Whilst all the stories about a hard man slave-driving poor, lowly paid northerners are great fun, they are simply not true.Dave was incredibly protective of us, he was like a father-figure to me (I was only 19 and new to London when I joined his brand new agency as the first creative). Everyone who worked hard - and had a modicum of talent - did well, even financially.It was the nearest thing to a meritocracy one could have.That's why I stayed there ten years, turning down offers from many other great agencies of the era.

As usual we were trying to provoke, be subversive, anything to create a reaction.Well this one certainly worked in that regard.Read the copy, I couldn't have been much more insulting! Anyway I was called into Dave's office and he told me Thorn had just fired us because of this ad. Apparently their Chairman played golf with Ted Heath. I thought that was my time up, back to Sheffield and unemployment.Whilst it must have galled him to lose a creative (and profitable) account, ever protective of his people, Dave just told me not to worry and said "fuck 'em, it's a brilliant ad, they don't deserve us"What more motivation would you need to work your nuts off for someone!

I was pleased to see the Holsten Export X-certificate lager cinema spot again on your site. I ripped that idea off from an old Benny Hill sketch using bad editing (always intellectual references eh haha). I remember a nightmare pre-production meeting with a very good but volatile Irish client, cool name of Frank Cockayne: Director Richard Sloggett was a spectator as Frank tore the approved (and successfully researched) script apart in the meeting, threatened to cancel the paid for shoot, fire the agency and basically nuke Great Britain. I've never seen a client so angry and to this day, I have no idea why or what brought this outburst on because it was all smooth going till this point. So we literally had to make it up there and then until he approved it to shoot a couple of days later! I don't know whether the end result was better or worse for it, but it was real cavalier, think on your feet stuff.

There were two more after that - one I don't have and the final one, Psycho shot by Graham Rose that won at D&AD I still do.

I always loved the DDB print ad with the guy leaning into the open window of a campervan, just the very stiff pose was so unnaturally weird.

So I wanted to do a similar, graphic thing for this but we couldn't find a model that could stand, bent over with legs absolutely vertical (your body natural compensates by leaning the legs back slightly).

I was complaining to Axel about it and he said "what, you mean like this...?" and did the pose.

So that is indeed Axel Chaldecott with hair, in his first, and as far as I'm aware, only, modelling role.

Dave, whilst I have have nowhere near everything I did, I do have many more, but no more time today. If you're tired of receiving them, don't be afraid to say so...

This is where the long line "Why move to the middle of nowhere when you can move to the middle of London?" came from. There were so many development agencies around the UK at the time and they ALL talked about how close they were to London. The second paragraph gave birth to the TV idea.

I remember this being the first nudity on a 48-sheet (although she's not technically completely nude) and as such it got a lot of media coverage.I was too junior at the time so Gordon went off to the Bahamas with Johnny Thornton and John's missus at the time, Alex, was the model.

I haven't got the very first ad I ever did. It was a small space ad - a full top to bottom column of the FT as a completely black panel with the headline at the bottom WHAT THE NATWEST TOWER WOULD LOOK LIKE WITHOUT THORN LIGHTING. I remember Dave loving it because it basically hijacked the entire page. Wish I'd kept it. This is the first colour ad I got to do, and it got into D&AD.

This kind of contextual advertising is so commonplace and seems lame nowadays but back then, using the location as part of the idea was pretty rare

Not everything we had to work on had great possibilities, even GGT had to do it's share of jobbing posters and such...

I used to love writing the copy for these, they were so direct and in your face.

Although it's a mere trade ad, I always liked the American style ballsiness of the headline. Trotty taught me well....

As you know, Dave heavily influenced us with American styles, and Sedelmaier was all the rage at the time. We won the Polycell account off some big international agency (think it may have been Lintas, not sure) and did a whole campaign trying to mimic his style, but in print...

