Ad man eyes No.1 bestseller title

By CARROLL DU CHATEAU

Our libraries and bookshelves are littered with advertising copywriters-turned-authors.

Fay Weldon made enough money to embark on life as a novelist by writing such rounded lines as "go to work on an egg" for, I presume, the British Egg Marketing Board.

Australian advertising guru Bryce Courtenay moved on from advertising jingles to bestselling novels starting with The Power of One. Joseph Heller, whose CV includes Second World War combat pilot and copywriter, went on to write Catch 22.

Closer to home we have poet Denis Glover who, after being a postie followed by a stint in the copy department, wrote Hot Water Sailor and some acclaimed poetry. Bob Harvey, former CEO of McHarman Ayer, outgoing Labour Party president and Waitakere mayor, writes lyrical books including The Savage Coast at the kitchen table.

Michael Wall's political thrillers include Museum Street, The Cassino Legacy and Cardinal Sins, and Don Donovan wrote The Wastings. Even I had a decade selling dog drugs, stockings and knickers before I found journalism.

While most ad-writing could never be described as serious literature, former copywriters can bring some sizzle to the Christmas book selection. Mike Hutcheson, the latest advertising man to reach the bookshelves, whose day job is executive director of Saatchi and Saatchi, has written and illustrated a first book that ranges from amusing to laugh-out-loud funny.

He says of the opportunistic title,

No 1 Best Seller, "Yes, it's selling well. We've gone to a second printing already. Sure, the first was only 3000 copies, but we're on the way."

But it's not the tricks of a consummate ad man that make Hutcheson worth reading. His book, a selection of columns that appeared in the Independent, brings an offbeat marketing brain and social awareness to subjects as diverse as business, swinging dicks (American for top bosses), raising children, suicide, marketing and diets.

"Creativity is seeing what everybody else is seeing and thinking what no one else has thought," he says.

Hutcheson is one of those writers who drags in ideas from the famous to the seriously obscure. Sir Francis Drake on timing, John McWilliams from Scotland on Sunday on toilet paper usage. "I have no faith in authority, no faith in our leaders - and a serious scepticism about kids," he says.

True. Listen to this description of young adults. "Males of the species do this [wander aimlessly between bedroom and fridge] dressed in crutchless trousers three sizes too big, with baseball caps on backwards and their faces dotted by Clearasil while the house throbs to drum and bass music ... Females do it in clothes three sizes too small, revealing as many anatomical parts as possible, while wearing small knapsacks and talking on cordless phones. In other cultures, demonstration of such ritual tribal adornment and behaviour is recognised for what it is, the precursor to pubescent fertility rites."

Hutcheson is refreshingly non-PC. He kicks cats, would rather drink Draino than stand in a queue and believes men are suffering feminist fatigue. Despite his increasing girth he favours slabs of butter on his bread. He hates all forms of fancy lettuce and demonstrates his theory - "people tend to look like living floral arrangements" - by encouraging me to eat mine, then sniggering when it sticks out the sides of my mouth like a bird's nest in progress.

"Political correctness has been invented to replace really good manners, to replace shame," he says.

So what gives Hutcheson the right to opine on anything? About as much as New York-based Saatchi supremo Kevin Roberts, probably. That is, 50-odd years of thinking, reading everything from the classics to Arts and Letters Daily (http://cybereditions.com/aldaily/) running large companies, serious amounts of creativity and "a passion to be an author since I was about 10 years old."

A naturally cheeky thinker, Hutcheson sold sketches during his schooldays at Nelson College. "I used to draw nudes for boarders - bikinis for 3d, nudes 6d." He left law school after a few terms, didn't even start at Elam Art School but decided instead on a career in advertising. Over 30 years he has moved between advertising agencies and real estate, but always writing.

Most hard-out work is done in the mornings. He's up by 6 and at the office by 7.30. If deadlines press, he gets up at 4 in the morning. "Janice [his second wife] and I happily work away together at different ends of the study in companionable silence.

There's a novel in the bottom drawer. A screenplay, written with Communicado chief Neil Roberts, is with a production company. His first children's book, Ding The Dreadful Driver (Hazard), is dueout in March.

"The dreadful thing about children's books these days is that they're so boring, so PC," says Hutcheson, who has two grown children of his first marriage plus two inherited from his second. "Kids' books need to be fun so parents enjoy reading them. It also helps if they rhyme." He quotes a couple of lines:

"So my boy, I am no fool,

I think you want a day off school."

As Hutcheson points out, copywriters who spent their early days writing advertisements to make a living gain great joy out of the freedom to write what people actually want to read. OK, may want to read. "To me, writing's an absolute delight. I love doing it. I don't find it at all a chore."