Johnny Cigarini by John Cigarini Page A

Saatchi and Saatchi, and grew to become the biggest advertising agency in the world – Margaret Thatcher’s fave!).
    Martin McKeand was a nice man to work for. Those were heady days in the advertising business. Selling the directors was an important part of the producer’s job and it would usually happen over a lunch. On down days, when we were not filming, we would regularly go for boozy ones with ad agency producers or creative teams to the Trat (Mario and Franco’s Trattoria La Terrazza), L’Escargot or other joints in Soho. The clients would invariably offer scripts for a new campaign over the coffee… or the Sambuca.
    Martin was a member of the notorious Colony Room Club. This was a members-only afternoon drinking club that managed to serve drinks when all the pubs had to legally shut for the afternoon. It was run by an infamous lesbian called Muriel Belcher, assisted by her equally gay barman Ian Board. It was a typically tiny Soho dive on Dean Street and very popular with artists. Its interior was painted in a vile green or ‘Colony Room green’, and its staircase stunk so badly, that members even gave going up them a name: “going up the dirty stairs”. It was certainly a place for eccentrics, misfits and outsiders, managing to attract both lowlifes and artists. Years later, for the young artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, it was a magnet.
    One of the founding members and regulars was the great and famous painter Francis Bacon. I think he was there every time I went in, and we became friends very quickly as we had something in common: the only school he had ever attended was Dean Close School, the place where I had moved to be with Revd Ken Senior and family. We were there in different years though, so we wouldn’t have known each other. We’d reminisce about those starched detachable Van Heusen collars in style 11 and how hands were not to be put in trouser pockets for going into town. It was interesting to think back about it all, in the context of having now lived through the sixties.
    After a boozy lunch with advertising agency creatives, and then drinking at Muriel’s in the afternoon, Martin and I got pretty hammered, but it didn’t matter; the producer’s work was done for the day if he had scripts for a new campaign in his pocket. Ian Board always called me Big Cock and for years I assumed it had just been his way of coming on to me, but Martin reminded me recently that apparently, in one moment of drunkenness, I had a cock contest with Francis Bacon in the Colony Room Club. For the record, I only have a slim recollection of this, and I guess it’s just a pity the winner didn’t get a painting. There were all kinds of goings-on in that club. It was, to say the least, bohemian, and later where Kate Moss once worked as a barmaid, Dylan Thomas threw up on the carpet and even Princess Margaret paid a visit.

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    One role of the producer is to find work. This means showing the directors’ showreels to the advertising agency producers and creative teams, and trying to get them to give you a job. In America, they have sales reps who work on commission to do that, but that was only just starting to creep into London when I left the business in the mid-1990s. Once the production company has been asked to bid on a job, the producer has to do the budget, which means working out how much the job will cost and how much to charge the client. In my day, this was done very differently – with a calculator and something called a pen and a piece of paper. The production company covers its overheads and makes its profit by what’s called a mark-up, on the basic costs of the job. Of course, if it’s a fantastic, potentially award-winning idea, then the agencies get production companies to do commercials at cost. Productions are bid competitively, particularly in the US, but in the earlier days in London, they were often just single bids for the