Why I Hate Yoghurt Adverts
Feb 7th
Still no approach from The Guardian to be their Voice of Popular Culture. I may have missed their job offer email in-between the 87 spam emails I received through the blog this week. I’m almost tempted to set up a Spam Training School: send me “sdhjkdsdfsafiudsahjk” in an email and I’m unlikely to click your link; try something like “Your blog is great. I am the Guardian Editor and I would like you to have the following job. Click here” and we’re sounding much more realistic.
So, in my quest to demonstrate my diversity as a blogger, today I expand beyond music and reality TV with a post on my Top Ten Most Hated TV Adverts. Commercials count as popular culture, right? Oh, by the way Literary Agent Housemate, I’ve had a brilliant vision of how my blog could be turned into a book. I see a compendium of popular culture with a range of top ten lists in it (like The Top Ten Worst lyrics, The Top 10 Most Depressing Songs, etc) filling stockings around the country for Christmas 2010. Thoughts? Onto the list:
1. Yoghurt Adverts
I was shocked to discover recently that you can only buy yoghurt if you’re a woman. It is also highly likely that, as a woman, you experience a terrible affliction known as bloating. Bloating can strike at any time but is most likely to occur when you’re in a nice dress in a bar. It will completely ruin your evening. Eating a yoghurt will cure this because it contains something called Biffidis Regularis, which is in no way a made up name. The yoghurt will not only cure all your digestive complaints, but also, as it now contains a special scientific “hunger fighting formula”, you’ll never feel hunger again after consuming just one small pot of dairy liquid.
Martine McCutcheon’s sums up everything that is rubbish about a yoghurt advert here. In it, Martine still seems to believe she is in Love Actually. She’s on a mission and has a beret. And as she marches through Britain she tells us that eating yoghurt will make us happy, on the outside. She is so happy through eating yoghurt that she has put on some fireworks to celebrate life. Her friends are so happy they scream in her face. Martine McCutcheon even takes a yoghurt and small spoon to these celebrations, which is definitely normal/natural.
In the US, however, yoghurt adverts are even worse: check this out. No one likes yoghurts that much, surely? And as this funny spoof video points out, no one eats yoghurts at a wedding.
Don’t get me started on how pointless Petit Filous is.
In the way that you can only eat yoghurt if you’re female, you can only buy a nice Dreams bed if you’re a pretty heterosexual couple. That is all.
3. Silentnight Beds
Whereas, Silentnight Beds welcome all kinds of diverse relationships. They advertise through a hippo and a duck who seem to be in a functional, romantic relationship. They certainly share a bed. One advert even shows them tucking their children into bed, which implies they’ve interbred. Once the hippo moon-walked to the bed. I’m not sure why.
What kind of crazy brainstorm came up with this?
Cash For Gold adverts suddenly took over daytime TV approximately six months ago. What I ask is, if you did happen to have lots of gold lying about the house would you really send it through the post in the hope that this very orange man, who has put together a TV advert using PowerPoint, might send you a fiver back? Especially as the videos of them melting the gold in a factory looks like something from Encarta.
5. Eye Roll-On (Enriched With Caffeine)
This is what looks like roll-on deodorant, which you rub around your eyes. As if that’s not weird enough, they also tell us it’s enriched with caffeine. Scientifically can this be true? Rubbing caffeine onto your skin has an impact? If I wash my face in coffee will I look more awake? If I dip my finger in a cup of tea will it look younger?
6. Please Teach. (Please).
A 15 year old manages to correctly identify that he is being shown a picture of a prisoner in class. The most patronising teacher ever almost explodes with excitement and exclaims “a prisoner! GOOOOD” like he’s five. The most scripted child ever says he feels bad as he’s taking for granted the things he’s got. “I love your honesty” exclaims the most patronising teacher ever.
School was never like this.
