The presence of Creativity as a Sequential Process
At one level, it matters to me as a creative person because, in maintaining the pretense that our business  works through a rational and sequential process, I feel we are perpetrating a minor fraud. And the victim of that success is creativity itself. Because in suggesting in our case studies that we  arrived at success through process, we are falsely paying to logic a debt that we really owe to magic.

Rory Suntherland, Executive Creative Director and
Vice-Chairman, OgilvyOne London;
Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy Grounp UK
(A Master Class in Brand Planning 2007)

Ever since post-war capitalism visioned endless economic growth, advertising has been a Mr Motivator of everyday consumer activity and as a result, become as much a part of the everyday life as the art, music and entertainment that it bookends in the TV schedules and mainstream medias of modern society.

From the fifties onwards there has been an air of glamour around the people and the ideas that create communications that resonate – even American cable network, AMC saw fit to tell its’ tale of cigarette smoking, drinking, sexism, adultery, homophobia, antisemitism, racism and complete lack of concern for the environment against a glamourous backdrop of sixties advertising, in its multi-award winning series, MadMen – Advertising as art, advertising as culture, advertising as entertainment.

So what is creativity in advertising? What is Nixon’s creativity in advertising?  Why does Rory Sutherland, a man working at the top echelon of the industry, in charge of one of the most successful and high profile creative departments in advertising, describe the process of ‘creativity’ as ‘magic’? Is it really that intangible?

In Nixon’s clarification of ‘creativity’ he defines several views and debates which he uses within his piece. Firstly as a noun to collectively describe the jobs of art director and copywriters. Or to describe ‘creatives’, or creative jobs or creative people. He also offers several broader and more conceptual understandings of creativity as influencing his piece. Nixon talks about du Gay’s  ‘creativity to denote a general human capacity or disposition for invention, novelty and newness’ (1996). Nixon talks also about this as a move away from Raymond Williams’s creativity defined as ‘exclusivist definitions in which it was associated with a capacity for originality and innovation among a small group of gifted individuals’ and how Williams saw dangers in moving creativity towards more ‘inclusivist accounts that attribute the quality (creativity) to a whole host of activities and (working) practices’ (1976). Williams believed it would erode the conceptual value of the term.

Suntherland has a more practical view saying, to an agency that is paid by the hour, process is wonderfully time-consuming. That relentless application of sequential logic untempered by imagination (or creativity) is responsible for the greatest absurdities and extravagances we see in business and government. He examples the 3G-license bidding, managed by New Labour and continuous NHS target-setting as instances when process is untempered by creativity. When a problem needs solving, creativity and imagination offer a logic unmeasurable. No-one engaged in the 3G-licence auction thought to ask what else could be done with £16 million, such as installing public WiFi in every hamlet in Britain (Suntherland 2007). Suntherland’s creativity or ‘magic’ is the the essence of his business, his trade and its success. If he had been in charge of the £16 million brief, ‘creativity’ may have been the only sober voice at the table.

More broadly in advertising you can easily see du Gay’s and both of Williams definitions at play. The word ‘creative’ is used to describe many aspects of the business. The role of ‘creatives’ is to invent novelty and newness. There is an exclusive and elitist community in advertising, that Nixon successfully identifies and interviews. And there is also this more inclusive idea of ‘creative’ as inanimate and external to the ‘creatives’. Creative as a product, the work (that’s sold to clients) – The ‘creative’.

Most significantly however is Nixon’s inclusion of Negas’s work on creativity in popular music. (1995; 1998). Negas suggests that creativity is ‘highly context-dependent and shaped by value judgements in which recognition is conferred upon (or denied to) certain degrees of novelty or difference’. Nixon sees this thinking and the debates around creativity within the context of advertising, as ‘always being informed by struggles over the authority of certain institutions or social actors to confer recognition upon a cultural practice or form and include the tensions between groups of protagonists to legitimate certain kinds of difference and novelty.’ Meaning that there is a struggle for authority over ‘creative’, and that a creative decision or the ownership over the creative product or idea, is based on its argued value of novelty or difference. This struggle certainly makes for a recognisable view of daily life and the growing-pains that move creative work forward within agencies.

Nixon’s begins his study of creativity in the commercial-value sense, being hinged on the economic climate at the time and the so called ‘creative revolution’ that agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, Yellowhammer and Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) pioneered.

