Bend over, take it like a man…

Oh the glitz, the glamour, the blaggers, the slightly disinterested host, and the rather stressed event’s team – welcome to the Data Strategy Awards 2011. That’s right folks, on Wednesday night I was lucky enough to be among the good, the bad, and a fair dose of the uglies at the Nine Kings’ Suite at London’s Royal Lancaster.
The funny thing is, my esteemed editor was so desperate for it all to go wrong, having been one of the founding team of the event a few years back. Sadly for him, it was business as usual and the evening went off well. Er, apart from when host Ruby Wax interrupted her script to bemoan: “Does anyone actually care about this shit?”
And there was another rather strange moment towards the end when she announced the winner of the prize draw as “Brian Brody from Eurology”. Now I haven’t seen him for a while, but I could have sworn the guy who picked up the award was Adrian “charm the birds from the trees” Brady from Eulogy. Then again, maybe my vision was slightly blurred by that time.
Anyway I got chatting to the indefatigable Jeremy Whitaker, who is now the proud holder of a number of non-exec roles – lucky bugger. And I have good news for all you readers who were wondering what had become of Jeremy’s former DLG colleague and Radley College ‘fag’ Richard Webster.
Apparently “the James Bond of direct marketing” is now marketing operations director at Advertising Loyalty UK – a company which boasts industry guru Terry Hunt among its directors. But it seems Jeremy’s not all together too happy with his former school slave.
A couple of months back he offered Webster a few weeks’ consultancy work but, having agreed to do the work, he didn’t show up – and has been ignoring Jeremy’s calls ever since.
Now I have no idea what retribution would be dished out in the business world for such a misdemeanour but I reckon back in the day at Radley that kind of indiscipline would have resulted in the young Webster not being able to sit down for at least a week… and no doubt he would have received a good thrashing too.
Then again, some people like that sort of thing apparently…