What were they thinking? There they were, Charles and Maurice Saatchi, kings of the ad world, trying to buy a bank. A bank! What did they know about high street banking? The two brothers had set up one of the most successful ad agencies in the world, Saatchi & Saatchi, slurping up talent and rivals like a whale would plankton, striking deals with British Airways, Silk Cut and Toyota. And then, come 1987, they want to buy Midland Bank, the fourth largest in Britain.

Maurice apparently saw both ad agencies and banks as business services, so one could easily take over the other. Midland did not see it that way, turning down the bid on the grounds that it lacked “commercial or strategic logic”. Oof, what a blow. The words “nothing is impossible” were carved into stone on the doorstep of the Saatchi headquarters on 80 Charlotte Street, and now the brothers were having to eat them. The City’s response to the bid started to ruffle shareholder feathers, especially when newspapers quoted experts calling the brothers “amateurish”, “totally bizarre” and “highly questionable”. This was the moment that the Saatchis’ luck started to run out, leading to their boardroom ousting by 1994.

This month, their company celebrated its 50th anniversary (while they mark the 25th birthday of their successor operation, M&C Saatchi). It’s worth reflecting on the successful and scandalous journey Maurice and Charles have gone on during that time, having launched themselves into the British establishment from their origins as the children of wealthy Iraqi Jewish immigrants.

Neither brother is a fan of the limelight (unless it is strictly under their control). Charles, 77, is an art mogul – he has a gallery in Chelsea, with an equally impressive collection of canvases and lurid headlines to his name. Maurice, 74, or Baron Saatchi to you, is now a Conservative peer – no doubt helped by one of his old ad campaigns. In 1978, S&S ran up a Tory advert that showed a snaking dole queue under the words: “LABOUR ISN’T WORKING”. It was rated best poster of the century by Campaign magazine, a trade publication for the ad industry.

The two spent decades crafting ad magic with a team of 1970s and 80s mad men. There was the ad for the Family Planning Association showing a pregnant man above the words, “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?” Then there was Silk Cut’s stylish purple slash picture. And The Independent newspaper’s launch campaign: “It is. Are you?”

Their early history is also filled with satisfying tales of reversing corporate decline with the kind of ingenuity you don’t hear about today. Take their campaign for British Airways in 1991, which had suffered a 30 per cent drop in airline passenger numbers after the Gulf War. S&S masterminded ads to drop simultaneously around 70 countries to promote a giveaway of 50,000 free seats. To stop the newspapers writing about the campaign before they went to press, S&S had supplied them with dummy adverts and switched them out at the last minute. “WORLD’S BIGGEST OFFER” ads dropped on April 23, spurring 5.7 million people to enter the ballot for a free flight, and passenger numbers shot up back to normal within 120 days.

This is the kind of S&S mountain-moving that underlings Nick Darke, Richard Myers and Simon Goode recall in their memoir 

Chutzpah & Chutzpah: Saatchi & Saatchi: The Insiders’ Stories

. They write about how the two brothers fostered an unmatched dedication to pitching that would make Don Draper seem like an intern, even though it didn’t always work. There was the time Schweppes was taking pitches for a new soft drink called The Raging Hog (with a name like that, no wonder you can’t buy it anymore), so S&S went to work hiring a pig for the meeting – it left hoof marks and turds over the floor, and didn’t win them the pitch. They also installed Toyota cars in the lobby of their office in time for a meeting, and one of their employees by chance foiled an armed robbery of a McDonald’s outlet, chasing down the thief on foot, winning the respect and business of the fast food giant.

The company grew and grew, snapping up 35 marketing services firms over a 15-year golden era, from 1972-87. It boasted 600 offices, the biggest clients on Earth, and hundreds of millions of pounds in delicious billings. But like conquistadors losing their marbles in the jungles of the New World, few business tycoons came out of the 1980s with sane heads. Less is known about Maurice (although he had to resign from M&C in December after a scandal caused by “the misapplication of accounting policies” which cost the firm £11.6m). But Charles, by all accounts, has an ego so large it is visible from space.

, once when Charles was late for a flight to New York, he called his PA Nick Crean and snapped: “Stop the Concorde or you’re dead.” Crean scrambled, phoning his BA contact, who amazingly arranged for the plane to wait 15 minutes and for Charles to be met at the airport and whisked straight through to the gate.

Another colleague remembers how Charles called on a Sunday afternoon yelling that he had cooked up the perfect idea for a Fiat campaign. “I’ve got it! I’ve got the campaign line for you! I’m coming into the office,” Charles told his team. But on arrival, his mind turned to mush as he said: “Ok, it’s… it’s… oh fuck, I’ve forgotten it!” Richard Myers remembers: “We never did get Charles’s line. And nor did we get the Fiat account.”

Then, this crazy business with Midland. “The general view persists that this was simply a spectacular five-vehicle collision involving chutzpah, hubris, megalomania, nemesis and naivety,” write the duo’s chroniclers in the book.

If age is going to mellow Charles, it has a lot of work to get on with. His habits are what polite society would have once called “eccentric”. When he noticed that his clothes were getting tighter and he started to suffer from upper thigh chafing, according to his autobiography, he administered Estée Lauder talcum powder to his groin. Rather than suffer the indignity of depositing white powder on the floor after each step, Charles decided on a diet: he would eat nine eggs a day, three for each meal, for nine months, until he lost enough weight (or got scurvy first).

His eating habits are worth dwelling on. Ex-wife number three, Nigella Lawson, the TV chef, recalled: “Charles said to me there is nothing you could cook ever that would compare favourably with Weetabix.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to suggest that Charles will be remembered for those terrible pictures that showed him grabbing Nigella by the neck over lunch at Scott’s in Mayfair, but they have loomed large in recent memory. Three explanations have been offered for what happened at that 2013 incident, which the photographer, Jean-Paul, described as “27 minutes of madness”. First: Nigella said it was because of a row over grandchildren, in which Charles said: “I’m the only person you should be concerned with.” Second: Charles had been going around telling friends that he was taking cocaine out of her nose, according to Nigella. Third: Charles dismissed it as “nothing more than a playful tiff”. He accepted a police caution for assault.

The pair divorced shortly after the pictures were published. Some bon mots from Charles’s autobiography will have surely come back to bite him: “Wives make excellent housekeepers. They always manage to keep the house.”

Also: “I have made so many mistakes, and such really stupid ones, I would start blubbing away if I could remember even half of them. But do not dwell on cock-ups, I say. You don’t learn by your mistakes – at least I don’t – best to blunder on making fresh ones.”

And on that note, Phoebe Saatchi Yates, daughter of Kay Hartenstein (wife number two) has collaborated with her dad Charles to open a Mayfair gallery in the middle of a global pandemic. Weathering disasters appears to be in the family.

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