I think there was a sense that we were quite arrogant, rude and isolationist at the time, we absolutely weren't. We genuinely respected the great agencies's work, we just weren't David Abbott and never could hope to be, so we just did our own thing. Which by and large tended to be a little more working class in tone.

If we ever offended anyone in the industry it was out of naïveté or poor judgement, not malice. It was a truly helpful place and we literally saw a team (sometimes more than one) every day of the week for years. As an example, my current partner in Thailand Jeff Curtis tells me he used to come in with his book to see me, I really do not remember because we saw that many people, and tried to help everyone

Very early days when we were working on Knirps umbrellas, Dave told me to do a branded line because no one had heard of the brand. I said "what the fook's a branded line when it's at home?" He explained "it's when the brand name is integrated into the line" and off the top of his head he said "sort of like...you can't k-nacker a k-nirps" I burst out laughing and said "that's fooking brilliant" so he went ahead and used it! From then on...Grow nice 'uns with Fisons So Farley's So Good You'll be Amazed at a Mazda and so on (and on and on....) Not surprising we did That'll Be The Daewoo; Hit The Hut etc at dfgw!

We had to get approval from The Daily Telegraph for this, and they turned down the original headline which was "The Telegraph is moving even further to the right"It was my first helicopter flight (ah those were the days, it would be a stock shot now)

A lot of our early work derived from Dave's love of American advertising - not necessarily flowery but poke you in the eye, incontrovertible argument stuff . He used to love Ed McCabe's headlines because (he said) you could always end them with "...you cunt". Hence this one...

I often don't recall who I did a particular piece of work with, because before I teamed up with Big Dave, Dave T used to encourage us all to mix, so whilst I had partners Andy Lawson, followed by Sam Hurford, I used to wander in and out of people's offices and sit and rap ideas, so consequently ended up creating ideas with almost everyone - Axel, Steve, Nick Wray, Pete Gatley, Dave Cook, Chris Bardsley, Neil Sullivan etc. As far as I'm aware, no other agency worked like this. It was Trotty that decided to try me and Big Dave as a team, and we became the longest running unit there.

But I DO remember the two Linda Lusardi posters were done with Sam Hurford, reason being Sam wanted to use her for the LWT poster I sent you earlier and she came into our corner office on Great Pulteney Street to do a casting (she'd never done a product shoot before only Page 3).

So we're sitting there having a pleasant chat when Sam tells her she would be shot in a revealing swimsuit. So she says, "oh ok, you need to see my body then" and started to undress. Sam quickly closed the blinds and we're sitting there wondering what to say to this top page 3 girl in her skimpy see through undies.So we asked her if she'd mind doing another poster for us, a local northern brand, posing as a (dressed) barmaid.

I was probably around 21 at the time, not long down from Sheffield, and thinking I can't believe we're actually getting paid for this! Me mates back home would have paid good money to do what I was doing.

Cadbury's Creme Eggs via LWT

When Big Dave and I pitched Cadbury's Creme Eggs, our campaign idea "How Do You Eat Yours?" (which lasted an amazing 23 years!) required a LOT of executions. That was easy in the tv because we did many vignettes to a cod knock off of "50 ways to leave your lover". Paul Simon refused to play ball, or egg, for some reason....

But they didn't have the money to do multiple press executions, so we proposed the same principle as LWT. By pre-printing a coloured egg on just one sheet of the 48-sheets twelve sheets, we then placed it in various positions to draw around - this example is sheet four on the top half. The single sheet adshel size was also pre-printed but the egg was always in the same place of course.

A single sheet example, the egg was always in this position

CCE 48 sheet using 4 pre-printed sheets

One of the most popular CCE posters

This is the last Creme Eggs poster I can find.

I really liked Aloysius (although no-one requested it) - it was a mean looking teddy bear with the egg in one paw and chainsaw in the other "This will be vicious, Aloysius". Brideshead Revisited was on air at the time.

