No Adverts

 Normally at this time of year I compile a list of my favourite songs from adverts. No, really, I do this. For the last few years at least. What an incredible waste of time, you might think. Well, I might argue, what isn't an incredible waste of time? Really. What's the point? All the stuff you're constantly doing, what's it for? Isn't it all just a colossal waste of time? I mean, I don't know what you do, or how you choose to live your life, but I bet you spend most of it scratching your arse and heating up chicken goujons. Not that there's anything wrong with that sort of thing. I've eaten goujons myself. 

Ho hum. 

Anyway, this year I'm not going to do it - compile a list of my favourite songs from adverts - because I haven't really noticed any music on adverts lately.  I started doing it as adverts represented my only intersection with modern pop music. That and going to the barber's, though I've only managed that once in the last two years. And while I've barely left the house, and barely stopped watching the TV, adverts seem to have made very little impact on me. I suspect this is because I am now demographically negligible. I don't have children, I don't have a dog. I'm not interested in massive tellies, or Warner Leisure Cruises. I don't want to adopt a donkey or a snow leopard. I don't want a pay day loan, a hybrid car, or a Crocodile retracting garage door that will actually add value to my home. I live in a place where the postcode lottery doesn't even happen, so there's no chance of Jade Goody's widower turning up at my door waving a big cheque, and trying to get me to jump up and down in slow motion with my mouth open. I suppose I should get some "Over Fifties Life Insurance" as I now qualify for it, in much the same way that as soon as my doctor's surgery told me I could get a flu jab, I queued outside a church hall to get one. I'm mad keen on injections lately. I should get into heroin. I hear it's quite relaxing.        

These days I'm mainly annoyed by adverts. They seem to be getting worse. I'm under no illusions that, beyond Silk Cut print ads from the 80's, advertising ever aspired to be anything fancy. It's basically no different to a red faced man in Tadley Market bellowing "Any bag, any bag, two noine noine". But they're so shit now. Wickes kitchens are trying to make the word "housebarassment" happen. It's not happening, guys. That's not even "nose-blind" good. Not even people who call a holiday "holibobs" have ever claimed to be suffering from "housebarassment". 

The Dacia Duster (it's a car) adverts have a history of appropriating pop songs with words that sound like "duster" in them. So we've had Queen's "Another one bites the dust(er)" and Ray Parker Jnr's "Ghostbusters" rendered "Go Duster" (the shouted chorus placed randomly in the song specifically to wind me up). The latest advert subverts this trend by just taking any song - in this case Bobby McFerrins' "Don't Worry, Be Happy" - and adding the word "duster" to it. We are advised "Don't Worry, Be Duster", mysteriously. Am I supposed to become the car?  Is this the Tao of Duster? Is Ralph Ineson my gravelly inner monologue, constantly urging me to throw a kettle over a pub roof? 

"Don't Worry, Be Duster."

Some brass-balled, gimlet-eyed, board-table wanker pitched that, and got paid. Impressive. On some level. 

The Wowcher adverts were long time favourites of mine. Simple, old fashioned, adverts trying to sell you something through the medium of a bad song and some dancers arsing about. Morgan Beverage, Nikkita Chadha and Carmelle Rudder - great names, great arsing - they're spraying themselves in the faces with showers, they're depilating, they're high-kicking in bathrobes, they're hugging cushions with their faces on them.  This is all laudable. This is fun. Great. Then came the boys. It was sort of the same advert, but the actresses were swapped for men having pillow fights and playing air guitar with their tongues out. The charm evaporated like steam off a razorblade. 

What followed was its ultimate form. Wowcher summoned a budget from somewhere, dumped Morgan, Nikkita* and Carmelle, and replaced them with ubiquitous panel show squatter Katherine Ryan (a woman so famous that she was literally the first "Katherine" to come up when I typed the word "Katherine" into Google, which rather proves Wowcher's point, I expect), who lazily drawls the poor lyrics to the song while shuffling around a frangipan house in a ballgown and boring the arse off a llama. I'm sure she's funny when she's doing comedy. But there's nothing here: no energy, no fun, no light in the eyes. Just another lazy pay day for Katherine. Are you telling me she's more fun than MORGAN BEVERAGE? ARE YOU REALLY?

Worst of all, as they always are, are the Peloton adverts. Peloton always find a way to make their adverts provocatively shit, but over the Christmas period they excelled themselves in the sloppiness of their thinking. This is their big idea: it's Christmas, so: SCROOGE. 

That's it. 

That's the meeting: it's Scrooge - but on a static bike. Here's the story: Ebeneezer Scrooge, a youngish man with a black beard - exactly like in the story - is horrible. We know he's horrible because some carol singers come round in Victorian dress and when answers the door, he sneers at them, says "No" and shuts the door again. What a bastard. Or is he? Because some anonymous benefactor likes him enough to buy him a high-end exercise bike with shouty attachments. Hang on, the advert is set in Victorian times, isn't it? So how come...shut up. Its only Victorian some of the time. For the rest of the advert Scrooge is dressed in lycra shouting "yes" orgasmically, while the narration confirms he is meeting his fitness goals. So the moral of "A Christmas Carol", according to Peloton, is buying an expensive gift for a disagreeable man will make him happy. That is probably true. Was the bike left by a spectral agent? We don't know. Was it from Scrooge's nephew Fred, who instead of inviting him to dinner, as in the story, reckons his uncle could a afford to shed a few pounds?  It's not clear. In fact it's utterly baffling. 

It's not even a good advert for Peleton. The follow up ad - there's a sequel because you were all so invested in Scrooge's journey - sees Scrooge opening his window and shouting "You boy! What day is this?" - they've seen the meme - to which a boy, very definitely not Victorian, replies "August 19th", information that doesn't seem to bother Scrooge at all. The hamster just gets back on his wheel, where he's been peddling away for eight months. Scrooge, it would appear, has a problem. He gets up, trudges over to his bike and starts his joyless, daily grind, the thrill gone, teeth gritted, reaching those fitness goals. Except he looks exactly the same. His body hasn't changed in any way after pumping his arthritic knees into broken biscuits for months on end. I think I'd want my money back. I wonder if the ghost of Christmas Present kept the receipt? 

*Nikkita's doing alright. She played "Bollywood Star" in "Eternals". It may well be the worst Marvel film, I'm watching it now, but that is no reflection on Nikkita who SHINES.