We need to talk about the healthcare squirrels

 

Like banks, healthcare companies have decided it's time to display a surfeit of goodwill and caringness.  (see my earlier blog about banks' weird grinning ads here)  The freaky smiles in bank ads emote something along the lines of 'sorry we robbed you but we're all better now'.  But what's with Simplyhealth?  Their TV advertising was created by Airside in colours they describe as 'stretching the colour diodes on your TV screens to near-breaking point'. The world they create,  is one "where the notion of healthcare" is "conveyed in a caring and positive light."

They're not kidding. The rotoscoped images literally take real life and paint happy colours onto it. Their endline is the utterly bamboozling 'We can be bothered'. Talk about setting their standards low.  I mean, that's your message to your million customers?  Pay us enough and we will pick up the phone. 

Wait, wait, no. The 'can' is stressed. In my copywriting workshops (preen) I tell people that using stresses, inverted commas, underlinings and other affectations of intonation are a sign of weakness.  It shows you can't find the right words, so (ironically in this case) you didn't bother.  OK bad start.  

So the narrative of the ad shows healthy people in a perfect world being made even more healthy and perfect, assisted by squirrels. It's the garden of Eden. In summer.  The idea is to offer a perfect future healthcare world, unhampered by bad weather.  This Pollyanna view of life was confirmed for customer Adam Parker when he contacted them for a scan. He received a recorded message saying they'd all gone home due to bad weather.  His story is here.

So what is Simplyhealth?  It's the strangely timely merger of HSA, BCWA, Healthsure  LHF,  Totally Active and a couple of others. BCWA is the UK's oldest private health insurer, starting as a not for profit organisation before the NHS came along. It made good money in the early noughties, for example a 2.8 million surplus in 2003 which got ploughed back into patient care.  In the interests of choice (really?) these companies were brought together in 2009 under the leadership of Des Benjamin, who ran HSA by drawing on his 30 years experience in er, financial services. However, worries about ever decreasing choice in the healthcare market grew when Simplyhealth then took over Groupama in 2011.  

Groupama were also a highly regarded provider, in particular for their record of claims transparency. The chairman of the Association of Medical Insurance Intermediaries said here: "Our initial reaction is extreme disappointment that a quality provider with a focus of claims transparency, and exceptional service may disappear with all its values and principles".  Simplyhealth said that while they CAN be bothered in general, they probably wouldn't bother so much with claims transparency thing.  Not so keen on enabling competition and choice.

I've ruled out Lupus

But Simplyhealth ploughed on, finishing the year by acquiring Denplan from AXA and are now the UK's largest private health insurance company. So back to the ad.

The caring, sorry bothering, that the campaign espouses is the unctuous tip of a mindfulness iceberg. Bothering is the company ethos through all media. The incident referred to above, where Simplyhealth closed up shop in a cold snap, just when people's healthcare needs were likely to rise, ended with a barrage of scraping and bowing. The customer was pursued through social media  and bothered about till he agreed he had been cared for. A comment on his blog concluded for us that the case just proved that Simplyhealth really really can be bothered after all. Hmmm-wonder who put that there. Des Benjamin talks about his commitment to service impressively too, attributing it to his experience as a kitchen porter. In PR, Social media, TV, they're caring. They've won a caringness award, they give to local charities, sponsor Secret Millionaire and bothery attitudes pervade their public statements. A Simplyhealth report says companies should be given tax breaks to give health insurance to the lower paid employees, not just the wealthy ones. (Well, when they say 'give', I think they mean 'buy from Simplyhealth'.) But another finds the shocking stat that 45% of British people suspect they will be denied treatment by the NHS following the Coalition reforms.

I think we can see what's going on. The CEO and other Simplyhealth spokespeople are candid in their narrative that they are getting ready for the coming changes in UK's health system, about which they seemed to have remarkable foresight in 2009. One even mentions future lower funding for the NHS, a policy that hasn't been launched yet by the Coalition. Simplyhealth's thesis is revealed. Caring is what the NHS will no longer provide. Hence the mangled and ominous endline. Simplyhealth, unlike the future NHS can be bothered. Or rather CAN be bothered. So long as it's not winter. It's the squirrels, see, they hibernate.

Radio. There are no pictures.

There are few things to ponder at 4am on a motorway.  Especially now it's autumn and therefore dark all the way.  The agenda is pretty much the inside of the car, the issue of keeping the car in the middle of the white lines and the thrill of a break in an hour's time at a service station with crappy shops at a time when they're shut.  Don't worry, you think, there's always the radio.  But there's not, is there.  There's a sequence of people desperately filling in time before they can press a button.  It's the sort of talking that you avoid normally.  Coked up talk, unnecessary jibber-jabber that assumes your interest.  They play music sometimes, but it's music they haven't even chosen themselves.  It's simply a terrible experience.

