Grrr. It seems that German and American companies have the worst adverts on UK TV. German because they must have sat there and thought 'Oh, it says that UK audiences respond to humour' and then had a terribly hard time remembering what humour was until they looked back at their pre-pubescence when some things seemed mildly amusing, and decided that was it. End result - adverts using grown humans, targeted at 12 year olds. Well, 12 yr olds who want to snack over the company computer on cold rice pudding - bleugh. Muller anything, I hate the adverts.
Werthers originals - they werent in the UK when our pensioners were kids, they are a German sweet. So what if that means the cherubic blonde haired blue eyed boy's grandad who sucked 'em when he was a lad was also in the SS or the Hitler youth at the time?
And Campino! OMG. These poor bloody actresses stuck in some shopping centre trying to make themselves sound brain dead and a solid lump of coloured and flavoured sugar sound orgasmic - Mmmmmm so crrreammmy! Eyelids a-fluttering, girls a-giggling. They did their best with a crud script and rubbish direction, but hey guys, if you were mid bonk and looked up to see your amour making faces like that - wouldnt you run off and join a monastery? Or at least invest in a strong paper bag. Always provided you survived the initial shock, of course.
American adverts get up my nose because the whole world knows that professional advertisers in the US are in complete denial - all their subjects are totally unrelated to real people and may as well live in the Trueman Show - 4 inches of pancake foundation cream and enough hairspray to make an individual hole in the ozone layer - and thats just the blokes.
The latest offering is that air freshener thing that sends up puffs of pong every so often.
OF COURSE the American and therefore English public are going to want to emulate squeaky clean, over made up, shiny, happy Janet & John families whose idea of exciting sharing is to lean precariously, ear to ear, over the bloody anti-pong thing, trying to see it puff. Not.
What really upsets me is that they never learn, The reason they never learn is because we do have citizens who are not so nauseated by this offensive dumbing down and the patronising crud-come-torture that they can actually buy the products without throwing up all over the checkout girl. For shame.
Showing posts with label sarcasm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sarcasm. Show all posts
08 February 2005
24 December 2004
Chaotic Christmas
I have just had my Christmas spirit restored. Now there’s a word, restored; maybe I mean vindicated, but it seemed to blossom with the warmth of recognition like some pitiful and malnourished creature, as I sat and watched the Grumpy Old Men Christmas Special on BBC2. Best hour I’ve spent slouched in front of the goggle box in a long time and it did more for my personal validation than even Harry Enfield’s Kevin did, just after my eldest son hit thirteen.
Now I find myself feeling all kind of warm and fuzzy and hopeful and benign because I’m not mad, we don’t have the most dysfunctional family on the face of the planet and the odd reverberation of Bah Humbug that has rattled around in my head itching to tick, tut and set my eyes rolling over the past couple of weeks is no longer a shameful secret looked down upon by a disapproving society.
Perhaps I am living in the wrong town, or maybe I don’t get out enough, but surrounded, I felt, by people doing the rounds and visiting this or that aunty/ pantomime whilst claiming to be having a solvent, benign and perfectly tranquil and soul restoring Christmas (on a blatantly high budget) had made me a little bitter. I forgot that if people were truly having such a whirlwind of ecstasy they would hardly be desperate to rush over and tell me about it, they’d just be getting on with it. I’m not irritated at them, mind, don’t get me wrong, but at the whole palaver where options seem to become necessities, where one appears to be letting the side down if the relatives you had paid no attention to for the last twelve months didn’t suddenly become the centre of the universe and the best people to take to a party, where buying presents only for those people that mean something to you and within your budget to boot is seen as the height of party-pooping.
Yes on Christmas Eve in this house the un-ironed laundry will get wedged into a bin bag and hidden at the back of the airing cupboard so that both sofas are empty ‘at least at Christmas’ even though this means it will probably end up going back through the wash in January to shift some of the harder creases caused by storage. Yes I will then be up, alone, probably until 1am, wrapping the kids’ presents that quite honestly we’ve been too knackered to drag out of the hiding places. Yes there will be something that someone deems essential to Christmas that we will have forgotten to buy, like chocolate, or enough milk for a cup of tea. Yes the children will thrill and rip and discuss and spread paper and presents around until its time to start making the dinner. Set it up, tidy it up, cook the food, eat the food, slob to the sofa and watch some inane family programme and start to feel like a prisoner. It doesn’t matter. That one TV programme has jogged my memory and reminded me it always was and always will be like this, please God.
