On Friday Kim and Neil attended the Clarion Awards ceremony, organised by the IVCA (International Visual Communications Association) and held at BAFTA. These awards recognise best practice in communicating the importance of corporate and social responsibility, sustainability, social inclusion and ethical debate. The awards cover corporate media, mainstream film, TV, radio, the performing arts and advertising. Which is how we came to be there, accepting an award in the advertising category for our ‘Grrr’ film for Honda diesel.

It was a somewhat different type of event from the sort of awards ceremonies to which the ad industry is accustomed. Attended by senior business people, CSR specialists, government types and a few celebs. The awards were introduced by Moira Stuart, which is a bit more classy than the usual ad awards presenters – Jimmy Carr, etc. I was seated next to Nicholas Parsons (nice man) and our award was presented by actress Rita Tushingham of ‘A Taste of Honey’ fame.

Also unusually, winners got to make an acceptance speech. There was even a letter of support from the Prince of Wales, which was read out. A bit like the Academy Awards. Kim refused to have anything to do with this so Neil had to stumble his way through thankyous to Honda UK, for their trust and belief in the power of dreams and to Kenichi Nagahiro, designer of the Honda diesel engine, without the inspiration of whose hate, none of this would have been possible, etc.

The list of other winners was pretty diverse, including Woman’s Hour (for outstanding contribution to radio), The Guardian (for their Living Our Values publication), the movie An Inconvenient Truth, and Unseen UK, a book of photographs by Royal Mail employees.
We try to be a ‘good’ company so it was actually quite an honour to be recognised in these awards.

Kim (above): ‘No way am I going up on that stage.’