Nixon observes that agencies like these recognised client spending was in decline and a new perception was emerging that agencies weren’t the best run businesses in the economy, and didn’t always represent value-for-money to the advertiser. Fueled by this perception and recommendations by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers for a standardisation of measurement of advertising, the buzzword strategy emerging for advertising agencies became ‘brand-building’ based on a set of ‘brand-values’. Rather than the more traditional ‘product-benefits’ strategy that had been the advertising staple in the booming eighties.

During in this time the creative team, that is art director responsible for the image of a piece of advertising and copywriter responsible for the messaging, was the unquestioned actor-dynamic required to produce work or ‘creative’. This is still true to some extent of today’s workplace. However agencies and recruitment agents as well as the academic community are now needing to adapt to an ever-evolving set of creative-skills required in real world application. Designers and art directors need to now think in 3D as well as 2D. Use moving image and interactivity. Copywriters are facing briefs that require whole editorial strategies. Multiple-strand conversations with two way dialogues, rather than one-liner ‘single minded propositions’ and the odd TV script.

There’s  increasing demand for creative computer technicians too. That can understand web-code and action-scripting, user experience, message navigation and so on. And its not just the internet where these skills are required in use. The idea-creatives (rather than executional ones) are thinking in experiential, viral, content-creation and even revenue-stream and business opportunity terms. The opportunity for ‘creativity’ and the complexities of Nixon’s struggles over authority are that much more poignant and innovation led in 2010.

Writing in A Master Class in Brand Planning, Rosemarie Ryan (President) and Ty Montague (Chief Creative Officer) of JWT (New York) believe that ‘big advertising ideas’ are the thing that agencies strive for and that these ideas can now come from many areas of the business or indeed by extension of the wider ‘creative industry’. This means that through the big ideas in advertising, many more actors have the chance to engage in the struggle for authority over ‘creative’. Ryan & Montague suggest that ‘big advertising ideas’ share certain immutable characteristics:

They don’t fit neatly into an individual medium.

They appeal to the things that we all share as human beings.

They are the kinds of things people truly want to participate with.

And are competitive, not with other advertising and marketing, but with broader pop-culture – art, books, music, movies etc.

2007 saw great examples of Ryan & Montague big advertising ideas. Cadbury’s, A Glass and a Half Full Productions concept saw great executions that included the Drumming-Gorilla and Dancing- Eyebrows. Where did the ‘big advertising idea’ come from in this creative process by TBWA’s hot-shop affiliate Fallon? And what was the struggle over authority on ‘creative’ that the actors played out? Was it the ‘creatives’ who cast a man in a gorilla costume to drum the intro to Phil Collins, I Can Feel It Coming in the Air? Or the PR agent who suggested that, for publicity, Phil Collins was actually in the costume? Or the brand-planning strategist that researched the consumer, had an instinctive feel for the changing market and used all their client negotiation charm to get the brief down to a core strategy idea like this – all executions should be something ‘entertaining’, as long as it is believably created by a fictional production company called A Glass and a Half Full Productions. This is the Ryan & Montague’s ‘big advertising idea’, this is the part that ticks all their boxes.

There’s an anecdotal phrase in creative circles that states “give me the freedom of a tight brief”. This is that freedom of a tight brief that allowed the execution of A Glass and a Half Full Productions to flourish into such a memorable advertising campaign. Drumming-Gorilla has entered into the collective conscious of society to become ‘competitive’, as Ryan & Montague suggest, not with other advertising or marketing, but with modern pop-culture more broadly. One quick look on YouTube and the original has more that four million views and counting, not to mention endless other versions created by its audience. It’s ‘creative’ that has inspired ‘creativity’.

For Nixon’s study of ‘creativity’, it’s the ‘creative team’ he’s interested in. Specifically the socio-creative relationship at play within a creative partnership, be that all male, all female or mixed teams. Nixon sets out to examine a small sample of creative-job-holding professionals, and as described in his book, their ‘subjective dispositions and self-dramatisations’. Or more broadly described as Advertising Cultures. Based on interviews with twenty-six male and six female art directors and copywriters working in 1997 in London-based advertising agencies, he draws these accounts as well as on much that was published in the industries trade-press about the changing marketing strategies of the nineteen-nineties recession, to examine the role of creativity and gender within the workplace of his subject ‘creatives’.

