Bored at home during the pandemic, old time City PR men Byron Ousey and Richard Constant wondered why there was no blockbuster TV series about PR people.

There are loads about bankers and lawyers. Advertisers have Madmen. What about us?

They intend to put this right via a book they feel is ripe for TV serialisation.

The style of Spinners: To The Edge and Beyond is best described as Jilly Copper does PR.

The female characters are all called Stephanie, Lucy and Melissa. They are highly likely to be statuesque honey-blondes.

The men are Oscar, Robert, Hugo and Mungo – all absolutely top chaps who are fiercely competitive long-distance runners, or similar.

My favourite sentence is this: “Lucy had driven down with Robert in his Range Rover.”

You need to know more, right?

No one ever listens to someone speak, they “admire her polished delivery”. And nothing ever happens at 3pm, but on the dot of 1500 hours.

Mungo is a bad lad – a womanising drunk who gets his comeuppance and no mistake.

He has to take two months off, undergo counselling and “will not receive his partner shares for a year”.

No shares for a year? It’s rough at the top end of global communications.

The book isn’t going to win any diversity awards, I offer. “There’s a lesbian,” counters Ousey. Fair enough. Go lesbians.

Whom do they think should play the lead roles, play them, basically?

Constant wants Aidan Tuner from Poldark. Ousey would prefer Dominic West.

I think they are kidding.

The PR agency at the centre of this high-stakes international communications intrigue is The Silke Partnership. It even has its own website (silkepartnership.com) with comically good-looking AI generated images of the executive team.

It is entirely possible this fake agency will be offered high-level work, of course.

The book is set in the recent past and the characters operate in what they call “no-man’s-land”, just outside regulation, where lonely CEOs are set up by bankers and lawyers and need rescuing by their comms people – folk who light up and dominate board rooms, averting disaster.

Social media doesn’t appear much. Says Constant: “There is still a generation of leaders around who don’t do social media. And it’s not a world it would be credible for the two of us to write about. The speed of it, does make the job infinitely harder,” he concedes.

Both men think the PR industry gets a rough ride from commentators and journalists.

Isn’t that because they associate it with lying?

“There is a difference between being economical with the disclosure and lying,” says Constant. And I guess that is what it comes down to. Because people not in PR would say there is no difference.

Perhaps super cool director Steve McQueen, along with Aidan Turner and Dominic West, will turn the world of international strategic communications into a Netflix smash hit, give PR the PR it feels it deserves.

If for any reason that doesn’t happen, then you can just read the book.

** Spinners: To The Edge and Beyond is available on Amazon.

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