7. Room Fragrances
Last year, when I watched the X Factor on ITV Player they used to show the same one advert in each of the nine advert breaks. This advert was invariably advertising room air freshener. In it, a woman buys a Plug In that releases fragrance whenever she walks by. She’s so excited that she invites her friend round to see it, who cannot believe her eyes. “It’s clever!” she screams. No it’s not! It has no brain! It’s motion sensored.
Also worthy of note is the “Poo at Paul’s advert”, although I actually think that has a small element of genius about it.
In the first of this hideous series of adverts, Ant and Dec are interviewed in a no way scripted or awkward manner about how much they love the Wii. We learn that they mostly play the Wii at Ant’s house but that Dec plays the DS more and loves taking it on aeroplanes. They cannot wait to get out and meet real people who play the Wii/DS, just like them! So they travel the country interviewing people, who live in all-white lounges, about how much fun the Wii is/how it’s changed their lives/brought their broken family back together.
Jason Donavon and Colleen Nolan singing about “swell” frozen nibbles makes a small part of me die inside. Jason, you’re successful in Priscilla, surely you don’t need to do this? They also have to invent the word “Swellegant” to rhyme with “elegant”, which is unforgiveable.
However, the chocolate covered strawberries do look quite compelling.
There is so much that is wrong about the “They’re Gonna Taste Great!” advert, which appeared and then rapidly vanished from our screens in 2006. Here are just five awful things:
1. The song.
2. The desperate list of people who love Frosties who have to rhyme with “great”. Why resort to “a man in a crate”? Why would a man be in a crate?
3. The line about personalised-number-o-plates.
4. Why at the end is the child punching his arms at us in an increasingly frenzied way whilst levitating?
5. The song. Which I now have in my head again.
Well, I feel much better having unleashed all that. As always, please suggest your own ideas. To end things on a high, take a look at Comic Relief’s hilarious advertising sketch below. In it, the Red Nose Day team have hired the greatest minds in advertising to come up with the best ad in British television history. Starring Monkey, Honey Monster, Captain Birdseye and many more.
What is the most depressing song of all time?
Jan 31st
It’s my birthday next week* and I am doing karaoke. I have been mulling over my song choices. I’m currently considering “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (I don’t care it’s out of season). I’m also keen on “Bleeding Love”, but my friends are trying to steer me away, fearing it is ambitious. I’m choosing carefully as in the past I have been known to unintentionally pick songs that kill dead the mood of the private karaoke box. Which brings me nicely onto this week’s blog post.
My iPod has gained a bit of a reputation amongst my friends as being bloody depressing. My ill-fated “house party playlist” showed me that songs I think are uplifting floor fillers are to others more sit-down-and-ponder-existential-suffering. Note: Karma Police by Radiohead does not get the party started.
So, scrolling through my iPod, I decided to create a cheerful blog post about the most depressing songs of all time. There have been many lists before that contain the usual suspects (Gary Jules “Mad World”, The Verve “The Drugs Don’t Work””, REM “Everybody Hurts”) so I’ve gone for an alternative list. I’ve even divided them into nice categories for your convenience. Please do contribute your own suggestions and thoughts in the comments below.
Just plain depressing (but good):
Sia – “Breathe Me”
You probably wont know this song but might recognize the instrumental that starts at 4:27, which is used in any emotional TV musical montage worth watching, along with the instrumental in Desree’s “Kissing You”. It was used as the finale song in the brilliant “Six Feet Under”, which is worthy of a hundred blog posts in itself. If you haven’t seen the final episode then skip on, but this song accompanies perhaps the best six minutes ever shown on TV. In these last minutes we see the future death of each character, who you have got to know over six seasons. Alan Ball is so clever he even manages to make everything six. Brilliant TV and a fitting song. I blubbed for approximately 24 hours after watching. Proper ugly blubbing, like Alexandra Burke when she won X Factor.