Until I laughed along with the observations of Arthur Smith, Will Self, John Peel, Rick Wakeman, Jeremy Clarkson and more, I had forgotten that this is actually what its all about. I was beginning to see the whole thing as over indulgence and an almost tawdry and masturbatory experience – one that seems thrilling or at least urgent at the time, until the second its over, when it suddenly feels empty and pointless and rather grubby. Err, what did I do that for? Right, mop up and put the kettle on then.
I want to take task with only one point in the whole programme; I don’t think all people camped out at the supermarket are shopping crazy; I think some are distraction crazy and quite honestly if I had the money I might have joined them. Being constantly ‘down the shops’ and bombarded with sparkly lights and jingly music and crowds pre-Christmas is a way to tell ourselves that we are having a ‘brilliant time’ because its busy, busy, busy. Being out to the sales at 10am on Boxing Day is simply ‘something real to do’ that doesn’t involve being wedged on a sofa next to Uncle Arthur while he tries to slurp Satsuma pith out of his dentures, or next to the kids while they argue over who broke the most expensive present one of them got and how. I suspect the end of any trip just after Christmas is incidental to the journey – somehow we feel we ought to be up and about, anywhere but staring at the residue of the day before, but to have a real place to go and a real reason to go there when in fact what we want is the air provided by the journey to and from.
Some marketing genius (and may God deal as He sees fit) saw this, saw the need to keep the momentum up, as if like runners we need to keep going when the race is run, not to come to a dead and terrifyingly jarring halt; to take our minds away from hangovers and the temptation to strike relative X from the Christmas list forever, if not from this life, for the outrageous things they said yesterday under the influence.
Hallelujah brothers, I have been saved. It all boils down to sex with yourself again – that awful situation where the spirit and the flesh are both jolly willing but the damned mind doesn’t want to play along, it happens you know, as soon as you start trying to schedule stuff like that. Going for a bit of FIY in the same way as you’d treat yourself to a bun from the bakers just doesn’t work, the mind isn’t focussed enough and things start to drag on as you become more and more bizarrely creative in an effort to (said it before) keep up the momentum. Boxing Day, when Christmas day was a damp squib, can be like that. Like a puppy chasing car tyres it feels, even as the imagined seventh heaven pulls further away, that if your subconscious can just keep your flagging body running, there’s still hope of Nirvana at the back of MFI. Sad.
Christmas for me, now, is going to be laid back. The children’s noise and disagreements, the husband’s inability to notice anything not square and electronic, all of it will go over my head, or otherwise I will smile benignly knowing this goes on all over the country, and more than that in the homes of some really rather wealthy and respectable old farts. And then I will do what their wives do – hide in the kitchen and politely refuse help with the cooking, possibly with the vodka and my jar of crystallised ginger for company. Why on earth not? They all get away with it at barbecues.
Honestly, Merry Christmas!
Now I find myself feeling all kind of warm and fuzzy and hopeful and benign because I’m not mad, we don’t have the most dysfunctional family on the face of the planet and the odd reverberation of Bah Humbug that has rattled around in my head itching to tick, tut and set my eyes rolling over the past couple of weeks is no longer a shameful secret looked down upon by a disapproving society.
Perhaps I am living in the wrong town, or maybe I don’t get out enough, but surrounded, I felt, by people doing the rounds and visiting this or that aunty/ pantomime whilst claiming to be having a solvent, benign and perfectly tranquil and soul restoring Christmas (on a blatantly high budget) had made me a little bitter. I forgot that if people were truly having such a whirlwind of ecstasy they would hardly be desperate to rush over and tell me about it, they’d just be getting on with it. I’m not irritated at them, mind, don’t get me wrong, but at the whole palaver where options seem to become necessities, where one appears to be letting the side down if the relatives you had paid no attention to for the last twelve months didn’t suddenly become the centre of the universe and the best people to take to a party, where buying presents only for those people that mean something to you and within your budget to boot is seen as the height of party-pooping.
Yes on Christmas Eve in this house the un-ironed laundry will get wedged into a bin bag and hidden at the back of the airing cupboard so that both sofas are empty ‘at least at Christmas’ even though this means it will probably end up going back through the wash in January to shift some of the harder creases caused by storage. Yes I will then be up, alone, probably until 1am, wrapping the kids’ presents that quite honestly we’ve been too knackered to drag out of the hiding places. Yes there will be something that someone deems essential to Christmas that we will have forgotten to buy, like chocolate, or enough milk for a cup of tea. Yes the children will thrill and rip and discuss and spread paper and presents around until its time to start making the dinner. Set it up, tidy it up, cook the food, eat the food, slob to the sofa and watch some inane family programme and start to feel like a prisoner. It doesn’t matter. That one TV programme has jogged my memory and reminded me it always was and always will be like this, please God.
