enthrall. Anyhow, I just read that one of his restaurants serves “traditional English Fayre”.

Fayre? Fayre. Fuck me, Gordon, I’d find out who wrote that and give them a right kicking. Outside of third-rate cafes in resorts like Weston-super-Mare where do they use expressions like that?

This could kill your positioning. How can you possibly charge your sort of prices for “fayre”. You’ll have to bring them right down if you get too much of that sort of language used.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

2 Comments

  1. I understand he's a talented chef. But why couldn't he have stayed in the kitchen? All that over-the-top aggression and frankly boorish swearing on TV… Of course, he should have hired the same profanity consultant as Armando Ianucci – The Thick of It and In The Loop featuring the funniest and most effective expletives known to man.

    And perhaps had he not spread himself so thin – and proved a poor businessman in the process – his reputation for food might not be plummeting so fast. It's not just shite cod-olde-English that's letting his places down: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/52990,news,gordon-ramsay-nightmare-as-public-slam-his-cooking-and-tv-career-is-in-doubt

  2. This reminds me of my favourite coining last year: the road to failure is paved with success. But he spoilt everything by being so arrogant. It's interesting to contrast the programme he did in America with the one Jamie Oliver is doing; far more revealing and original – tons more charm, too.

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