Radio may have been exciting in the era when everyone used flags and pigeons to handle their Comms strategy.  But today someone ought to get all radio people in a room and tell them to stop bouncing up and down in their chairs and laughing at their guest's jokes, because the medium just doesn't stack up.

For a start, no pictures. Those whose careers have taken them to this abyss of technology-lessness, will deny it by saying in some fat-arsed Uncle Magic the Magician way, "the pictures are better on radio".  But they're not better.  They are non-existant. It's radio.

This morning on TalkSport a man called in to complain because he'd recently been concussed by a man who was in drug rehabilitation.  He had an irritating, concussed sort of voice and I didn't want to know his rancid little story, let alone have anyone draw me a picture.

The trouble is, radio is not proper media all, it's essentially an outgoing voicemail message for a wrong number.  Worse, it has adopted all kinds of habits and stylistic repetitions that they assume we all think are cool, simply because no one writes in to tell them otherwise.

1.  Trailing sports programmes.  Instead of explaining the times and contents of programmes, radio insists on mimicking cinema and TV trailers by giving you an adrenalin-filled sample.  So they play the reaction of a commentator shouting his head off at goal from a previous match.  It is a vile and disturbing sound.  Would they trail the appearance of glamorous female by playing the sound of middle-aged men masturbating? Why, yes they probably would.

2. Attenuating voices to make them sound trendy and exciting.  Against the background of some throbbing music, a man excitedly lists football fixtures, or up coming celebrities, then suddenly, out of the blue, a girl's voice interrupts with a completely different EQ setting, sounding like she's trapped in a tiny perspex nightclub and she adds to the list, sounding all hot and turned on "Tranmere against Arsenal" or "Brian Blessed".  After which the man carries on.  What are they thinking? We're not fooled into thinking radio is white hot technology, you know.  We are still aware that is just a upgraded version of morse code.

3.  BBC.  The sprawling negative vision of BBC radio is to stop you listening to anything else.  Drive through my route up from Somerset and you scan in despair.  BBCs Somerset, Cymru, Bristol, Swindon, Wiltshire, Berkshire.  All droning on in the same charmless way, not that they have any reason to bend your ear, they'd just rather you didn't hear anything interesting that might make their jobs less secure.  Every text you send is schmoozed over as if condoning their right to stick that fat, corduroy vowels and Neil Sedaka classics in your ears all the way from Cornwall to Norwich.

4.  Repetition.  Who listens to radio for five minutes at a time? No one.  We're drivers, builders, sheet metal workers.  We listen for 2 hours at a time. So stop telling us the same fucking weather, FTSE index, trailers, news bulletins, traffic, guests who'll be dropping in, competitions, addresses, emails, phone numbers, every five minutes.  It's pure audio dung.

5. Getting jokey about tiny verbal slips.  Sadly, it seems radio announcers are the only people who genuinely believe in the comedic value of mispronunciation.  "Ooh I said that wrong."  "I'd better put my teeth in".  "Excuse me", "why what you done?" "Chance'll be a fine thing" "Easy for you to say".  Are we rolling around at the improvisational elan of these gifted raconteurs?  No.  We think they're drunk.

So don't get your hopes up.  The next time I go for a long drive I shall take the precaution of regarding the radio not as "media", like twitter and TV and gaming and things that are modern, but simply as a vital source of middle aged men with sadness in their hearts and no short term memory.

Amis and Hitchens.

'Mmm yes, we're really great, shnrah, chumble'

I just read Martin Amis's article about his mate Christopher Hitchens, written I think on the occasion of Hitchen's cancer diagnosis.I hate to be cold but it struck me as pretentious. Unlike Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, whose friendship was of lasting literary interest, Martin and Christopher have been flattered by privilege and modern celebrity into thinking themselves into near gods.  It's material for a great novel, ironically. It's the tragedy of a son unable to compete with his great novelist father, displacing him by idolizing a thundering bore. The bore sadly, is now seriously ill, adding pathos to the story. While Amis is the product of a great but unpushy father, Christopher Hitchens is the product of an ordinary but pushy Mum.  ('If there's going to be an upper class...Christopher's going to be in it'.)So both Amis and Hitchen have achieved fame with help, accompanied by the sound of doors swinging open, and they accept each others' right to be feted unquestioningly. Perhaps that's why the Amis tribute is horribly overblown for the ordinariness of what he describes.  As he starts his paragraphs he invokes the Gods and the titans of the literary world, only to end each time with something quite funny Hitchens said at a dinner party.