Nixon see’s significance in the social makeup of his sample, which he defines as the ‘new lower middle-class’. Drawing on Bourdieu’s discussion of the ‘new bourgeoisie’ and the ‘new petit bourgeoisie’, Nixon suggests that Bourdieu has some interesting things to say about his sample, by reflecting on these class fractions. Nixon says ‘Bourdieu is primarily interested in the distinctive characteristics of what he calls the new lower middle class by virtue of their cultural dispositions’. He goes on ‘(Bourdieu) is particularly concerned with drawing out the way this grouping embodies a new ‘art of living’ characterised by its opposition to older notions of duty, sobriety, modesty and deferred gratification in their own lifestyles and modes of living’.

Nixon opens his book with a dialogue from Mark Wnek, a 41 year-old executive director of Euro-RSCG, who says things like “every single pair of my underpants is Calvin Klein” and “my shoes are Gucci, purely because they’re comfortable” which supports his analysis and Bourdieu’s theory, particularly about opposition to deferred gratification. Here Wnek clearly articulates a sense of consumption that is instant. In the wider creative industry we see a similar relationship with Bourdieu’s ideas of opposition to these older values. The main entrance of creative agency Cake for example, where they have an indoor skate-park with ramps and playful architecture that suggest an industry that is conscious of the role of a more instant gratification in it’s work place, encouraging play-gratification at work for its staff. It’s not sober, or modest. Cake, in this example are using the temptation of gratification, that is, gratification not deferred from (Bourdieu), to attract its latest  ‘new lower middle-class’ talent. Cake consciously places this allure as the first thing creatives, and indeed anyone who comes in contact with their physical embodiment, as the first impression of their business as a whole.

Nixon continues with Bourdieu’s ethos, positioning the new middle class within what Bourdieu calls the ‘ethical avant garde’ of consumer capitalism and its new form of ‘enlightened conservatism’. Drawing  ‘the new lower middle class into a cultural alliance with the new middle class, who share the same anti-puritan values and lifestyles’. That is to say the consumer values of contemporary society. Is Nixon suggesting that in order to become a creative in advertising is to be from this socially mobile group for whom consumer gratification comes naturally that is where the best talent will emerge?

Ultimately where Nixon goes with it is to suggest that creative jobs are overwhelmingly male-dominated, and that they create an environment of male-consumption around which the creative departments of the late nineties follow a pattern laid out in the eighties that set a president for advertisings improved cultural standing in Britain as a whole. Nixon observes  the emergence of London as a centre of ‘creative excellence’ within the wider global industry as evidence related to agencies expansion into young male markets. He says that ‘style and lifestyle products aimed at young men offered scope for the development of a more image-led form of advertising upon which the industry’s reputation for ‘creativity’ often rested’. It’s this that also sets London apart in the wider global creative community. And what also created the social environments that advertising agencies work under. This in turn, Nixon argues, creates an environment where women have to engage on the same level as men. Throughout the book there are candid tales from his female subjects about laddish behavior in the office that they are exposed too either as initiations into the department, or with statements about women having to have “balls of steel like the men”. Some of these stories are shocking and some humorous, but do they say more about advertising culture, or the time they come from? Could these stories, of office sexism, come from any office in 1997?

In the final part of Advertising Cultures, Nixon presents a body of theory around the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mike Roper and Hern & Parkin about homosocial relationships and the social bonds between men, that suggests an inherent desire surrounding them, either about homosexual desire or anxiety about homosexuality. Nixon believes that particularly the use of metaphors by his subjects about marriage and heterosexual romance are ways in which his subjects express both their experience of close-working relationships and the broader public perception of themselves. His subjects talk candidly about their working relationships as creatives, and how they are like being in a marriage, with the day-to-day ups and downs of dealing with each other, but also their real wives or partners. One example even goes so far as to describe a new creative relationship he is engaged in, as being more functional than any romantic one he has, on the basis that his real love life is mostly dysfunctional. He goes on to use his metaphor in such a way as to suggest that working in the new creative partnership he is describing, is in some way, being unfaithful to an earlier creative partnership. This makes for great reading, however it’s hard to think of another metaphor that would suit the close relationship that a creative team experiences throughout it’s life-span. Is it not so, that people are lazy and habitual with talking in cliche’s about these things, even being tongue-in-cheek about there use. After all, these magicians are in the business of creating fantasy – fantasy of consumption, culture, life, sociability and society.
Nixon finally turns to the trade press to present evidence from the industry more broadly, with a series of features about successful creative teams that are presented visually with images that support the ‘marriage’ metaphor. One example depicts an all male team in full white-wedding dress, but this doesn’t think reflexively about it’s context. As editorial its function is to entice the reader to read it, it’s sensational and provocative. Also, over time would it be in the interests of the publisher to continue to depict creative teams in this way over extended periods of time? Or is it true that this mealy reflects a trend of these kind of depictions relating more to the time they were published. Would Creative Review, or Marketing Week, or any other industry rag present a creative partnership in this way in todays climate?

