Reports that the Scottish Greens want to ban sweet flavoured vapes reminds me that the period between Christmas and New Year can be a great opportunity to get media coverage for your cause.
The reason is obvious but not always acted upon. At the tale end of the year with parliaments in recess and relatively little happening during the holiday season, news stories are in short supply so journalists and broadcasters can be desperate for copy.
It also explains why every year after Christmas Radio 4’s Today programme invites ‘guest editors’ like Jamie Oliver to self-indulgently address their personal interests or obsessions.
When I was director of the Media Monitoring Unit in the Eighties we made a point of publishing all bar one of our annual reports a day or two after Christmas.
Each volume assessed hundreds of British current affairs programmes for political bias and were quite substantial in size so in those pre-Internet days we would courier printed copies to journalists several days before Christmas with a press release embargoed until the 27th or 28th December so they had time to read the summary if not the whole thing.
Funnily enough the first Media Monitoring Report - published not at Christmas but in November 1986 - was a rare case of an embargo being broken but in a strange way it worked out well for us.
The report’s findings were splashed across the London Evening Standard the day before we were scheduled to hold a press conference to launch the report at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London’s Pall Mall.
Fortunately the Standard gave it the best possible coverage. It was the lead story on the front page with a banner headline that read ‘YES, THE BBC IS BIASED’.
Not only did the headline appear on newsstands throughout London, the following day the story ran in just about every national newspaper.
We went ahead with the 11.00am press conference but although the embargo had been broken it wasn’t a complete damp squib because several senior executives from ITV and BBC News turned up and I was later interviewed by Jimmy Young on Radio 2.
(As an aside Young was said to be Margaret Thatcher’s favourite interviewer. He was mine too. Well-informed, he was unfailingly polite but no soft touch. Interviewees who underestimated him usually came unstuck.)
The Telegraph also sent a journalist to the Oxford and Cambridge Club and ran a full page feature the next day. You can read it here - Pedigree of a TV watchdog.
But I digress.
Each subsequent Media Monitoring Report was published between Christmas and New Year to take advantage of what we hoped would be a slow news day and the strategy worked pretty well.
The print media never tired of giving their broadcast rivals a jolly good kicking so our reports always got their attention.
It meant however that I had to be in London and available for interview because in those days there were no mobile phones or Internet.
Year after year my Christmas break was cut short as I travelled to London from my parents’ home in Derbyshire but it was a pilgrimage I was used to because in my very first job as a junior PR exec I had no choice but to return to work on December 27 to man the office phone in case a client rang.
In practice two of us were assigned to the office for the Christmas-New Year period but when it became clear - usually by lunchtime - that no-one was going to call we would head to the pub for the afternoon.
I’m not sure why we didn’t give clients our home telephone numbers but that wasn’t the culture at the time. If you were working you had to be at your desk in the office.
Things began to change with the arrival of mobile phones in the Nineties. By then I was freelance but I know that working in the office between Christmas and New Year was no longer compulsory for an increasing number of people.
After I joined Forest in 1999 we would organise a rota so that calls to the office were diverted to one of our mobile phones.
The mobile phone also meant you could do interviews without being tied to a landline or a specific location, although broadcasters still liked you to get to a studio if possible.
One year, two days after Christmas, I remember being interviewed in a shopping centre car park off the Edinburgh by-pass. The year was 2001 and I was talking about a new Forest report - Health Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Written and researched by my colleague Jo Gaffikin - who was simultaneously being interviewed by Five Live’s Peter Allen - it was a compilation of all the health scares that had been published by the UK media that year.
We published it on December 27 - having sent hard copies to journalists the previous week with an embargoed press release - and it was widely reported by both the print and broadcast media.
The Guardian, for example, reported that:
Britons are being "scared to death" because of hysterical and irrational health fears, a pro-smoking campaign group claimed yesterday.
Josephine Gaffikin, author of Health Wars: The Phantom Menace, and a researcher at the pressure group Forest, claimed the "hysterical and often dubious nature of many warnings" were signs of an increasingly unhealthy preoccupation with health. "The British public is being scared to death," she said.
Her report, published by Forest, says warnings which emerged in the last year included reports that liquorice eaters have babies earlier, thinking too hard can put a strain on your brain, and vets linking a full moon to animal ailments. The report also lists more mainstream fears such as the MMR vaccine, flying, mobile phones, hair dye and suntan cream.
Ms Gaffikin said: "Just as some of the health scares featured in the report are grossly exaggerated, so you find similar distortions in the smoking debate." Lord Harris of High Cross, chairman of Forest, said: "With so many hazards to strike us down, how will the medics know which did us in when the time comes?"
See Pro-smoking campaigner scoffs at health scares (Guardian).
Prior to that Forest used to announce, also a day or two after Christmas, a series of awards, rather like the New Year’s Honours List.
They were mostly tongue-in-cheek but always got some coverage, usually in the regional press. A hospital in Leeds, for example, might have been commended for installing a comfortable smoking shelter. That would be news in Yorkshire, less so in Cornwall.
Like Jo Gaffikin’s report, the timing (between Christmas and New Year) was crucial.
Governments too aren’t averse to taking advantage of a slow news period, and the time of year, hence the public health messaging that often happens around New Year.
For a while it became de rigueur for a new anti-smoking campaign to be launched by the UK Government in the week after Christmas but I’ve seen less evidence of that in recent years.
Covid may have been a factor but I also think warning fatigue - and the perceived nannying - is an issue as well, and the Government knows it.
I suspect too that Forest’s formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about one campaign may have made the Department of Health more cautious about promoting similar contentious claims, at New Year or any other time.
Anyway I’m happy for you if you’re still enjoying your Christmas break with no plans to return to work until the new year.
For some of us, though …
PS. When my family moved to Scotland in 1969 my father - who managed a factory in Dundee - initially worked on Christmas Day, and Boxing Day too.
In those days there was relatively little concession, work wise, to Christmas in Scotland. The big event was New Year.
That changed significantly in the Seventies - partly, I think, because thanks to television Christmas got so big even the Scots couldn’t ignore it.