Mark Borkowski - The Art of the Prank

Author: Mark Borkowski

Mark Borkowski and his 30-strong agency BORKOWSKI PR are among the London media industry\"™s most talented practitioners of the craft of publicity, with Mark widely acknowledged as the contemporary authority on public relations. He trained in theatre publicity at the Wyvern Theatre, Swindon, and subsequently with Joan Littlewood\"™s Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Borkowski PR was founded in 1988, and grew rapidly by representing a broad spectrum of leading arts and entertainments stars, from the left-of-field (Archaos, Cirque du Soleil, Stomp, The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow) to the mainstream (The Bolshoi Ballet, The Kirov, The Royal Albert Hall, Sir Cliff Richard), to landmark TV (The Word, Spooks, Cracker, Our Friends In The North, Never Mind the Buzzcocks) and current theatre (Cabaret, The Glass Menagerie, MAMMA MIA!, Treats, The Last Laugh, A Model Girl). What distinguishes him from other publicists is the showmanship of his ideas. This is a man who has commissioned interviews with tap-dancing dogs, publicly auditioned parrots, cats and crocodiles, and was once frog-marched from the BBC for letting scorpions loose in a Green Room. There\"™s more; cow pat flinging competitions, sword-fighting workshops with Douglas Fairbanks, driving cars on two wheels across the Albert Bridge, a dull cheapest\"“ever book launch in a dirty launderette, an Action Man party in an NCP car park, a Vivienne Westwood dress for a doll, and a ballet for radio-controlled vacuum cleaners. He\"™s created a newspaper column written by a cat, and once walked an elephant into a fish and chip shop with the Andrews Sisters. Although the agency\"™s clients have included products and companies as diverse as Vodafone, Peugeot, Virgin Megastores and JCB, links with the arts remain strong. The roll call of major international stars includes Noel Edmonds, Michael Flatley, Macaulay Culkin, Damien Hirst, Michael Jackson, Joan Rivers, Eddie Izzard, Mikael Gorbachev, Graham Norton and Boy George. To publicise the agency\"™s tenth anniversary, Borkowski PR produced an exhibition and a book entitled Impropaganda: The Art of the Publicity Stunt. Mark is a regular performer on television, commenting on all matters concerning PR. In the spring of 2004 he presented the BBC 3 documentary How The War Was Spun on the use of censorship and cover-up during the 2nd Gulf War. Mark took to the stage of the Edinburgh Festival fringe in August 2004 with his show Son of Barnum: A Stunt Too Far? the history of the forgotten Hollywood publicists. Mark was then commissioned to write a book on the subject, due for publication in 2007.

From Mark Borkowski:

I love the notion of stunts and pranks if the end product generates meaningful content and lingers in the conscious. When Joey asked me to contribute to Pranks I had some great fun tripping down memory lane, and remember a bizarre prank show I staged with performance artist Dexter Augustus.

I have worked with the great and perverse Dexter, who staged daily shows in the front room of a respectable Edinburgh Morningside house (where “sex” is what nuggets of coal is packed in) to a maximum audience of six. He let the audience in for free and, on the basis that critics don’t pay for their seats, to retain the protocol of inequality, he paid each reviewer £10 to come in. He refused Ruby Wax entry because he didn’t like her coat.

On the roof of the house, he placed rave-sized speakers blasting out a repetitive egocentric two-minute ditty on a tape loop, which attracted police attention when local residents claimed they were being subjected to the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture. The coverage was superb. Continue reading “The Great and Perverse Dexter”