Inkygirl: Daily Diversions For Writers

Last week, I posted about the Happy Endings Foundation being a book marketing ploy for the Lemony Snicket books, and mentioned that someone had posted about hearing the story on the BBC. Well, I just listened to that Jeremy Vine show, which is still available online.

Thanks to Grace, posted the following yesterday: “I’m the one who posted about the Jeremy Vine show, it was on; and they even lined up Michael Morpugo for the rebuttal! If you go to the BBC website, to the Radio 2 section and into the listen again feature you should be able to hear it for yourself as long as you do it before Friday the 12th when it’ll be taken down. I’m sure it was on last Friday’s programme.”

I checked it out; the segment is near the end of the 45-minute show (you have to listen to a lot of British politics discussion first). I was curious to see if Claire Hughes came across as a exaggerated comedic character, not to be taken seriously. However, her tone was reasonable and not overly polished; she was interviewed by telephone. She also claimed that she didn’t expect that the newspapers would headline her “lighthearted throwaway” comment about tossing unhappy ending books onto their bonfires.

When Vine asked Hughes for examples other than the Lemony Snicket books, she only named classics like The Little Mermaid and older titles such as Shock-headed Peter, but then re-emphasized that it was mainly the Lemony Snicket books that were so objectionable.

After interviewing Claire, Jeremy Vine asked award-winning children’s author Michael Morpurgo how he felt and he took the issue seriously, saying how he felt that children shouldn’t always be protected from sadness because they did experience sadness in their own lives, how he abhorred the whole book-burning idea, etc.

I’d be curious to know how Jeremy Vine, the BBC, and Michael Morpurgo feel about having been manipulated into helping promote the Lemony Snicket books in this context. Isn’t the BBC funded at least partly by the public? (through television licensing fees) The BBC has a policy of not carrying any advertising or sponsorship on its public services, so that they can stay “independent of commercial interests.”

It will be interesting to see what fall-out (if any) comes from this publicity stunt.

[Updated: Apparently Ceri Radford from the Telegraph called ArtScience about the PR hoax and their response was that "Everything is spin these days - you just have to listen to politicians." As Radford points out in her article, however, spin can backfire.]

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