Death: at least make it profitable

Occasionally, you see a publicity stunt so inept, so tone-deaf, that you wonder how it got through the planning stage. Here's a humdinger folks.

This morning I got an invitation to the university's Macmillan Cancer Coffee Morning. I decided to  go along, if I'm free. I'm largely against death in general and I've had enough friends and relatives die of cancer in recent years for me to be against the misery and suffering of that particular diseases for me to want to support efforts to prevent or cure it.

Then this Tweet caught my eye:

Isn't that sweet? A massive engineering firm helping its employees contribute to curing cancer in a fun and cute way.

Hold on a minute. BAe Systems Air? I'm sure that rings a bell. I know that 'Systems' is a nice bland word that doesn't give much away but there's something nagging away at the back of my mind.

Ah, yes, that's it. BAe Systems is British Aerospace as was, and BAe Systems Air makes big fast stuff.

What kind of big fast stuff? Well, Typhoon fighter-bombers and Paveway IV bombs, amongst other things. Just for you students of Anglo-Saxon literature there's also a Beowulf all-terrain vehicle, described as 'poetry in motion': Auden apocryphally said that 'poetry makes nothing happen' but the Beowulf can insert heavily-armed killers into any crowd of pesky protestors in minutes.

And they don't just make this stuff: they 'support' their own customers just like football teams have sponsors. BAe Systems has picked the cutest underdogs in the league: the Sultanate of Oman, a violent dictatorship rated by Freedom House as 'not free'.

So that's BAe Systems. I guess their PR department knows that it needs all the love it can get, between the core business of providing mass death to any customer, no questions asked, and the awkward business of all those bribery and corruption allegations and convictions. A coffee morning for charity, heavily promoted on social media is just the ticket.

But what of Macmillan Cancer Care? I know it's hard to say no to eager volunteers, but did nobody at HQ wonder if a charity working hard to prevent suffering, misery and death might look a teensy bit hypocritical hosting an event and taking money from a company whose whole raison d'être is the aforesaid suffering, misery and death. Perhaps they had a big banner hanging above the coffee and cakes: 'Death From Above, Not From Within'. Perhaps they can have a little competition like the Great British Bake-Off?

Ah yes. The Bombe Surprise. It's hard to pick just one winner when your normal method is to kill them all and let God sort them out.

Oh look: double points for this one as it manages to promote the company, grovel to its customers and threaten death from above, all the while polluting the timeline of a cancer charity.

Perhaps there's a perfectly rational way of looking at it. From BAe's perspective, every cancer victim is a potential target lost. It is clearly not against premature and piteous deaths, it just wants to find the profit in it, and quite frankly carpet-bombing is far more efficient than cancer (and besides, quite a few munitions are subsequently carcinogenic to the inhabitants of the unfortunate lands visited by their customers). So if Macmillan cares to open an outlet in say Syria, it's guaranteed some repeat customers. Everyone's a winner!

Joking aside, this is a superb case study for PR students. For Macmillan a nice idea has become appropriated by a major arms manufacturer to whitewash its reputation: for both BAe and Macmillan it's an object lesson in giving a moment's thought to the credibility of your activities. If this story grows, they'll have a representative on the airwaves trying to normalise what it does, and claiming that events like the cancer coffee morning demonstrate what a good corporate citizen it is: we see the same thing when Labour MPs in places like Barrow defend the retention of nuclear weapons because it 'provides employment': in the short term, it does. In the long term, as Keynes put it, we are all dead, and I guess the survivors of a nuclear exchange can find fresh employment burying the remains and decontaminating the scorched earth.

As for me: I think I'll find a cancer charity that doesn't think it's OK to be used as part of a PR campaign. Though weirdly, this happened:

A Pre-Memorial

Some people have the unfortunate opportunity to read their own obituaries, mistakenly published by newspapers. It's rumoured that Alfred Nobel, having seen himself described as a 'merchant of death' (he was an arms manufacturer) founded the eponymous prize to make amends. Marcus Garvey supposedly died of a stroke on reading his own obituary ('broke, alone and unpopular'), which seems rather ironic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge read his own obituary and coroner's report in a newspaper: a man who hanged himself was wearing a shirt apparently stolen from the poet with his name on a label. It was Mark Twain of course who quipped that 'Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated'.

Quite gloriously, it was reported that having survived two plane crashes, Ernest Hemingway used to regularly read a scrapbook of his obituaries, while swigging champagne. This is what I hope my friend – and Vole reader – MT is going to do, because I'm going to write a little bit of his obituary here and now. It's only partial, because I only see a small part of his life, but that's what makes it personal.

M is well known to my office colleagues, even though they've never met or spoken to him. He phones me regularly, more times than I can answer him. Often, of course, it's because I'm out teaching, or in meetings or whatever. Sometimes it's because I'm stuck deep into some marking or research and I know that there's no such thing as a short conversation with M. We have too much in common. We're both slightly obsessive geeks on the same subjects. We agree – and disagree – about politics and economics and can spend hours talking around the most obscure topics. If I need advice about hi-fi electronics, he's the one to consult. We both Mac obsessives and photography enthusiasts. He's from a technical/engineering background and is endlessly fascinated by design, by society as a system, and by the way making things well has been replaced in the nation's economic structure by speculation and fiscal trickery. We profoundly disagree on so many things (he doesn't feel most of you belong in internment camps, for one) but one of the things I most respect about him is his determination to test ideas to destruction rather than adopt an ideological position and stick to it in the face of the evidence, which is sometimes beyond me. For a long time he ran one of the early electric cars, for which I admired him deeply. I've never spoken to him without learning something new or seeing an issue from another perspective. This is why my colleagues know M: because when I pick up that phone, they know I'll be elsewhere for quite some time.