"You're going to hate us for this."

And Christopher said, "We hate you already."

Yeah, it's funny,  but no funnier than any put-down overheard in any pub, any day of the week.  Nor do you have to be in a tavern in a university town, a packed Wetherspoons before a QPR match would do.

"Christopher and His Kind runs the title of one of Isherwood's famous memoirs. And yet this Christopher doesn't have a kind"

So why reference the book at all?  He might just as well say: John Keats once wrote 'Much have I traveled in the realms of gold' And yet my friend John Smith hates traveling. His main thesis is unconsciously daft.  He notes that Nabokov once mocked his own shortcomings in conversation with the phrase: 

'"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

This is in contrast to his friend Christopher, says Amis.

'He writes like a distinguished author'

'He speaks like a genius.'

'He thinks like a child.'

To anyone not in his thrall,  this simply means Hitchens is a grandiloquent idiot, a man who covers egotistical simplicity with a show of book-learning. Amis reveres the effortless fluency of Hitchen's speech, but then goes on to undermine the point by quoting one this great witticisms, including its clumsy mid-sentence revision.

"Don't forget the miseries of others," said Christopher. "Don't forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others."

Why did he revise the point to include 'languid'? This reveals that Hitchen's is maybe not after all,

"one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen"

 but, tragi-comically, someone who is straining to fulfill the role for his friend. There's further unintentional mirth  (or as Amis and Hitchens would call it Sophoclean Irony) in Amis's non-literary compliments.

"One evening, close to 40 years ago, I said: "I know you despise all sports – but how about a game of chess?" Looking mildly puzzled and amused, he joined me over the 64 squares. Two things soon emerged. First, he showed no combative will, he offered no resistance (because this was play, you see, and earnest is all that really matters). Second, he showed an endearing disregard for common sense."

Or as I would put it,  Hitchens is shit at chess. Here's another of Hitchen's being a legend of the quip.

"I can't understand a word you're saying."

"I'm not in the least surprised," 

said Christopher, and moved on."

While I'm sure Nabokov couldn't have competed, it's not really worth the build up Amis gives it. It's OK as a recovery tactic after you've just talked drunken rubbish, but eulogy material? To get an idea of the Olympian feats of pretension these two are capable of in their pomp, consider this anecdote.  The punchline I have already given away so you can immerse yourself in every gloopy detail of self-regard

"In the summer of 1986, in Cape Cod, and during subsequent summers, I used to play a set of tennis every other day with the historian Robert Jay Lifton. I was reading, and then re-reading, his latest and most celebrated book, The Nazi Doctors; so, on Monday, during changeovers, we would talk about the chapter "Sterilisation and the Nazi Biomedical Vision"; on Wednesday, "'Wild Euthanasia': The Doctors Take Over"; on Friday, "The Auschwitz Institution"; on Sunday, "Killing with Syringes: Phenol Injections"; and so on. One afternoon, Christopher, whose family was staying with mine on Horseleech Pond, was due to show up at the court, after a heavy lunch in nearby Wellfleet, to be introduced to Bob (and to be driven back to the pond-front house). He arrived, much gratified by having come so far on foot: three or four miles – one of the greatest physical feats of his adult life. It was set point. Bob served, approached the net, and wrongfootingly dispatched my attempted pass. Now Bob was, and is, 23 years my senior; and the score was 6-0. I could, I suppose, plead preoccupation: that summer I was wondering (with eerie detachment) whether I had it in me to write a novel that dealt with the Holocaust. Christopher knew about this, and he knew about my qualms.Elatedly towelling himself down, Bob said, "You know, there are so few areas of transcendence left to us. Sports. Sex. Art … "

"Don't forget the miseries of others," said Christopher. "Don't forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others.""

The pond-front house, wrong-footing pass and nearby Wellfleet are so absurdly irrelevant to the actual story that it makes you giggle at the whole poncy business. You could argue these details are reminders of good times spent with Christopher,  were it not for the fact that Christopher wasn't present.  He is a comedy character wheezing in at the end to misdeliver a pay off line. Were it not for Amis's obvious love of his subject, you'd wonder if Amis is simply using him to show off his own powers. 

"Christopher's personal devil is God, or rather organised religion, or rather the human "desire to worship and obey"."

So is God Christopher's personal devil or did he just want to start a sentence by saying something clever?  Perhaps we are not supposed to be reading it at all, this is just another performance by Amis, for Hitchens.

"Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now."

Christ on a bike. The personal address is touching, and I'm sure Hitch is a great guy to be around, but per-leaase, save it for the funeral.