PETER CRAWLEYponders a theatre critic under the influence

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from work, which gave me a cocktail of responses – about two parts amusement to one part alarm. “Hi Peter,” it read. “There is vodka for you in the office.”

Maybe you get messages like this all the time, particularly if you happen to be a hard-boiled detective or Don Draper, but this was news to me. Even as my correspondent told me whose desk this bottle had been left beneath for safe keeping (journalism has really pulled itself together since the mid-20th century) I had a sudden pang of anxiety about what my paymasters must think of me.

I quickly figured out who sent it by running through a series of ignored PR e-mails: “Hi Peter, wondering what is the best daytime address for delivery for you as we want to send you a bottle of . . . ” I hadn’t responded. There seemed to be something about “daytime delivery address”, “vodka” and “in honour of their sponsorship” that just didn’t sit right with me. The result, of course, is that I now have what Philip Marlowe would have referred to as an “office bottle”.

Of course, the PR company was just doing its job. I wondered: if its client had manufactured USB keys, chocolate-covered nougat snacks or anything that wasn’t 80 per cent proof, would such a daytime delivery have seemed so potentially compromising?

There’s nothing markedly different, for instance, between this and previously sent launch trinkets: a comb (“Comb” through the programme with us!), a keyring (“Unlock” the secrets of this year’s festival!), a lollipop (This year sort of “sucks”). But alcohol draws more attention to how corruptible the relationship between sponsor, art and audience can look because of its obvious effect: are you under the influence?

The reason I bring it up is that I recently saw another vodka bottle tucked away for safe keeping within the logo of an upcoming arts festival, which has rebranded itself in honour of its sponsor.

This follows the same company’s sponsorship of yet another festival’s visual arts programme, in which the company’s advertising images were included in one of the exhibitions. These were specially commissioned works, from some bona fide artists, but like a cola- drink mural or a novel with a jeweller in its title, they were ads nonetheless.

Everybody needs financial assistance in these troubled times, and let he or she who is without vodka throw the first shot glass. But even from a sponsor’s point of view, isn’t discreet placement a much wiser move than the heavy branding exercise of getting in on the act? Wouldn’t we appreciate any patron whose dough allows art to happen without them having to shove their product into other people’s logos, galleries or desks?

Debate continues between state bodies and beverage lobby groups about the merits of alcohol sponsorship, but most punters have no enormous misgivings about beer-sanctioned music festivals or whiskey-enabled film festivals. There will always be a delicate negotiation between who pays the piper and who calls the tune, but the relationship should carry a warning: Please, enjoy sponsorship sensibly.