Arcade Fire – “Cold Wind”
Another song discovered through the “Six Feet Under” soundtrack: this one’s used to accompany the disappearance of the main character’s wife who vanishes one day. The song itself is about a man disappearing and by the time the funereal organ starts and the background singers start chanting “dead, dead, dead” (some say it’s “hey, hey, hey”, but I’m sure it’s not) it has got bloody depressing. But great.
Songs That Try To Be Depressing But Actually Are Just Funny
Eternal – “Don’t You Love Me”
Who could forget Eternal’s apocalyptic vision of the social chaos the world was descending into in 1997? Eternal went all “let’s put social messaging in our songs” with potent lyrical content like “why does granny have to walk the streets?” and “child goes to the store for a loaf of bread/bullets flying all around his head”. The child choir is the icing on the cake.
Mel C – “If That Were Me”
Mel C’s enlightened song about homelessness. It contains the lyric “I couldn’t live without my phone/But you don’t even have a home”. Possibly. The. Worst. Lyric. Ever.
Songs That No-One Else Finds Depressing But I Do:
The Foundations – “Build Me Up Buttercup”
I fully acknowledge that it is probably only me that finds this song soul achingly depressing. But I maintain that it is (in exclusively bad ways). There’s something about “Build Me Up Buttercup” that sums up every rubbish night out I had at university spent in a club I didn’t really want to be in, dancing to rubbish music with groups of people alternating between inappropriately snogging each other and crying. Those introductory bars are enough to make me shudder. Argh! This gets no video.
Sugababes – “About You Now”
An uplifting pop song (and the Sugababes’ best moment without Siobhan), this song was transformed for me by its inclusion in one of Hollyoaks’ better sequences. Now, before you laugh, Hollyoaks went through a stage a few years ago of breaking free of its trashy storylines about fit girls to produce some brilliant, innovative plots. One of the best, which should not have worked, was Max’s funeral. Steph, his widow, is a wannabe singer, but isn’t actually very good. When she stands up at Max’s funeral to sing “About You Now”, it absolutely *should* be hideous and silly. Instead, her a-cappella off key rendition is pretty touching, especially as the song sums up her regret at umm-ing and err-ing over Max before they got married.
Watch the brilliance here! It was the closest we got to making my housemate who never cries cry.
Songs That Are More Depressing Than They Seem:
David Gray – “The One I Love”
David Gray puts something into his chords that makes all his songs fill you with sad nostalgia. If any of my Internet Following is musically minded please do explain how he does this. “The One I Love”, my favourite of David’s songs, initially sounds like his most cheerful, with a chirpy jangly melody and the nice “tell the stars above/that you’re the one I love” chorus. Oh no no. Listen properly and you realize this song is actually sung by a man bleeding to death, hallucinating about his lover. Amazing.
Kelly Clarkson – “Because of You”
This song is obviously sad and on first listen seems like a typical power ballad sung by rejected ex. Oh no. In fact, it has some of the bleakest pop lyrics I know. Listen carefully and it’s actually about a child who’s been emotionally damaged by a parent (“I watched you die, I heard you cry/every night in your sleep/I was so young, you should have known better than to lean on me”). The song gets darker as the music builds, culminating with Kelly telling us how ashamed she is of her life because it’s so empty. Few pop songs go this bleak.
There are so many more I could have written about (Mika’s “Happy Ending”, especially when the cuddly toys start crying in the video; George Michael’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” – oh dear Lord, Peter Andre is releasing a version of this; Sinead O’Connor “Nothing Compares To You” – that one perfect tear in the video), but that’s enough for today. Glee is now on. To lighten the mood, I want to end with one of my favourite YouTube clips ever: Karen from Outnumbered pretending to be Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson:
* Feel free to send me birthday emails/leave birthday comments/send presents. Or suggest karaoke songs.
The Archetypal Boyband Music Video
Jan 17th
My ideal Saturday morning involves me placing myself horizontally on a sofa whilst watching the music video channels for longer than is probably healthy. This stems from my teenage years when me and my friends would socialize by going round each other houses to watch music videos on Sky. The most important Dawson’s Creek-esque conversations of my teenage years took place to a backdrop of late 90s music videos.