Until I laughed along with the observations of Arthur Smith, Will Self, John Peel, Rick Wakeman, Jeremy Clarkson and more, I had forgotten that this is actually what its all about. I was beginning to see the whole thing as over indulgence and an almost tawdry and masturbatory experience – one that seems thrilling or at least urgent at the time, until the second its over, when it suddenly feels empty and pointless and rather grubby. Err, what did I do that for? Right, mop up and put the kettle on then.
I want to take task with only one point in the whole programme; I don’t think all people camped out at the supermarket are shopping crazy; I think some are distraction crazy and quite honestly if I had the money I might have joined them. Being constantly ‘down the shops’ and bombarded with sparkly lights and jingly music and crowds pre-Christmas is a way to tell ourselves that we are having a ‘brilliant time’ because its busy, busy, busy. Being out to the sales at 10am on Boxing Day is simply ‘something real to do’ that doesn’t involve being wedged on a sofa next to Uncle Arthur while he tries to slurp Satsuma pith out of his dentures, or next to the kids while they argue over who broke the most expensive present one of them got and how. I suspect the end of any trip just after Christmas is incidental to the journey – somehow we feel we ought to be up and about, anywhere but staring at the residue of the day before, but to have a real place to go and a real reason to go there when in fact what we want is the air provided by the journey to and from.
Some marketing genius (and may God deal as He sees fit) saw this, saw the need to keep the momentum up, as if like runners we need to keep going when the race is run, not to come to a dead and terrifyingly jarring halt; to take our minds away from hangovers and the temptation to strike relative X from the Christmas list forever, if not from this life, for the outrageous things they said yesterday under the influence.
Hallelujah brothers, I have been saved. It all boils down to sex with yourself again – that awful situation where the spirit and the flesh are both jolly willing but the damned mind doesn’t want to play along, it happens you know, as soon as you start trying to schedule stuff like that. Going for a bit of FIY in the same way as you’d treat yourself to a bun from the bakers just doesn’t work, the mind isn’t focussed enough and things start to drag on as you become more and more bizarrely creative in an effort to (said it before) keep up the momentum. Boxing Day, when Christmas day was a damp squib, can be like that. Like a puppy chasing car tyres it feels, even as the imagined seventh heaven pulls further away, that if your subconscious can just keep your flagging body running, there’s still hope of Nirvana at the back of MFI. Sad.
Christmas for me, now, is going to be laid back. The children’s noise and disagreements, the husband’s inability to notice anything not square and electronic, all of it will go over my head, or otherwise I will smile benignly knowing this goes on all over the country, and more than that in the homes of some really rather wealthy and respectable old farts. And then I will do what their wives do – hide in the kitchen and politely refuse help with the cooking, possibly with the vodka and my jar of crystallised ginger for company. Why on earth not? They all get away with it at barbecues.
Honestly, Merry Christmas!
21 December 2004
erm, ooer
Ok my first blog knowingly written for an audience. Not because of the comments on here (what comments on where?) but because friends are mentioning things like the delay between blogs, of late, which presumably means that things are being read.
Well here it is, my version of being stage struck and tongue tied - which is to rattle off any old rubbish at an alarming rate of knots to fill the creeping internal sense of silence, and panic. Maybe I should have gone into radio. I do after all know very well how to twitter idiotically with the best masters of 'filling the gap between records' - although that shows my age. I doubt that even hospital radio has a seat-of-the-pants show anymore, I suspect everything is meticulously scripted from the playlist to the number of seconds in the gaps in between, with marginal room for ad-libbing. Isnt that why Chris Evans was so popular? Because he did his own thing? He was hysterically funny and succesful until eventually even he ran out of twitter and failed to notice his own dissatisfaction, or at least to correctly apportion blame for it, and started a downward spiral of pissing people off.
I could claim that as good enough reason never to 'go in to radio' but then again it may be that the man simply had an artistic depression of the kind that geniuses are allowed, albeit one that ought to have involved a lot of apologising later on. Spike Milligan suffered terribly with what-the-hell-am-i-doing-and-why-are-they-laughing-itis but as he could to a certain extent control whether and when he performed fo the public, it was conducted behind closed doors. I should imagine he effed and blustered and was just as caustic, if not moreso, but privately, with the comfort and balance provided by dissapproving friends rather than the giggles and titters of a bored public looking for someone else to be the bad boy in class.
Good grief. Two minutes bypassing the brain en route to the keys and I have just about mentally compared the Ginger One to George Best. In fact, probably all it would take to get Mr B Piper back on TV and therefore back in the good books of the media in general (and, baaah, who else I wonder?) would be a documentary-interview in which he admitted he had been an arsehole and pleaded that the fame and wealth and confusion at being so popular had thrown him off balance. He would come out as mature and fallible and therefore forgiveable. Kill the 'cocky' impression he once gave in one fell swoop. Heck he could even knock Beckham back off the top spot - being rude to people in public isnt bonking around in public, even though our ginger friend did more than enough of that, but he humiliated an unknown wife and a series of semi-vaguely-heard-of girlfriends and didnt shatter some plastic-perfect illusion that he had willingly conspired with the media to establish.
