I was in the Garrick Club in Covent Garden the other day, having afternoon tea in the morning room.

And I found myself staring at a young French girl bent over someone’s knees and being spanked on her bare arse.

(I know what you’re thinking , but I’m afraid I can’t tell you offhand what the annual subs are.)

Anyway, it’s a rather fascinating piece of sculpture, although on a small scale, just to the left of the fireplace in that imposing room, and it depicts a scene from  Zola’s novel L’Assommoir. But unfortunately I can’t tell you any more details about it because my host returned to the room at that point and one doesn’t want to be found peering myopically at a piece of S&M pornography, albeit a very artistic one from the 18th century.

My host was a friend of mine who’s now in his late 60s but who has more energy than, I would suggest, most of Gen X put together.

And it occurred to me that everything is about energy.

Paul Arden said that great creativity was 76% energy.

Echoing Edison’s assertion that genius was 99% perspiration.

(Originally I thought it was Oscar Wilde who said that, but I managed to summon the energy to Google the quote and find out that I was wrong.)
Everything is energy and energy is everything.

We all KNOW that 90% of the work produced by ad agencies is a compromised piece of garbage, which probably started out as an idea of pure shining genius but which took too many hits along the way from Millward Brown et al.

And we all know that it isn’t going to work.

We all know that unless you do something outstanding, the client is going to be complaining about the sales figures in 3 weeks, trying to make a version with a bigger logo in 3 months, and threatening to review the account in 6.

And yet we allow the compromised piece of garbage (herienafter referred to as the CPOG) to run, because we ourselves run out of energy arguing against committees of caution  and the sham, shambolic and shameful quasi-sciences of research.

So what’s the answer ?

More energy.

As Noel Coward said to the young John Hurt – “Push  on”.

T S Eliot said “Fare forward, traveller”.

George Lois, a whirlwind of energy who once threatened to jump off a ledge if the client didn’t buy his ideas, wrote a brilliant campaign for Cutty Sark around the line “Don’t Give Up the Ship”.

Rather like my friend  in the Garrick, who has done outstanding things in his career, and who’s still arguing and fighting and saying deliberately provocative things in his 60s.

Incidentally the spanking scene is called, in the Garrick catalogue, “a conversation piece”.

Which says more about creativity than any number of effing focus groups ever could.