THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about Parker's recollection is the abrupt change of heart that he says Saatchi had when his first film venture failed. That was that. This is a theme that recurs in Saatchi's story and, spectacularly, in his art collecting: radical and absolute changes of direction that are then presented as the new reality, with a denial that history exists or imposes any responsibilities. Bold self-invention. When I meet Saatchi at County Hall, I discover yet another life that might have been: he sometimes wishes he had gone into journalism instead of advertising. He reads the papers for a long time every day, apparently - all the papers - and re-edits them in his head. It's one of his favourite pastimes. But it was as one half of the advertising partnership Saatchi & Saatchi that he became famous in the 1970s. Combining Charles's creative expertise and his brother Maurice's brilliant business sense, Saatchi & Saatchi became known as the hardest- hitting agency in Britain. Edward Booth-Clibborn, who chaired the advertising industry's D&AD awards (won again and again by Saatchi) saw Charles as a genuinely creative copywriter: "For a long time advertising was saturated with Americanese, but he used our own language with English colloquialisms. He is a very talented writer. He ran two sorts of accounts - one sort where he made his name, and others that were the hard business." The high-profile accounts included the Health Education Council: the anti-smoking posters warning "You can't wash your lungs clean"; the image of a pregnant man used to promote contraception.

                                                                                                                                                                            

Photos, right: Vermin Death Stack by Dave Falconer (1998). Left, below: Vermin Death Star by David Falconer (2000-2002)

Saatchi & Saatchi got the ultimate account, however, when they were hired by the Conservative party in 1978, the first truly professional use of advertising by a British political party. In the summer of that year, amid Tory fears that James Callaghan's Labor government was about to go to the country on the back of relatively good polls, Saatchi & Saatchi came up with their notorious poster of a dole queue with the slogan Labor Isn't Working. It was a riotous success and may have contributed to Callaghan's decision to delay, thus blundering into the winter of discontent. Once again, Saatchi's path crossed that of Booth-Clibborn, who worked - voluntarily - as Callaghan's advertising man in the 1979 election. "I wrote a letter to Callaghan saying that with the arrival of Charles Saatchi the role of advertising in politics would change. I think what was revolutionary about Labor Isn't Working was that it summed up everything with a one-liner - it was a stunning poster. They really did change political advertising." But all this seems a long time ago. By the end of the 1980s, Saatchi & Saatchi had lost a lot of their mystique; share prices fell, they rowed with the increasingly unhappy Tory party, and an attempt to buy Midland Bank was ridiculed by financial journalists as insane hubris. It was not until 1995 that Charles and Maurice were driven out of their own company and opened a new agency, M&C Saatchi, but there is no question that by 1987-8 the Saatchi myth was dented.