How to Lose a Million Quid
The Malcolm Hardee Awards are getting a good rise out of their latest crop of nominees – or one of them in particular. The awards honour Hardee – one of the greatest festival pranksters and publicity magnets – by giving out semi-satirical awards.
This year the committee chose to nominate US stand-up Bo Burnham for the inaugural ‘Act Most Likely to Make a Million Quid’ Award. Burnham’s London PR company, whose clients include a Wealth Management company and an insurance broking, risk assessment and financial services company, wrote to the Award organisers saying of Burnham: “making money is not what he’s driven by at all and (we) don’t think he’d be at all comfortable with receiving this award.”
As a consequence, the Malcolm Hardee judges have now nominated Burnham for their main Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality because “for a modern day stand-up comic not to be interested in money is entirely original”.
They have had a lot of sport with the PR company’s decision – award organiser John Fleming saying: “{Malcolm] would have admired Bo’s disregard for money. So we have asked the PR if Bo would like to lend us £500 or £1,000, which we promise to pay back. We haven’t had a reply yet, but we live in hope.”
What exactly drives people to make these decisions? Surely they know that the best thing they could have done was deflect the award nomination with wit and guile, rather than push their client right into the hands of any satirist who wants to have a go? The Malcolm Hardee awards have some serious satirical chops – let’s see where this goes and how little Burnham’s PR like it.
Burnham, being American, might have an excuse for not knowing how the Edinburgh Festival works, but his British PR ought to know better. Malcolm Hardee is surely laughing his ethereal socks off from beyond the grave at all this.