[D&AD] The lowdown on D&AD 2009

Like the Loeries, D&AD starts off with interminable inscrutable design awards. Packaging design. 2D design. Design with papier mâché. Design using bits of bats and a wooden spoon and treacle.

London doesn’t look a thing like Margate. No one’s wearing shorts, and the role of John Vlismas is played by Richard E Grant (he’s the guy from the Allan Gray ad). “Please don’t laugh at anything I say,” says Richard, who is hosting because Susan Boyle wasn’t available. No one does laugh, except when he calls it D&DA. Twice.

The design awards keep on coming like it’s Sky News. Didn’t I see exactly all of this just 15 minutes ago? Never mind. Environmental design. Book design. Excellence in kerning. Excellence in leading. Most sensitive use of a serif.

By the time the advertising awards roll around, just like in Margate, some people are jeering, everyone’s slurring, and someone has vomited in a handbag. A couple of Saffas win: Lowes’ immaculately entered Wally, and JWT’s “Researchers Wanted”. There’s a word for ads like “Researchers Wanted”. I can’t remember what it is, but I seem to recall it rhymes with “scram”.

Black Pencil time. Glasses break, dreams shatter, and somewhere a septum dislodges. No one except the winners pays any attention. Oh look, it’s those German designers again, picking up another Pencil for, um, Best Design by People that are German.

You emerge from the Roundhouse into a summer’s evening in Camden Town. It doesn’t look a thing like Margate: the people outside are much odder than the people you’ve just left inside. Some are wearing shorts.

• Deon Wiggett was a copywriter at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris\Johannesburg and King James. He moved to London last year, sold his soul to Satan and now works for the Daily Mail.

See also: Yellow Pencils for Lowe Bull, JWT