It’s Awards Season – Time to Break Out the Hankies
If you’re hanging around the TV with little to do on Tuesday night you might want to make sure you’ve plenty of tissues around.
The Pride of Britain Awards – they’re the ones that reward real, everyday people for doing some quite remarkable things and for overcoming incredible odds – will be broadcast across the nation and a few million tears will almost certainly be shed.
There’s an unspoken rule about awards ceremonies…you can take the mickey tirelessly out of any awards bash EXCEPT the Pride of Britain Awards.
This is because while most awards ceremonies are built on the premise of rewarding extraordinary people (celebrities) for doing ordinary things (their jobs) the Pride of Britain awards are the polar opposite – rewarding ordinary people (us) for doing extraordinary things.
And this, ladies and gents, sets them apart. We may well poke fun at ourselves for blubbering uncontrollably into our Kleenex Mansize at the real life stories of triumph over adversity, but we can’t help but celebrate true heroics.
I’m not suggesting that the icons of screen, music and other arts don’t deserve a pat on the back for their efforts – anyone who does their job and does it well deserves that.
Some celebrities believe they’re undeserving of the acclaim. Legendary vaudevillian Jack Benny once said: “I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.”
Some believe it might just be cool to say awards are a bit crap. Mark Twain, for example, famously said: “To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.”
Some like to see the humour in their awards nominations. Like when James Taylor said: “I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.”
Or when Johnny Vegas more recently crowed: “You don’t want to be flattered and become big-headed by getting awards. But, well, I am.”
And some are more pragmatic about the honour. Like pop-star Pitbull, for example. His response when asked how much awards meant was straight to the point: “My kids can’t eat awards.”
And yet, some awards ceremonies still mean the world.
The CIPR awards (the annual PR Oscars for the uninitiated), still get the whole Brazen office buzzing.
The reward, if it comes, and desperate let-down if it doesn’t, is all about recognition from your peers for a job thoroughly well done. And, let’s be honest here – it certainly does nothing to harm the company credentials adding another ‘Agency of the Year’ plaque to an office wall or company letterhead already groaning with pats on the back from your contemporaries, does it?
Everyone deserves a pat on the back for going above and beyond, don’t they?
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