Despite their risks, award schemes are still beloved of PR companies

In public relations, Plan B is vital. The best-laid schemes of spindoctors can gang very aglay unless the negative possibilities have been worked out in advance.

The account team has to establish what they’ll do if there’s fog at the airport, another event of the same kind on the same day, or the compere arrives stewed to the gills on alcohol.

They don’t usually have to consider putatively drug-taking horses.

But that’s exactly what happened to the PR people in charge of the ESB/Rehab awards on Saturday night. One minute they had a nationally televised awards programme with Cian O’Connor saddled up as star. A minute later, the star’s horse had been shot out from under him by sample A and they were staging Hamlet without the Prince.

Cian withdrew, which was decent and proper. The PR people - if I understood them aright - said they’d keep the award warm for him and if sample B cleared the horse, they’d slip the prize to its rider a few months down the line.

It makes a great case study. It’s a whole new dilemma for PR people, the thought that public appearances of prize-winning athletes (or their horses) may have to be postponed until both are proven drug free. A bit like the ‘cooling off’ period applying to the purchase of a gun in America.

The problem is that the public’s attention span is shortening so quickly that a prize-winner’s saleable fame could drain away during the cooling-off period. For example, can you, right now this minute, name the rider whose final clear round gave Ireland the Aga Khan trophy just a couple of months ago? Fame isn’t permanent any more. Neither is shame.

Of course, awards schemes can have enormous positive impact, internationally and nationally. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize makes a splendid statement about the capacity of passionate individuals to improve the environment. Closer to home, writer Vincent McDonnell, who in February won RTE’s Francis McManus short story contest, has said that such awards can give a writer the courage to keep going. Since writing is as cruel a trade as politics, an award that keeps the hope in a fine writer has solid value.

On the other hand, Colm Toibín, currently short-listed for the Booker Prize, maintains that while being short-listed is mighty, because it quadruples the sales of a book, actually WINNING that award is a kiss of death to the quality of work produced by the victors, post-factum.

For some writers, awards have even worse consequences. Journalists winning a Pulitzer Prize know the moment their triumph is announced, they can expect other journalists to investigate every aspect of their past. One woman was awarded the Pulitzer for a heart-stopping story of a ten-year-old drug-dealer and crack addict. When it first appeared, the story seemed to establish that drug-peddling was moving into a new era. The next logical step would be toddlers flogging ecstasy to each other in crèches.

However, when other journalists sought out the child at the centre of the story, he was difficult to locate. Very difficult. Impossible, even. The journalist’s own editors began to interrogate her. In the process, they proved that fact-checking is best done before the story appears, rather than afterwards. The underage druggie did not exist. Never had existed. Fiction had been presented as fact. The Pulitzer Prize cut short the writer’s career, cast a pall over the competence of her editors, and did the newspaper involved no good, either.

Although awards for TV and film actors do not tend to generate probes into the past of the winners, they can, nonetheless, serve as a public demonstration of why most actors should shut up except when speaking a good script. When they use their own words, they turn the Oscars ceremony into designer car-crash showbiz.

Coming unglued and talking (or weeping) drivel, as Sally Field and Gwyneth Paltrow have done at the Oscars is no more than a harmless diverting personal mistake. More serious is consciously duplicitous use of the awards concept.

Undoubtedly the most egregious example of this was when the late President Richard Nixon brought Elvis Presley to the White House to award him a symbolic Deputy Sheriff shield in the War against Drugs. At the time of this public award, Elvis was already deep into the drug-ingestion which would kill him shortly afterward. Nor was this a secret.

But awkward facts were not going to get in the way of a great photo opportunity for an unpopular president. So up they stood, the two of them, in front of the cameraman, the President beaming as he handed the shiny shield to the bloated, bejewelled and demonstrably befuddled pop star. The latter’s glazed grin in the resultant photograph indicates that he was footless, legless and clueless at the time. An unforgettable contribution to a drug-free America ... the same kind of amoral opportunism surfaced when Norah Jones won a fistful of Grammy awards. In her case, it wasn’t the singer who was opportunistic. It was her father, whose 15 minutes of fame for playing the sitar had happened decades earlier.

He came lashing out of obscurity to claim paternity, thereby giving Jones a chance to smack him straight back into obscurity by crisply stating that, since he’d left her mother when Norah was a toddler and had been a consistently absent father thereafter, his bid for a share in his daughter’s awards was unjustified. He must have been one sorry sitar-strummer.

Despite all their implicit risks, award schemes are beloved of PR companies and of sponsors alike. Sponsors get to dress up, rub shoulders with the famous or transiently worthy, pat them on the back and be pictured with them.

Consequently, these days, we’re up to our armpits in awards. One for everybody in the audience: if you stay upright and reasonably civil, you’re likely, sooner or later, to win one. If you buy good suits, you might even win a best-dressed award, like Jim McDaid.

For all the good it did him.

Whatever about best-dressed awards, the key type to eschew are the lifetime achievement awards. They’re the kind they give you to acknowledge the fact that you didn’t get one, earlier, when you should have, and won’t die until they make it up to you.

For ESB and Rehab, joint sponsors of the prize now sitting on a shelf with a tea cosy keeping the heat in it for Cian O’Connor, this weekend was fraught. But, longer-term, they may decide the 2004 People of the Year Awards were not a bad deal, at all, at all.

Their respective PR people will tot up the media mentions of their scheme and sponsor. The performance of PR companies is often measured by the media mentions they generate for their clients. (They’ll find two in this column alone.) The total is unlikely to be less than last year’s. They may even find they did better, BECAUSE the horse was under a cloud, than they’d have done if the horse had been cloudless.

But will they give Waterford Glass a sugar lump to thank him for causing all this extra coverage? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.