Years of this have led to two things. The first is that I now spend much of my days actually believing myself to be in a music video. The second is the exciting discovery that every good Boyband video needs the following four elements:
1. The Christ-like Gesture:
This is the *only* way for a Boyband member to show a climax of emotion. The frequency of the gesture should increase throughout the song, reaching a frenzied peak at the key change. Falling down on your knees whilst doing the Christ-like gesture is an ultimate display of emotion. See Mark Owen below.
Here are some more of particular note (especially note Jason Orange who holds a holy light in one hand):
Westlife really pushed this concept forward in “Flying Without Wings”. They not only coordinated their gestures (see below) but there was also levitation. Can this ever be beaten?
2. Location:
The location *must* either be an abandoned urban space or a deserted dramatic landscape. An industrial warehouse is perfect for the urban setting. A cliff top is the best for dramatic landscape. Westlife are particularly good at the latter and get bonus points for including snow in their “What About Now” video below and thereby potentially making it all about climate change.
Some interesting urban interior examples include Five’s “Keep On Moving”, which even features a lift, and “Beat Again” by JLS, which shows how relevant the warehouse is even today. It also features a nice fire escape in the background.
But the ultimate example (urban) must be Boyzone’s “No Matter What”: what is this strange abandoned factory that houses a giant hot air balloon?
The best location award (landscape) goes to Take That “Patience”. A cliff top. Mist. A raging storm. Amazing. (I like to think the dragging of their heavy microphones up the cliff top is a reference to Christ carrying the cross up the hill, making the whole video a big metaphor for Take That making their big comeback and being prepared to be crucified by the public (but actually being showered in glory).* Ahem.
3. A mysterious female figure:
Boyzone really embrace this concept in “Baby Can I Hold You Tonight”, with not just one, but several spooky women (see below). The ideal mysterious woman should do very little apart from standing and looking a bit miserable.
A special shout out must also be made for Boyzone’s “Better”, which contains the first ever mysterious male figure in a Boyband video.
4. Water:
Ideally, the water is dripped on scantily clad Boyband members throughout the video. However, a sudden onrush of water can also be used to signal a dramatic moment in the song: for example, “Words” by Boyzone, where it unexpectedly starts raining inside a pub (strangely, no-one in pub seems that shocked). Take That’s “Back For Good” also uses rain nicely to show that the song is a sad one. However, the ultimate example must go to Take That’s “Pray”, which has water dripping all over the semi-naked Boyband members (who also obsessively make Christ-like gestures).
I’m sure there are more than four archetypes, so please do share any I’ve missed. I nearly included slow motion, the “i’m looking down but now I’m going to look up into the camera” look, and levitation almost got a whole slot of its own. JLS are also currently bringing back a concept that I hope will take off: the “mime the words you’re singing” with their brilliant “forever and a day for you” actions in “Everybody In Love”. I tried to screen grab this but they are too talented and do it too fast for me to capture.
I’ll leave you with the ultimate Boyband video: Take That’s “How Deep Is Your Love”. Whilst the song is a bit rubbish, the video is important. I like to think that, as this song marks the death of the ultimate Boyband (it was their last single before they split), all the archetypes are in meltdown.
1. Firstly, the mysterious female has gone evil. Rather than being the passive object of admiration for the Boyband, she is now in control! She has abused this power and kidnapped them all.
2. She has placed them in an urban interior (basement/warehouse) but they are all tied up and therefore unable to perform Christ-like gestures.
3. Evil mysterious female now takes them to dramatic exterior landscape – a cliff top. Hooray, we are in safe Boyband territory again! Oh no we’re not, she’s going to throw them off it!
4. And what does she throw them off into: yes, that’s right, water! Water kills the Boyband! And not even the stormy, dramatic sea; no, instead a lake by a motorway.*
*That’s a frustrated ex-english lit. student for you.
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