When was the last time a subtitle made you cry?

Jeremy Bullmore reflects on the magical power of words and wonders why copywriters’ efforts seem so thoughtlessly clumsy

The most talented screen writers are those who are best at leaving things out; who know about inference and nuance; who can convey a character’s character through hints and allusions; who have sufficient faith in the mental agility of their audience to infer, to complete, to get it. The most talented screen writers are those who, as they type, are simultaneously projecting the intended pictures on their internal screens, so that the ear doesn’t duplicate what the eye will be doing.

In the much-quoted words of Arthur Koestler: ‘Language itself is never completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the same time, they are merely stepping stones for thought.’ (That last sentence of Koestler’s is itself a lovely little illustration of the truth it’s expounding: ‘stepping stones for thought’ coaxes the reader into an understanding far more telling than any ponderous explicit exposition could have done. But of course, you’d already got that, hadn’t you? So sorry.) Koestler goes on to say: ‘The artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices.’

The best poets use words to disguise the fundamental inadequacy of words. By that I mean that poets never expect the dictionary definition of words, their ‘meaning’, to be able to transport an inspired understanding from one imaginative mind to the minds of others. Words are used as allegories, metaphors, allusions – as stepping stones for thought – so that the capacity for shades of understanding and communication is not limited to the dictionary definition of available words but becomes infinite. The words that the best poets use paint pictures in the reader’s mind. No, that’s not quite right. The reader paints the pictures; the words are what prompts them. Poets don’t need illustrators.

In October, the BBC transmitted a one-off drama called The Song of Lunch. It was a curiosity. It was billed as ‘based on Christopher Reid’s narrative poem’ but it was more than based on: the poem was read in its entirety and tells the story of two former lovers meeting for the first time in 15 years. The words, like the words in any good poem, are evocative; and yet, inexplicably, the BBC had chosen, word by word, to replicate them visually. When the poem mentioned a mouth, you saw a mouth; a glance, a glance; a waiter, a waiter.

The producers of current affairs programmes have long referred to this lumpen custom as Lord Privy Seal: whereby the editor synchronises each of those three words with an image of a peer, an outside toilet and an aquatic mammal. This is precisely what The Song of Lunch did – and the result completely neutered the writer’s skill. Instead of intensifying understanding, these plonking pictures denied the spectator all the rewards of completion. Subtleties and personal interpretation were effectively shuttered off.

Christopher Reid, whose words they were, must have felt first flattered and then curiously deflated. The subtitle is a curious beast. It’s a visual element doing its best to compensate for the absence of an aural one. It helps basic understanding but precludes sensitivity. It’s not the translator’s fault: space is limited and inflection unavailable. But it’s one of language’s happier ironies that subtleties and subtitles should be almost-anagrams.

All these lofty musings have been triggered by the words in today’s advertisements. Almost without exception, they are as leaden as subtitles. Take any ten commercials, strip away the pictures, and you’ll be left with commentaries devoid of wit, nuance, allusion or originality. Nothing is left for an audience to complete; no stepping stones for thought here. Only the extraordinary technical ingenuity of the post-production houses saves these advertisements from featureless anonymity.

The words in print ads are no better. First-thought adjectives are shamelessly employed. Food is invariably delicious, beaches invariably fabulous. It’s as if the specialist talent of the writer is no longer recognised; and indeed, perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened.

What do they teach them, I wonder, on those advertising courses? They certainly don’t teach them about words; or if they do, they teach them very badly. It’s easy to mock the old days, when copywriters were all poets manqué or had half-finished novels in their desk drawers; but they were a great deal more effective than most of today’s writer/art director teams who take it in turns to be the writer.

It’s clear that even the perpetrators of these turgid printed words don’t think very much of them. They set them in blocks, reversed out of lemon yellow, seen more as a design element than as an irresistible invitation to engage further.

Some clients are happy to approve press layouts on the basis of headline and picture alone. What is dismissively called body copy is churned out only after approval has been obtained. Creative agencies should be ashamed.

The writers of leaden subtitles have many legitimate excuses. The writers of leaden advertisements have none.

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