Let’s Go Fly A Kite!

This coming Monday, the 15^th of December, will see the 21^st Anniversary of Mary Poppins opening in the West End. 

(the London premiere, at the Prince Edward Theatre, took place forty years after the film opened in UK Cinemas, December 17, 1964)

And a big Business of Pleasure Happy Birthday! to Dick Van Dyke who co-starred in the movie as Bert, the world’s least likely Londoner, who turns 100 today!

PL Travers, the Australian-British author, lived to 96. 

The first of her eight Poppins Books was published in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, the last in 1988, at the peak of the Lawson (Nigel not Nigella) Boom, and the tour of the musical is currently playing at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, before opening at the Liverpool Empire on the 14^th of January.

So what is the enduring appeal of Mary Poppins, now 91 and still going strong?

(I have some 'form' here: I was five years old when my mother took me to see the film at the Odeon, High Street Kensington, and forty-five when I worked on the London Production as Sales Manager for Cameron Mackintosh.*

To me the power of the wind-borne Nanny lies in her ability to the re-ignite the imaginations of all the inhabitants of 17 Cherry Tree Lane, young and old, and with imagination comes greater empathy and increased emotional intelligence.

In the first book of the series, Mary Poppins uses a magical pair of compasses to take Jane and Michael Banks on a whirlwind trip around the world.

In the books, film and stage musical the children enter a magical world through Bert the chimney sweep’s pictures.

 Whereas children today have their own magical portals, such as the internet, VR and AI, to whisk them away, at the speed of thought, to the furthest flung shores of the imagination.**

But will a dependency on these wormholes into other worlds make the future contributors to The Business of Pleasure, on whose shoulders the survival of our creative industries will rest, less, well, creative?  Less able to think for themselves? 

The jury is still out on this one, and well may be out for some considerable time. However there is a lot of research taking place at the moment, and perhaps it will all come down to the level of confidence possessed by those future creators, as one recent study of AI usage, conducted with 800+ adults, in over 40 countries, suggests:***

’...For participants who viewed themselves as highly creative, adoption was driven by exposure and not disclosure (i.e. knowing ideas were from AI).  But for lower-creativity participants, knowing the source of an idea did affect the adoption of that idea.  Perhaps people high in self-reported creativity relied less on source cues when adopting ideas because they were more confident in their ability to judge an idea’s creative merit. Regardless, our results suggest that (self-reported) creative people will adopt ideas on the basis of their content. Knowing the source does not matter. In a world where humans have difficulty distinguishing if the content was AI generated, these findings suggest people high in (self-reported) creativity may not be ‘duped’ into adopting AI ideas.’

One person who does not lack confidence in his ideas is best-selling author and podcaster Professor G (aka Scott Galloway) who did some kite flying of his own last week on a webinar showcasing his predictions for 2026, the top seven being: 

1)     AI stocks correct (massively)

2)     The data centre bubble bursts (dramatically)

3)     Nvidia and Open AI duopoly comes under siege (mainly from Chinese competition)

4)     Big Tech stock pick; Amazon (SEE BELOW)

5)     Space becomes the next ‘thing’ (and the sky's the limit)

6)     Best investment you don’t have access to?  TikTok US (ring-fenced for Trump's allies)

7)     Short-form video and AI meteors strike Hollywood (with cinema audiences still below pre-pandemic levels)

Galloway’s Big Tech stock pick, Amazon, is based on his belief that the firm’s long term  investment in increased automation will pay off during 2026 by greatly reducing labour costs.

The great American author, Kurt  Vonnegut, tackled the subject of automation, and its impact on displaced workforces, in his first novel, Player Piano, published in 1952.

The book takes its title from the revolutionary nineteenth-century invention which used air from a bellows to ‘hit’ a piano’s keys as sequenced by paper rolls, with holes punched out, which encoded the pieces of music to be played. 

Over thirty years before radio was widely available, these Player Pianos brought classical music and popular songs into homes and bars without anyone needing to learn to play a note of music, or pay for a pianist to play for you.

Unlike Player Pianos, which require no knowledge of music, AI Large Language Models are great if you have a solid grasp of the subject you’re working on.

And extremely dangerous (operationally, reputationally and vexationally) if you don’t.

My personal view, at this very early stage in the AI revolution, is that the most significant long-term benefit for those of us engaged the creative side of The Business of Pleasure is the opportunity to up-skill rather than out-source.

And thereby use the hugely powerful (and currently low cost) resources AI can bring us to get a better grip on our core competencies, from scriptwriting to acting, cinematography to composing, portraiture to ....piano-playing, etc.

Or to quote legendary songsmiths, the Sherman brothers, in Mary Poppins:

'…With tuppence for paper and strings

You can have your own set of wings

With your feet on the ground, you're a bird in a flight

With your fist holding tight to the string of your kite.'

DT

12 December 2025

*The World Premiere of Mary Poppins was at the Bristol Hippodrome, where it played for seven weeks before heading to the West End.  I refused to allow the primary agents (the authorised dealers with allocations for the London show) to use their imaginations and purchase extra tickets for the London run before seeing the show for themselves. I arranged for them to travel down to Bristol, to let them see the show and meet the cast, and as the lights went up after the performance I circulated asking for feedback:  “I couldn’t make out a single note, DT,” a legend of the business replied to my horror, before adding: “All I could hear was the sound of cash registers.”

**I remember my children first entering the cybersphere, before they could read, via floppy discs of Donald and Mickey. When I mentioned this to an octogenarian Dutch Futurologist, and how, as parents, we tried to balance the computer-time with physical activity, he replied: “If that makes you feel better, great. But to your children there is no difference, it is all the same world to them.”

***How AI ideas Affect the Creativity, Diversity and Evolution of Human Ideas: Evidence from a Large, Dynamic Experiment. Joshua Ashkinaze, Julia Mendelsohn, Li Qiwei, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert ACM Collective Intelligence, July 2025.