That every great organisation goes through peaks and troughs is a truism to which the Executive Board of the Threadbone Corporation can readily attest. From the giddy heights of November’s Mechanically Recovered Meat Extruder of the Year 2020 Award to the lows of last week’s internecine warfare [Pimp-my-Busgate], top executives are only too aware that a multinational conglomerate’s image is only as good as its latest Sydling St Nicholas Sun headline [“Less Great Heaving; More Great Balls-up”]. So it comes as no surprise that the powers that be in Dorset's largest corporate enterprise are looking to bounce back and put a week of adverse publicity firmly behind them.
Leaving nothing to chance, Deputy Chair Royston Binstock has taken to the airwaves on a regular basis this week, blitzing local radio and television studios in a series of in depth interviews designed, in the words of the immortal Mr Johnny Mercer, to “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative and not mess with Mr In-between”.*
* In future all mention of gender fluidity - however snide - as well as veiled allusions to hermaphroditism or indeterminate- / trans- gender issues - should be “run past the Editor” prior to publication. However, as the arresting officer said to his colleague after detaining a certain lady’s bicurious husband outside Sixpenny Handley Scout Hut in 1996, “on this occasion we’ll let this one go”.
Alongside that sustained mixed-media charm offensive comes news of what Mrs Threadbone and others will hope is the timely release of a new [promotional] film by distinguished French auteur Monsieur Pèlé Cûle [Je suis un camembert, Une journée dans la vie d’une baguette coquine, Pas ce soir Brenda] celebrating in typically Delphic - not to say impenetrable - French style nearly 25 years of development at the Great Heaving Science, Business and Arts Complex. The entrepreneurial and cultural hub was originally proposed and envisaged by Professor Thrupiece as long ago as 1973 and was brought to fruition (almost single-handedly save for several hundreds of thousand staff and other functionaries) by Mrs Amanda J Threadbone.
Variously described as “meaningless garbage”, “vapid sentimental ordure” and "a complete black and white wash”, the film’s alleged elevation of style over substance has drawn mixed reactions, uniting critics only in their sustained contempt for the project as a whole and the meretricious motives which appear to lie behind it. “Watching the film”, says outspoken cinema reviewer Rex Odeon Gaumont, “you would think that the Great Heaving development is one of civilisations most notable achievements - something to rank alongside the Corfe Mullen bypass or to be mentioned in the same breath as the Mr Threadbone Memorial Pole - but in reality, it’s just the largest, most transformational and most commercially successful multi-disciplinary project the world has ever known”.
As for the film itself, Mr Gaumont believes it is an obvious attempt to exemplify Jean Luc Godard’s famous dictum that “a story should have a beginning a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order” but with the added twist that "in this case it would probably have been wiser to dispense with all three".
Additional reporting by Our Great Heaving Special Correspondent Medea Hubbe.
EXCLUSIVE:
Promotional Video for the forthcoming release Great Heaving: Visions Magnifique
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