I've known M for probably 10-15 years now, though it's only over the past few years that we've become friends rather than acquaintances. He is a leading fencing coach, referee and former director of England Fencing. Without him, many of the stars past and present would never have got where they are today. I'm not one of those stars: I first encountered M in his refereeing role. Having seen me fence and referee around the circuit, we got to know each other to the extent that when he refereed my fights, he'd intersperse his judgements with a running commentary on how awful my style and technique really are. If I won, he would loudly suggest that I should be ashamed of myself. This is when I knew that we were destined to be friends: not only does this approach match my sense of humour, I secretly knew that he was right. I'm the Stoke City of fencing: I play ugly and sometimes win ugly against much better people.

So that was the start of a friendship forged in dank sports halls across the country, one which started in sport and came to encompass so many other aspects of our lives. MT is at the heart of a network of fencers who meet up for plotting, gossip and teasing occasionally interrupted by a little light coaching or competition. Being initiated into the club means always seeing a friendly face whether you're at an Under-8s competition or a World Cup event in the Polish boondocks. It means being inducted into the cultural memory of my sport, and it means joining the Resistance: M and his friends are the ones who do the real work, underpaid and often in spite of the efforts of the toff in blazers still infesting the upper reaches of the organisation. If there's an Awkward Squad, he's its general and plenty of people bear the scars of battle, yet he's one of those people who never leave the vanquished resentful because he always plays the ball, not the man (though some devastatingly witty character judgements will be uttered accompanied by a disarming giggle which I'll miss enormously.

MT has now been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. The last few times I didn't dare answer the phone because I could see my afternoons disappearing, he wanted to tell me this. So you can probably imagine how guilty I now feel. As to how he's feeling? Well, he's taken the diagnosis exactly as I'd have expected. Like Wilko Johnson, he's laughing in its face. He doesn't know how long he has, some treatment might slow its progress, but he's feeling OK. When I spoke to him, we talked about it briefly before moving on to the things that we usually talk about - this week it was of course Margaret Thatcher's death, a topic on which he was as nuanced as he always is.

MT: I know you're reading this. I know too that you're probably cringing with embarrassment and will brush off all this sentiment with a cutting remark, which is why I've typed it out rather than trying to say it to your face. There's no point saying this stuff when you've gone: I want you to know how we all feel about you, then we can all get back to mercilessly teasing each other. I'll answer the phone a lot more in the coming years and look forward to seeing you treat cancer the way you treat recalcitrant bureaucrats or stroppy prima-donna fencers: with amused disdain and infinite patience. When I say that he's my ideal of an Awkward Git, I mean it with all the warmth and respect I can muster.

University Smackdown

The bloody Daily Mail today claims that switching the light on while you go for a pee will give you CANCER (for the Mail, the world is divided between things that cause cancer and things which cure cancer - and they're always wrong about both categories).

Leicester University, which clearly has a copy of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science in its library, is rather unimpressed by the distortion of its research and has responded with a barrage of magnificent sarcasm. Hurrah!

There is no connection between illuminated, nocturnal calls of nature and cancer, despite what certain newspapers are claiming.

In fact, neither Professor Kyriacou nor Dr Ben-Shlomo suggest anything of the sort.

What the researchers did was examine the connection between the circadian clock – the biofeedback mechanism which animals and plants use to regulate their physiology on a 24-hour cycle – and cell division, which is also cyclical – in mice. …nowhere in their paper, which is published in the journal Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics, do they mention trips to the toilet or anything even vaguely similar. That is entirely an invention of the Daily Mail.

For what it’s worth, if you get up in the night to go to the loo, you’re probably best using a dim night-light for purely practical reasons. But that’s all to do with the rods and cones in your eye – nothing to do with cancer and nothing to do with this research. Also, if you don’t use some sort of illumination, you might slip and break your neck - this might be a particular problem with males!)

Never mind Michael bloody Jackson

Swells is dead! Steven Wells, the wonderful, angry, witty, committed music writer from the days when NME did more than print bands' press releases. He died of the seemingly inevitable cancer: his final column (for the Philadelphia Weekly) treats cancer pretty much the same way as he treated all the bands I liked - with total contempt.

How I loved buying NME on Wednesday morning to see what fresh torture he'd inflicted on the English language to express his true feelings towards Slowdive, the Field Mice or anyone else who wasn't absolutely bloody furious every single day. Charlie Brooker learned everything he knows from Swells, though he as yet hasn't managed to write an anarcho-Trotskyist novel entitled Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty.

For reliable medical advice, read the Daily Mail

Welcome to my blog list The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project which tracks that rag's obsession with dividing the world into things which will give you cancer and things which will cure it. Being the Mail, the same things are likely to be on both lists…

Licence fee - whinge, whinge, whinge.

People sometimes whinge to me about the licence fee being a rip-off, or an unfair, compulsory tax. Never mind that it pays for 100+ radio stations, several TV channels - at least one of which will appeal to you - the World Service and the whole transmission system AND doesn't carry adverts.

Last night's BBC2 vindicated the licence fee for me (despite the Orwellian ads about paying up or being hunted down). Heroes, followed by some variable quality Mitchell and Webb, then Stuart Lee (he won't be appearing on commercial TV anytime soon), then a stunning Cancer Special Newsnight which didn't mention God or 'alternative' (i.e. evil, made-up preying on the vulnerable) medicine, followed by The Wire. Two of these are American shows - fine. They're good quality and cost millions of pounds per episode, and we get them for £140 per year.