When I arrived at Dulwich Picture Gallery, it was unknown even to most Londoners. At the time, Gillette was running a major advertising campaign
for Rightguard and the slogan ‘Hands up if you’re wearing Rightguard, hands down if you’re not’ was one of the catchphrases of the day.

My idea was to get Gillette to plaster the Underground with big 12-sheet posters of the gallery’s painting St John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Guido Reni (left), with no wording except, in the bottom right corner, the name and address of DPG and the line ‘Sponsored by Rightguard’.

A friend in Gillette’s marketing department said: ‘It’s a wonderful idea but the ad agency will squash it for the simple reason that it isn’t theirs.’ Maybe so – but I shouldn’t have given up at that point, as I did.