Conclusion

When Advertising Cultures was published in 2003, the book wasn’t widely recognised by the advertising industry, maybe saying more about advertising’s attention-span than the value of it as a piece.

But was well received by the academic community, bringing such accolades as “unique and very valuable series of observations about creativity” (Terry Flew, Queensland University), “major contribution to the cultural sociology of the new service sector professionals and their gendered identities” (Frank Mort, UEL) and “major new contribution to the cultural study of economic life” (Don Slater, LSE).

Although the later two comments are from academics that contributed to the piece itself, all three consider value in the lucid micro-observations of the interviewees made by Nixon, particularly about gender in the day-to-day lives played out in the creative departments of the time

What Nixon describes, are opinions, perceptions and dialogues that any working agency-professional would recognise today. However, in a creative working environment, where the whole process is driven by the same goal (to create good work that resonates with a clients audience), does interviewing only art directors and copywriters go far enough in its method? Is the ‘creativity’ inherent in the creative product of an agency wrapped up solely in two job-roles that, as Sutherland suggests, perform ‘magic’.

This limiting method doesn’t go far enough to making this book more informed about the ‘struggles over the authority’ that Nixon talks about with his inclusion of Negas’s ‘creativity’. And ultimately lets the piece down from the prospective of offering anything meaningful about this conceptual ‘creativity’ . Where are the planners, with their innovate strategies integral to the insight and research of the market and overall direction of a piece of ‘creative’? Or the clients who commission and invest in the creative product with their ballsy capitalist agendas? There are many actors at play within the ‘struggles over authority’ that could have informed this debate much further. After a theoretically sound understanding and rational of creativity, the promise of insight about creativity moves towards a series of interview evidence about the office environments of the subjects moving the piece closer to the gender conclusions it finally makes.

Emma Nugent, in her 2004 PHD at Goldsmiths University asked instead this poignant question – ‘how is talent recognised in businesses that see themselves as creative?’. Rather than limiting creative insight to an elite specially-skilled community of gifted magicians, she broadened her method to include contributors to the ‘struggles over authority’. This offers Nugent’s the researcher, an opportunity to explore creativity in the day-to-day lives of several actors in the struggle for authority over ‘creative’.

Over her three years study from 2000 to 2003, Nugent followed eight subjects with varying roles from lower-admin to middle-management within the creative process of a newly formed ‘digital’ department of a large publishing company. During this time of change, she observes how the new department tries to manage it’s creativity with varying degrees of success. She documents the aspirations and anxieties of the individuals, as well as battling with her own role as both team member and social researcher. She even has the opportunity to follow one of her subjects, a design creative called Guy, who part way through the work, leaves to start his own ‘creative’ agency. By viewing ‘creativity’ in a broader sample of actors and in a more inanimate way, Nugent was able to better observe Nixon’s ‘struggle over the authority’ as well as the the social dynamic of the sample group in more detail.

When ‘creatives’ Bovill & Allison created their award winning ‘Skoda Cake’ ad, they engaged in a ‘struggle over authority’ with their planning colleagues by answering a brief that simply read -

‘Stop children crying in showrooms, when daddy’s about to buy a Skoda’.

This advertising brief, as well as it’s final execution is brimming with ‘creativity’ and Nixon’s struggle over authority between the ‘planners’ and the ‘creatives’ as well as being a ‘big advertising idea’ that Ryan & Montague describe.

Just as a brief (a single sentence) this example presents insight into the ‘struggle over authority’ that was undertaken. It is full of ‘creativity’ or ‘magic’ as Suntherland would say. It identifies a market audience – young families with father as key decision maker holding the purse strings. It acknowledges the brands negative legacy in it’s depiction of ‘children crying’ at the thought of owning a Skoda. It is aware of the products point-of-sale – the car ‘showroom’. And finally it applies a tone-of-voice by being  playful, funny and as Bovill & Allison later executed, “full of lovely stuff”. The evidence of the creative teams contribution in the struggle is evident in their reply to planning’s authoritative brief when looking at the image of a car made out of cake, it’s full of the ‘magic’ they bestowed on it in the execution of this memorable ad.

