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This sketch came from the story about Tesco wanting to do something about how much food is wasted, by us and them.

CHARACTERS:
MARKETING EXEC
PUBLIC RELATIONS (PR) 1
PUBLIC RELATIONS (PR) 2

ANNOUNCER: Tesco chucked away 30,000 tonnes of food in the first half of this year. If you laid all that end-to-end you’d have three rockets the size of Wales going to the moon and back. Their Marketing Department decided they had to do something.

MARKETING EXEC: OK guys. 30,000 tonnes of food in a dustbin: not looking good. We don’t look good looking bad. We need ideas, so I’ve come to my ideas guys. Go.

PR 1: Er – we’re PR? Like, we do the spin thing? We don’t actually change anything?

PR 2: Yeah – like, we change the way people think about the thing we can’t change.

MARKETING EXEC: Yep, yep. Understood. People buy salad: it rots in their fridge. We know that. We need to make them happy about that.

PR 2: What, like make it fashionable? We need a Damien Hurst salad shark.

PR 1: Wow – yeah. We could sponsor a whole art prize, where you could get like – kids – making sculptures with cabbage leaves …

MARKETING EXEC: Guys. Guys. It’s not just salad. We have to chuck almost half our bakery stuff too.

PR 1: Who buys a cake and then doesn’t eat it?

PR 2: Dieters. We could lobby parliament to criminalize the 5:2 mentalists.

PR 1: Or get Jamie or Hugh to do a series entirely on left-overs.

PR 2: Stale leftovers.

PR 1: The benefits of mould. “Penicillin: the new wonder diet.”

MARKETING EXEC: Loving the creativity guys. Loving it. But maybe a bit more of the workable stuff and less of the salmonella lawsuit area?

PR 2: OK. We could weigh Job Centre Plus chavs and employ the obese ones. End of the day: feed them the leftover bakery items.

PR 1: Awesome! They could be in an open pen by the tills. We could dress them in animal onesies and get a TV company interested.

PR 2: Fatties food fight!

MARKETING EXEC: Again – loving the spark, guys. Just … maybe a bit too close to a human zoo? Not au fait with all the legal technicalities, but I’m pretty sure we can’t lock people up and make them eat stale eclairs.

PR 2: OK. Got it. Make everyone Instagram their fruit bowls & fridges.

PR 1: That’s so 2012. No-one in Hoxton’s doing that now. It’s all raffia work and home knitting.

MARKETING EXEC: So basically what you’re saying is we can’t make people like salad, or eat their food before it goes off.

PR 1: No.

PR 2: As I said, we can’t actually change anything, no.

MARKETING EXEC: Great. Let’s just open up a food bank in the car park then. I hear food banks are the new Granita.

END