Rt Hon Geoff Hoon MP and now he's gone! Over to Lord Adonis...
Secretary of State for Transport
Great Minster House
6 June – no acknowledgement or reply
Drink/Drive Advertising
It has been a long time since we played cricket together for the Lords and Commons. But I know that you still love the game, which leads me to hope that you might enjoy the enclosed suggestion for a new short film to discourage drinking and driving. It came to me while composing the sequel to my cricket novel A Tale Of Ten Wickets and I am enclosing a copy of that as well (I have plenty of them!) sorry I bothered now
As you will see, the film shows what happens when
You could use another iconic cricketer and/or another archetypal loser, but KP versus David Brent strikes me as the ideal contest and I hope that both of them would be willing to contribute their personas to such an important public cause.
The underlying message is equally important and has wider implications for health as well as road safety. Drinking before any important task reduces you from a world champion to the level of a loser and one who inspires derision and contempt.
I think that both the humour and the message represent something new in drink/drive advertising, and an approach which might also be helpful in some major health campaigns, which is why I have copied this letter and the advertisement to Dawn Primarolo.
Drink/drive campaigns generally try to make their targets feel guilty and remorseful about the terrible harm they cause. That is entirely logical, but in my view it carries a psychological risk. It may also make the targets feel dramatic and important. I suspect strongly that many drink-drivers are inadequate people with mediocre and unsatisfying lives. In an awful twisted way, causing a road accident may represent an “achievement”, and if they are caught it begins a sequence of events in which they are centre stage. By contrast, no one wants to be identified with David Brent.
I believe that there is a similar psychological danger in many anti-smoking campaigns and in other major public health campaigns. They warn targets about the terrible risks to their health – and to those near them. The hope is to make them feel frightened and guilty, but again it might also make them feel dramatic and important. Smoking will make them centre stage in a drama. Smoking is daring and dangerous – the worst possible message to give to young smokers. It might again be more effective to say that smoking reduces them to David Brent – smoking is for losers.
If you like my advertisement, and my approach, would you kindly pass this correspondence to whichever section of your Department can take it forward?
With best wishes,
Richard Heller
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