‘Creativity’ here is evident at both the planning and creative execution level. Nixon was right to engage with Negas’s creativity, however if he’d studied this advertising campaign and only interview Bovill & Allison as the art director and copywriter team that worked on the piece as a method, he’d only have half the picture of of the ‘struggle over authority’ within this example. Or at least, he would only have Bovill & Allison’s version of their own ‘creativity’. Of course there are many other examples of ‘creativity’ being applied by the players with creative skills along the road to the execution of Skoda Cake. In this example, the director of the TV ad, the cake company that cooked and created the car-cake that featured, the hair and makeup teams etc.

This example is how modern advertising, and its processes, works today. It offers a glimpse of the ‘struggle over authority’ that could be observed first hand. It is a view that is missing from Nixon’s account. And certainly one that could offer further insight into the social dynamics at play in this complex working environment. Obviously a method to engage with creatives as a subject group is advantageous to any study of creativity in advertising, but observing ‘creatives’ in dialogue with other colleagues and with clients is essential to understanding truly the role ‘creativity’ plays.

Since Nixon published Advertising Cultures the industry has undergone more change than in it’s whole post-war history. The idea of what it’s very product is, is being challenged. As well as it’s place in cultural society. It would be all to easy to keep tweaking the old strategies about single-minded propositions and adding yet another silo’d service be that experiential marketing, digital, guerrilla marketing, viral marketing etc. But at some point there needs to be a more cerebral understanding of what they’re in the business of doing and what contribution can be made to its audience and wider society. By understanding ‘creativity’, agencies may be better equipped to making these changes in thinking. To be better able to engage audiences in the two-way dialogues that technology and media are enabling.

Advertising and marketing is an industry that trades it’s time-for-money as a business model, it may not be entirely comfortable with creativity being a product measured only by time, as Sutherland suggests with his quote that began this review. If this is the case, how does the creative industry, and the broader creative economy measure it’s most precious asset and maintain credibility for its services with paying clients? After all there would be no advertising if brands and  clients didn’t value its commercial contribution and invest heavily in it with a view to further their own capitalist strategies.

Of course this is ever more poignant in 2010, for an industry competing for advertising budgets. More a decade after Nixon was researching Advertising Cultures, the advertising and the broader ‘creative industry’ is again facing tough financial circumstances. In December 2009 Marketing Week reported that the UK’s consumer spending had fallen by 11.6% with a knock on effect on advertising spending in decline just like in the nineties. The real story for this recession however, is where advertising spend is on the move.

M Group forecasts that ‘TV advertising spend will fall 11.6% year on year in 2009 to £2.92bn, but will only fall 0.2% in 2010’. Print advertising is forecast to drop ‘20.4% year on year in 2009 to £3.9bn, and fall 6.2% this year to £3.6bn’. Yet Internet and mobile advertising is set to ‘rise 2.7% year on year for 2009 to £3.4bn and rise again in 2010 by 7.3% to £3.7bn’.

This reflects an industry that is in the throws of changing business models as well as changing consumers, changing media and changing communication strategies. For some it may mark a fearful time of decision making anxiety. At the grass roots of education level, creative education departments are wandering if they’re teaching the skills that will be relevant in the years ahead. For new talent, they’re maybe wandering what the right path through career is. For Sutherland it could be an opportunity to re-vision his concerns about selling creative time for money and start putting a price on creative contribution instead.
For Nixon and Advertising Cultures it could mean an opportunity to revisit the work to reflect on the changes that are mentioned here. It could be an opportunity to be more reflexive and take a creative approach to researching ‘creativity’. C.Wright Mills said ‘the sociological imagination enables its processor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career of a variety of individuals’. For Mills, the sociological imagination is meant to galvanise sociologists into approaching social research on more creative terms. Advertising as a creative business, is in need of reflection and a more academic approach to understudying its future, in understanding it’s role in society and understanding how to become more academic in its strategic approach.  In advertising language, is what is called a call-to-action (for Sean Nixon and Advertising Cultures).