We had a very funny meeting up at Bourneville. Imagine the Brummie accent:

"What koind of noiyme is Aloy-sius? (pronounced as it's spelt) And vicious doosn't roim with it anywoy"

But they were good sports and let us do it

We'd just won Morrisons, the massive northern supermarket chain, but the campaign we pitched with bombed in research. Dave wanted me and Big Dave to work urgently on a new campaign so we could go and present it after the bad research news.

Except Big Dave was about to fly to Corfu with Spencer Rowell for a week to shoot a brochure for Falmers Jeans, which we'd also just won.

Dave T was pissed off it was just a brochure and Big Dave was pissed off because he was looking forward to a week long hot location gig, we'd been working pretty damn hard.

So Trotty said emphatically (and by that I mean it was not up for discussion): "Right, Grubby - you go with him, and don't come back without a campaign"

It was a very aggressive statement, but I think secretly, although I doubt he'll admit it, Trotty just wanted to give us both a rewarding break (as I said, contrary to legend, he was very kind and supportive of us). However, we DID need to return with a campaign, and between sunbathing, drinking, speedboats, fast cars and motorbikes, plus a lot of photography, we created a massive, long running tv campaign "More reasons to shop at Morrisons" - that branding again.

This is my only surviving print example, and the till register flags give its age away. And when I say long running, Morrisons removed this slogan from their trucks...2 years ago (I don't know whether that says a lot about Morrisons or the slogan?)

I did this with Axel, and no, he wasn't creeping in the rafters and Chas & Di's nuptials, it's a stock shot, and we we allowed to use it because Thorn did actually provide the lighting.

This is an interesting one Dave, that typifies GGT's approach.

We had Mazda Cars for many years, and they sold every single car they imported. In those days, Japanese imports were subject to a 1% maximum import quota, so they simply were not allowed to sell anymore.

But the reason they advertised was to hike their prices - the only way they could increase profits, whereas the Europeans manufacturers (Audi; BMW; VW; Saab etc) could import as many as they liked.

So we did this very copy-heavy campaign based on sales statistics from various Euro countries.

The point is, they'd never have won any awards, they weren't designed to (in fact nothing GGT ever did was designed to, it just did).

If people thought anything we did was rubbish, it was usually done that way for a reason (and sometimes it simply WAS rubbish!)

There are six of these, followed by two one offs, and then we did a whole new campaign which was reviled in the industry, primarily because Gordon had art directed them with a full-colour bleed left page and all-copy right page, but the mazda logo was a massive, stencil style cutout across the full width of the photograph. Everyone assumed the client had demanded bigger logo etc...it wasn't. Personally i thought it was a superb design, but then I've always been into logo design. Sadly I cannot find any of these, but there were some pretty cool visuals.

Meanwhile, the copy-based campaign....

My reward for doing this brief (apart from the pleasure of working on a car poster) was getting sent to the press launch of the RX-7 Convertible, to race it around Bruntingthorpe with Jeremy Clarkson and other road testers. Not a bad gig for an uneducated young oik from Sheffield :-)

Not even sure why I kept this Honeywell b2b ad, or why it's such poor quality.

I think it was the back story:

We had a receptionist I really fancied and when we were doing this ad, we had no money for a model as the elephant took up the budget (we had it to paint it!)

So I said "why don't we use Jane, one of our PAs, and we can pay her with lunch" Jane was the receptionist's best mate and she said she'd only do it if her mate could join the lunch, which is what I was hoping. So off we went to a posh place called Boulestin (remember that with a tent-covered doorway just off the piazza in Covent Garden?)

Anyway, I was given such a hard time by Trotty for putting in a 150 quid lunch bill but said it was still cheaper than hiring a model (this was the early 80s remember when a 150 quid lunch was not cheap)

Crap ad though...

We wanted to use Bailey's famous over the shoulder shot for this but he wouldn't allow us. He gave the excuse that he'd get knee-capped (but I think he just didn't like the ad)