If you can bloody well organise yourselves like this, then you can bloody well make sure you all pass on your bloody costs to your bloody clients, for fuck's sake! That's the joy of capitalism! And learn your fucking spelling and punctuation!
Dear Smiling Evil Scary Killer Doll Woman from Planet Lypha, I think your name is Jan and I've seen your babies.
This frightening ad screams "Kill! Kill! Kill!" every time I log into my Statcounter.
Remember this classic by Ammirati Puris Lintas from 1996?
I find myself overcome by WTFness at this extraordinary story from the Philippines, which illustrates the sometimes vast cultural divide between East and West.
My interpretation is: Mum wants daughter to look good on the X-Factor. Mum pawns ring. Mum buys gown. Daughter scrubs up well and sings to great applause.
The real-life UK version would be: Daughter wants to wear nice gown for X-Factor. Mum says: get a fucking job, you spoilt lazy cow.
There, my excuse for a mangled Gene Hunt quote from the best BBC drama in the last decade. Odds-on that it will have been disembowelled in the interests of keeping US audiences within their comfort zones.
UK trailer:
You can tell that the economy’s drying up when brands start to play the nostalgia card. The Starburst name is making way for Opal Fruits, and Snickers (always a shitty name that sounded a bit like the word Americans use for sports shoes, in one fell swoop subliminally linking the chocolate bar with the taste of rubber) reverting to Marathon.
So a big boo to Smarties, for reintroducing the blue sweet a mere two years after its rejection for health reasons, and forgetting that the real selling point of the brand was its sturdy round tube, abandoned for the hexagonal tube three years ago. My research is quite limited: the two youngest chimplets liked the old version and now prefer M&Ms. My patented infallible Chimpmetrics weighting measure translates this to represent 67% of UK 6-10 year-old children, which is damning evidence.
"What a delightful horror story. You know, this reminds me of something that happened in the park last week. There we were, Ethel and I, sitting on a bench when a man ran up and flashed us! Deary deary me! Ethel had a stroke, but I couldn’t reach. Why are those people dressed like condoms? Why are they running away? This looks like the old woman who lived in a shoe. Wait a minute. That blue chap has a rucksack. He’s heading for the tube! Is he a suicide bomber? Are you allowed to do that nowadays? I found a penny yesterday."Of the dozen or so podcasts I listen to each week, my firm favourite is BBC Radio 5 Live's film reviews by Mark Kermode (grumpy rockabilly weirdo with a doctorate in filmology and a wife who's a published authority on trash porn). The show can also be watched live, which is how a YouTuber has helpfully intercut last week's review of Iron Man, complete with Kermode's mocking impressions of the three main stars, with footage of the film. It's short and stupid but tickles my funny bone. I'll never be able to watch Gwyneth Paltrow with a straight face ever again.
It’s best to ignore TV cookery shows, mainly because the chefs are evil. Estate agents are going out of business because of the housing slump, and its about time the gastronautical parasites suffer a penthouse defenestration. I have two beefs with these bastards. One is the fly-on-the-wall restaurant kitchen footage of them flinging good grub into the bin because it’s too runny/grey/cold etc. This is where the Victorian in me shouts "there are people starving in Africa!". Lo! The quest for artistic perfection!
The second is less profound, but more annoying. It’s when Gordon/Gary/Marco etc. chop a fucking onion at lightspeed. What the fuck’s that about? Haven’t they heard of food mixers? The trouble with that is that it forms a challenge in the mind of the viewer. Wouldn’t it be just so cooool to be able to chop an onion like that. With real force. While talking. Nurse!
There was an eSure survey getting the PR treatment last week which claimed that more than "one in 10 people in the UK have had a cooking accident or caused damage to their kitchen as a result of copying professional cooking techniques of top TV chefs". And that’s despite three quarters of them describing themselves as "amateur", "novice" or even "useless"! (The best bit of the survey said that a third would use a DIY blow torch instead of a special culinary one, the fucking idiot numpties).
Which brings me to this, the current TV ad that I hate most. Each time this tosser appears, I pray that there’s an accidental dismemberment, so much do I loathe his effort at cooking green worms. It does achieve its aim of hammering the brand name into your skull, so job done, I suppose.
The idea behind it isn’t original. Here are two arty experiments that played with it, and I’m sure there are more.
Here’s another attempt at making a car look cool and macho. Sadly, it succeeds in making the driver look like a twunt. If you sit behind the wheel of a motor in the frame of mind required to jump off a mountain, dismember imaginary opponents, or skid across a frozen lake, then you should lie down in a dark room until the urge to be Anakin Skywalker passes.
Park your arse in a car before driving down aimlessly winding roads in a desolate landscape? Evidently, the propellerheads at RKCR/Y&R have never been to Widnes.
After running a Sky+ series link on Mad Men, I finally started catching up on it last week, with about another 4 episodes to go before I'm up to date with the UK schedules. I thought it was going to be crap, but it's really rather good, and is right out of the Dick Van Dyke Scriptwriters School.
If you're watching series 2 of Heroes, you'll know what I mean: we see the US idea of Telly Ireland Gangsters. Begorrah ohr shet ets fecken rainen t'besure. The same school is responsible for Telly London, where St. Paul's is a stroll away from Greenwich Park, which nestles beneath the Tower of London, and has pubs under fog-shrouded bridges where the locals wear flat caps and red neck scarves and raise a pint to the portrait of the Queen behind the bar. Have I mentioned that I live in a castle?
These phenomena exist because of a simple unifying fact: the writers have never bloody well been there. Thus with Mad Men, the central character is a well groomed cold-hearted shit, cast from a JR Ewing template. The storylines are compelling because they are set in a Telly Sixties world combined with a Reading Level Z version of what the ad world was like back then. Still, it's oddly compelling. I hope that at some point someone, anyone, twats that Donnie Darko or whatever his name is, firmly on the nose, for the sake of his poor missus.
