Project: The launch of Idle in Provence
Where: Hôtel Lou Calen, Cotignac, Provence
When: 4 and 5 September 2026
Our role: Press strategy, media relations, and management of the launch weekend

Eric Idle has had a house above Cotignac since 1971. When he wrote a memoir about it, the obvious place to launch the book was London. It happened instead in a Provençal village of two thousand people, and we ran the comms surrounding it.

We managed: the press strategy, every interview, and the two days for the journalists we invited. That meant deciding which journalists to bring to a village an hour and a half from Nice, persuading them to come, negotiating the terms of every conversation with the author, and then building a weekend that gave each of them something they could not get anywhere else.

The press

Across the launch we secured and managed face to face interviews with Nice-Matin, the daily paper for the Var and the Côte d’Azur, the BBC, for its travel series The Specialist, Society Magazin in Vienna, Cité des arts in Provence, The Oldie, and HELLO! and The Australian Magazine. Le Soir in Belgium ran their interview ahead of the weekend. Exploring More carried a page on the launch in the UK.

Paris Match’s head of culture travelled to Cotignac for a feature timed to the French edition, with Eric’s French publisher joining, and we arranged for the day to continue at the hotel afterwards, so that a story set in a house in the hills also became a story about the village around it.

Every interview ran to an agreed brief, with topics submitted in advance, an embargo held across seven titles in four countries, and a clear line on the subjects the author would not discuss. Nobody crossed it.

The weekend

Two days, two films, a signing, a dinner and a village. We handled the guest list, the rooms, the transfers from the coast, the seating, and the running order, and we were on the ground for three days so that every journalist was met, walked to the right place, and looked after from arrival to departure.

The bit nobody puts on a website

The schedule changed six times in the final week. An eighty-something-year-old author, quite reasonably, did not want four interviews back to back on the morning after a late night. Journalists were driving in from Toulon and flying in from Vienna. One cancelled from Botswana.

Getting that right is most of the job. Every journalist who travelled got their interview, none of them got a rushed one, and the author was protected throughout. That is what you hire a press team for, and it is the part you only notice when it goes wrong.