It’s intricate how brands play roles in everyday life, often becoming cultural or taking on cultural signicance through the choice, identity or the activity of consumption. Emotions are even at play – love, hate and trust inspired how people feel about brands. With recent innovations in technologies changing dialogues in society too, there is a requirement for marketeers to revise their strategies for better ways of communicating with consumers and society as a whole. Moving away from the traditional advertising ‘single-minded proposition’ delivered through multiple channels, to a more conversational approach that takes advantage of these technologies by facilitating or aggregating conversations more effectively.

Should we advocate to clients an approach to brand communications that, either through legacy or heritage or by investing, supporting and facilitating art, music and entertainment, can engage more culturally in the social conversations already at play? Brands that develop strategies and creative that engage in this way, stand the best chance of lasting popularity. The essence of any engaging communication must then be to talk to consumers with a more social voice about the truth of the message being delivered.

Should we advocate to clients an approach to brand communications that, either through legacy or heritage or by investing, supporting and facilitating art, music and entertainment, can engage more culturally in the social conversations already at play?

Brands that develop strategies and creative that engage in this way, stand the best chance of lasting popularity. The essence of any engaging communication must then be to talk to consumers with a more social voice about the truth of the message being delivered.

The prospect of Richard E Grant’s directorial debut is a good one; a semi-autobiographical tale of a young boy growing into manhood played out against the backdrop of a new era for South East Africa’s Swaziland, the place Grant himself grew up, amidst the end of British rule. It follows Ralph as he witnesses his mother’s adultery, played expertly by Miranda Richardson, and Gabriel Byrne’s stunning and sensitive depiction of a loving father plagued by alcoholism. The performances are magnificent, however the twisting and turning of the plot is clunky in the end, I can only assume that that’s it was how things really turned out in the real world.

Paris, 2054 and Christian Volckman’s debut feature, Renaissance, hits the ground running as the young, brilliant Ilona Tassueiv (Romola Garai) is kidnapped in suspicious circumstances. Hired by her boss, Paul Dellenbach; Vice-President of the powerful Avalon Corporation, the plot follows renegade cop, Bathelemy Karas, as he tries to piece together a puzzle of secrets and cover-ups of genetic exploration and the pursuit corporate dominance. This groundbreaking animation will draw comparisons with Sin City for its look, but really viewers should understand that the techniques developed to create new characters from human movement is closer to that achieved with Golem in Lord of the Rings, more Emation than animation.

Adapted from a story by Jonathan Raymond, Old Joy tells the tale of two friends. Kurt and Mark reunite for a weekend camping-trip in the Cascade mountain range, east of Portland Oregon. Set against the backdrop of the American dream shattered by the second Bush era, it attempts to articulate the subtle differences time and circumstances put between two friends. Mark is facing fatherhood for the first time while Kurt seems stuck on a carefree merry-go-round of road trips inspired by another time, the sixties. Although beautifully shot and with a great musical score, Old Joy only leaves you asking why a great short story was adapted into a feature? Why not a great short movie?

A tale of lust, jealousy, temptation and friendships tested. Lower City follows two lifelong friends, Deco and Naldinho as they share in a love triangle with Salvador bound stripper called Karinna. The boys offer Karinna a ride to her destination in their cargo boat, Danny Boy, in exchange for sex. This simple transaction draws all three of them into a phycological complicated threesome, challenging everything they and their friendships stand for. Masterfully directed by Sérgio Machado and with the help of producers Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and Maurício Andrade Ramos (City of God), Lower City is celluloid realism that strikes a deep chord with the heart’s passion to be loved.

William Keane is six months on from the abduction of his six-year-old daughter. The story finds him veering between relentless days compulsively returning to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where he last saw his little girl and late nights of alcohol and drug-induced self-destruction, as he struggles to keep sane. A chance introduction to a financially strapped mother provides a distraction and over a couple of meetings with her, he gains trust enough to pick up his new companions seven-year-old from school. As he gets close to the girl, he’s forced to deal with loss. Expertly directed by Lodge Kerrigan, and emotionally played by Damian Lewis, it’s story telling at it’s engaging and subtle best.

Set on the sun-drenched island of Haiti at the end of the seventies, Laurent Cantet’s Heading South tells the tale of three disillusioned North American women searching for the love that’s eluded their lives at home. Life friends Ellen, Brenda and Sue, played by Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young and Louise Portal, hide away in this picturesque paradise, entertaining young black-boys with presents, food and drink. These relationships are obviously false to the audience, but the girls persist with them until their friendships are are at a jealous breaking point and the reality of the young boys lives catches them up and forces them to face the reality of male prostitution and death.