'I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.’
Jack Benny

I won my first prize at St Mary’s Primary School. 

Our teacher Mrs Hughes was an elderly Irish lady enamoured of times tables and using every inch of the exercise book. A strict disciplinarian, she was not afraid to issue reprimands with a wooden ruler to the rear. But I respected her for her fierce enthusiasms and academic ambition. She once had us 9-year-olds estimating the height of the church tower by measuring its shadow - a re-enactment of the experiment carried out on the pyramid at Giza by Thales of Miletus in the 6thcentury BC. 

One day Mrs Hughes invited us to participate in a speech competition. We would have to compose a short address about any subject that took our interest, and then deliver it to our assembled classmates.

The first challenge was to find a suitable topic. Football and telly were bound to be popular, and so I determined to expound on a more esoteric theme. I had always been interested in medieval history and had recently been given a colourful book about heraldry. It was a magical world of arms and armour; of argent, azure, mottoes and mantling. My book outlined the key terms and traditions, and explained that having a distinctive coat of arms emblazoned on your tunic or shield made tidying up after a battle much more efficient.

So I decided to share my new enthusiasm for heraldry. And to amuse my classmates I would draft my own coat of arms. True to the spirit of the ancient craft I needed to design something that summarised the things that most mattered to me. This took a certain amount of unaccustomed self-reflection. Eventually within a shield device I drew some crossed ping pong bats and a lump of bread pudding. Since most coats of arms also had some animal participation, I introduced Granddad’s bull terrier Chips supporting my shield on one side, and the Carroll family guinea pig Bubbles on the other. 

On the allotted day I delivered my oration with the confidence of youth, and Mrs Hughes awarded me first prize - as much I suspect for the abstruse subject matter as anything else. I confess I was rather pleased with myself.

My classmates, however, were less impressed, and mocked me unsparingly for weeks to come. Winning the competition had certainly not made me more popular. Nobody likes a smartarse.

I had learned for the first time that prizes have pitfalls. 

'Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.’
Billy Wilder

A recent analysis of Nobel Prize winners, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface (The Times, 22 April 2020), suggests that winning this most prestigious award can handicap scientists’ subsequent pioneering efforts. In the two years after receiving the Nobel Prize, winners’ research output, measured in citations, dropped by an average of 11 per cent, and took four years to recover. This phenomenon has been dubbed ‘the curse of the Nobel.’

'The Nobel prize has often been described as the kiss of death… You constantly get invited to all sorts of events, and even if you say no to 99 per cent of them, it can be very distracting.’
Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, winner of the 2009 Nobel prize in Chemistry

It seems that Nobel winners are befuddled by all the attention they receive. They can become complacent. And sometimes they are emboldened to explore esoteric areas of research that are of particular personal interest, rather than pursuing answers to the most pressing problems in their field.

‘Competitions are for horses, not artists.’
Bela Bartok

We may recognise ‘the curse of the Nobel’ in our own commercial world. We all love to award prizes, to celebrate success, to recognise and reward excellence. We like to think that accolades encourage healthy competition and worthwhile endeavour; that they set standards and educate the young.

But in my experience trophies can also prompt complacency, arrogance and affectation; and some of the awards events are sadly just festivals of conceit. Winners often develop a tendency to believe their own PR, ascribing success to their individual genius rather than to team collaboration. And some subsequently are less attentive to criticism, demanding to work only on the best briefs or their own pet projects. 

I wonder: Are prizes perilous? Would we win more if we awarded less? Would we just be better off without them?

'In the light of his love,
In the light of reflection.
What a world this world
Sometimes oh so it seems.
Eyes to the sky in the silver gift friendship.
Glittering prize
Is the price of lost love.’

Simple Minds, ‘Glittering Prize’ (C Burchill / J Kerr / M MacNeil / D Forbes)

 No. 285