IN this week’s lecture, I intend to talk pith. I can see several of you rising to make observations, but I think I can anticipate what these are, and can tell you that it is all a matter of opinion. Making one’s opinions known pithily is pretty much the province of Twitter these days, but there’s still room for the much more physically public practice of taking part in a protest and brandishing a placard. (Despite my opening bombshell sentence, even I hadn’t anticipated so many p’s in one sentence). The People’s Story Museum in Edinburgh has been collecting placards and other protest paraphernalia (enough p’s – please!) for an exhibition to be held at the capital’s City Art Centre next month.

These will cover such agreeable subjects as independence, Brexit and Trump, and are expected to evince titters and smirks, given the creativity and pun-work that will probably be on display

Protest is pretty much the province of the left and, for a long time, you could hardly demonstrate against noise at the bowling club dance without finding that someone had mysteriously supplied the assembled mob with a load of placards bearing the words “Socialist Worker” at the top. As I argued in a previous controversial address, the SWP should have set up a business franchise for its placards, which would be so successful they could eventually go public and float the party on the stock exchange.

Never happened. Meanwhile, the downside to their sort of placards is that they’re all, perhaps appropriately, uniform, unfunny and sanctioned somewhere (and will generally read something like “Get the Tories out”; unlikely bystander – “Oh, all right”). It’s better when people make their own, which wasn’t much of a thing until television’s Father Ted took his “Down with this sort of thing” placard to the mass protest by himself and Dougal (“Careful now”) against the local cinema showing an arguably blasphemous film called The Passion of Saint Tibulus.

Unfortunately, unlike most protests, theirs actually achieved something since, by drawing attention to the film, which contained lewd scenes, they made it the most popular film in Craggy Island’s history. After that episode, folk started taking copies of Ted’s placard to protests in reality-style life, and then coming up with their own clever and creative efforts. From the independence referendum in 2014, I liked “Aye have a dream”, which worked on several levels. As with most reactionary causes, the No campaign offered little by way of creativity and humour, and, after the result, it was left to cynics of no known affiliation to mock Scotia Minor with Braveheart-style mickey-taking memes: “They’ll never take our freedom … because we’ll formally decline the offer in a democratic election.”

Disaffected losers across the pond also protested against the democratic election of President Dennis Trump, if that is the name, with placards that included: “We shall overcomb.”

Thus the onward march of placards, which have come a long way, historically speaking. While I was tapping phones and taking long-range photographs to research this piece, I came across a reference on Wikipedia to (wait for it) … The Affair of the Placards. This occurred in yonder France in 1534 and involved putting up posters protesting about “the horrific, great and unbearable abuses of the holy mass”. Somebody even put one on the bedroom door of King Francis I.

That must have put his gas at a peep, because he changed his policy, though I cannot tell you exactly how as the detail of religious history turns my disbelieving mind to mush.

Placards may not change minds much, but at their best they can create a mood and even dissipate tensions, while letting decent ratepayers know which side has the best jokes. Whoever came up with “I’m so angry I made a sign”, or “Not usually a sign guy but … Jeez!”, would probably get my vote.