There then, all that because I didnt know what to say. Thank God I didnt rummage down the old document files for something I wrote last year. Or maybe not.
Well here it is, my version of being stage struck and tongue tied - which is to rattle off any old rubbish at an alarming rate of knots to fill the creeping internal sense of silence, and panic. Maybe I should have gone into radio. I do after all know very well how to twitter idiotically with the best masters of 'filling the gap between records' - although that shows my age. I doubt that even hospital radio has a seat-of-the-pants show anymore, I suspect everything is meticulously scripted from the playlist to the number of seconds in the gaps in between, with marginal room for ad-libbing. Isnt that why Chris Evans was so popular? Because he did his own thing? He was hysterically funny and succesful until eventually even he ran out of twitter and failed to notice his own dissatisfaction, or at least to correctly apportion blame for it, and started a downward spiral of pissing people off.
I could claim that as good enough reason never to 'go in to radio' but then again it may be that the man simply had an artistic depression of the kind that geniuses are allowed, albeit one that ought to have involved a lot of apologising later on. Spike Milligan suffered terribly with what-the-hell-am-i-doing-and-why-are-they-laughing-itis but as he could to a certain extent control whether and when he performed fo the public, it was conducted behind closed doors. I should imagine he effed and blustered and was just as caustic, if not moreso, but privately, with the comfort and balance provided by dissapproving friends rather than the giggles and titters of a bored public looking for someone else to be the bad boy in class.
Good grief. Two minutes bypassing the brain en route to the keys and I have just about mentally compared the Ginger One to George Best. In fact, probably all it would take to get Mr B Piper back on TV and therefore back in the good books of the media in general (and, baaah, who else I wonder?) would be a documentary-interview in which he admitted he had been an arsehole and pleaded that the fame and wealth and confusion at being so popular had thrown him off balance. He would come out as mature and fallible and therefore forgiveable. Kill the 'cocky' impression he once gave in one fell swoop. Heck he could even knock Beckham back off the top spot - being rude to people in public isnt bonking around in public, even though our ginger friend did more than enough of that, but he humiliated an unknown wife and a series of semi-vaguely-heard-of girlfriends and didnt shatter some plastic-perfect illusion that he had willingly conspired with the media to establish.
There then, all that because I didnt know what to say. Thank God I didnt rummage down the old document files for something I wrote last year. Or maybe not.
02 December 2004
Metamorphosis
A couple of friends recommended the following sites today, which cheered me up immensely:
1. www.lhj.com. You can sign up for free, upload a photo of yourself and try some different hair styles and colours. Most of them look ridiculous, of course.
2. http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph/Transformer/
No sign-up necessary and you get to see how you look as an old person, a baby, a monkey, the opposite sex
Both brilliant fun, but as I have just learned, not to be discussed or played with in the company of an '8 Year Old Daughter':
8YOD (pausing to watch an advert): Ooh mummy do you want your hair to go straight? Theres this thing on telly
Me: No thanks love, see all the dry frizzy bits would stick out even more
8YOD: Oh no, I think you'd look pretty, and if you put on that wrinkle removing cream you'd look even prettier
Me: You are 8, arent you???
8YOD: Yes and Lewis is 10, what, you dont know the ages of your own children?
Me: No, look, I'm wrinkly, I forget things
8YOD: Oh yes and your brain gets smaller doesnt it.............when it gets the wrinkles..........
1. www.lhj.com. You can sign up for free, upload a photo of yourself and try some different hair styles and colours. Most of them look ridiculous, of course.
2. http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph/Transformer/
No sign-up necessary and you get to see how you look as an old person, a baby, a monkey, the opposite sex
Both brilliant fun, but as I have just learned, not to be discussed or played with in the company of an '8 Year Old Daughter':
8YOD (pausing to watch an advert): Ooh mummy do you want your hair to go straight? Theres this thing on telly
Me: No thanks love, see all the dry frizzy bits would stick out even more
8YOD: Oh no, I think you'd look pretty, and if you put on that wrinkle removing cream you'd look even prettier
Me: You are 8, arent you???
8YOD: Yes and Lewis is 10, what, you dont know the ages of your own children?
Me: No, look, I'm wrinkly, I forget things
8YOD: Oh yes and your brain gets smaller doesnt it.............when it gets the wrinkles..........
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