Commercial Breakdown

Screen

Right. I've been watching television. I have some things to say. I have, actually, a lot of things to say. And this being my forum, I am going to say them here and now.

I hate, right, hate adverts. I refuse to be advertised to, preferring to change channel and watch something else rather than absorb another exhortation to spend money I haven't got on things I neither want nor need. As a Sky subscriber, I need to keep the remote control in my hand at all times. Because if I have to see that fucking Frosties advert again, you know, the one where that shiny blond waste of oxygen of a "cheeky" teenage "character" leads a parade across what seems like all of time and space to sell breakfast cereal, if I have to see it again, someone will die. I mean it.

There are so many things to hate about it. The music (polka? Polka?), the words ("If you live in Oz, mate!" - if you live in Australia they aren't even called Frosties in the first place, or can't Kellogg's read their own website?), the shit-eating grin of a look on that wankstain kid's face, the idea that running an advert which sells a kids product to kids and which looks like kids TV at ten-thirty in the evening is a good one, everything about it is designed to enrage me. I take great, almost physical delight in knowing that as soon as that beast-child got back to school he had the shit beaten out of him by every single person there, teachers included, and will continue to have it beaten out of him, every day until he either graduates, or dies. He deserves every second of it.

The commercials for Yellow Pages with James Whatsisface as that uber-smug tosser with a Corvette he can't fit a child seat into so he has to buy a Renault Espace, or is cornered by a vicious dog in his flash batchelor shag-pad and wants a dog trainer who does home visits, or who has come to a fancy dress party as a gnome and needs a taxi to a theatrical outfitters, all those hee-fucking-larious situations that we find ourselves in all too often at home. My phone doesn't even work properly, so my sympathy with Whatsisname Nesbitt over him hurting his back doing yoga is going to be very limited indeed.

Prat-face jumping on bollards to sell Lacoste posh aftershave for twats, or cheap loans for the already destitute, or anything selling anything to do with Lynx, it can all just piss off. Really, I mean it. I am tired of the endless images of perfect teeth and tits which pass across my screen in an alomst ceaseless stream day in and day out. I am a simple man, and ask little other than to be allowed to watch Malcolm in the Middle in peace without another deeply patronising and ill-thought out pitch for whichever mobile phones, bleach or supermarkets are out for my cash today.

Really, what annoys me most is how bad so many of them are. I do not, on seeing the tossers walking through the streets of Barcelona (it is always Barcelona, seemingly for no reason) trying to convince me that Coke Zero is anything other than Diet Coke with a different colour label and so will by its very nature taste of pencils, find myself thinking, "My. What a finely crafted peice of advertising which did not patronise, denigrate, frustrate or bore me, which did not insult my intelligence in any way and did not intrude uninvited on whatever it was I was thinking about on order to sell me a product I already know I don't want." Instead, I thought "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!"

And it's not just adverts. Many, many television programmes are just rubbish. Bargain Hunt, You Are What You Eat, Big Brother and Two Pints of Lager can all just fuck off. I don't want them anywhere near my TV. If they are on my TV there is a good chance I will be seeing them there and we don't want that. Pop videos are frequently even worse. Aside from the classics of annoyance - Motorcycle Emptiness, a six-and-a-half minute dirge of vague studenty post-existential alienation by the never-popular Manic Street Preachers with a stupefyingly awful video that solely consists of some random shots of the band stood about bits of Tokyo looking either disaffected or just bored; Today by the Smashing Pumpkins, where well-known megalomanicac and drunk Billy Corgan drives an ice cream van into the desert, covers it in paint and then walks off; literally anything by Oasis but especially the one set in a mental hospital which does not so much borrow from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as gets Liam Gallagher to re-write it whilst ripped on cocaine, set it in the generic North and fill it with football-as-freedom images, as if we haven't seen that a zillion zillion times before. They are shoddy and made with no thought for either the product nor the audience that is expected to watch it.

I am not of exceptional intelligence. I am not of overly discerning tastes. And when something is dome well, whatever it is, I like it. So I like the Honda ad with the choir doing an impression of a car, the old VW adverts where you never actually saw the car or, best of all, the bizarre Marmite ones that make a believable sales pitch out of the fact that half the population can't stand it. I like the videos for To The End by Blur, Trains to Brazil by Guillemots and especially A Million Ways by OK Go, which is on my profile and is staying there until YouTube remove it becasue I want to keep it forever.

What's the difference between these things I like and the fucker of a child hawking Frosties? Just that they were done with a little bit of thought, a little bit of care and I guarantee that the Coke ad which caused me so very much agony during the World Cup, cost more and sold less. This I why only I listen to Radio 4 on demand and basically nothing else.

Frankly they could sell more Coke by doing nothing. I'd much prefer it if they did, and immediately, please. Brands like that don't need to advertise. And the ones that do (such as low-cost loans, no-win-no-fee soliciting and Cillit Bang) don't deserve my money anyway. So don't let them advertise. Change the channel and watch something else for three minutes. The advertisers know all this, by the way, they know that the overwhelming majority of people would rather eat their own knees than watch advertising, but until they can think of a way to advertise to us in our dreams, they are stuck with telly and banners for singles dating agencies on well-known networking websites. And until then, fuck 'em.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal