Dolce et Gabbana est. Part 2

Dolce et Gabbana est – Part 2

(In which we continue from Part 1 and appease all 1 of the readers, hunched in anticipation. The godawful scary doll represents the forgotten embers of Part 1, for those who read it or got put off by the godawful first doll picture, goddamn it.)

………………in reality even ok adverts are diabolical, which means that 99.999% of all adverts are biblically fucking dreadful, leaving 0.001% as good. I’ll attempt to think of a few good ones at the end of this load of twaddle. So here is a rough transcript and expansion on those very adverts between two episodes of Raymond. Just in case you give a toss the advert that got me really going was the Morrison’s salmon one. ‘The wife’ didn’t like the art therapy one. Neither did I.

1. Munch Bunch. Packed with fruity goodness which will make your children glow with health. Probably literally glow, like lightbulbs in a brothel, as they become fat cheeked, red faced, massive children, who by the age of 14 are morbidly obese because, with the exception of actual fruit, all fruit based kids products are just full of life threatening shit. The children in these adverts are usually Sylvia Young wankers with pushy, over ambitious parents with massive prams and wearing overpriced body warmers from Jack Wills but calling them gilets and, oh god, please don’t get me started. For examples of such nob-heads come to St Albans on a Saturday afternoon.
2. Salmon from Morrisons. I don’t have any great problem with Morrisons. I used to love Safeway for some reason, I guess as a habitual attendee as a kid. I also used to love Bejams. What a great name. What the hell does it mean!!?? Anyway this Morrisons advert was for salmon fillets and the big message was that they were going for £9.99 a kg. Only at the end and in very small print at the bottom did it say that the usual price was £14.99 a kg. Now, assuming most people don’t have the eyesight of a peregrine falcon this begs the question – who in the name of fuck would have a clue how much salmon costs by the kg? As far as I can work out the following groups would have an idea – salmon fisherpeople, fishmongers, er that’s it. No wonder Morrisons are going down the pan if they spend all that money on an advert for something that’s not particularly sexy (unless you’re a deviant grizzly bear) on the basic assumption that the majority of your target audience spend their time wandering around thinking about how many kg of salmon they can cram into their freezers while it’s such a steal. As I said, I had a really sore head.
3. Laundry expert/Lenor. What is a laundry expert? Do people get degrees in laundry expertise? Is this the point of evolution? That some grinning, self-satisfied woman can stand in front of a camera in an age when we still haven’t got a cure for cancer and expect us to believe in such a profession as ‘laundry expert’. Quick, it’s an emergency, my t-shirt isn’t quite soft enough, what the fuck am I going to do? Stand back everyone, I can help, I’m a laundry expert with a degree in it from the University of Northwick Park. Sorry I meant Middlesex. For laundry read utter. For expert read ringpiece.
4. H & M kids. Crap advert but probably the least offensive on this list. Quick enough at least to not give you a chance to hate it with all your might.

Quick diversion. ‘The wife’ has just pointed out that the Guardian magazine has an advert for Taylor’s coffee as a front cover (and again weekend of this posting with an M&S full advert). This is unforgivable and whoever allowed this to happen should have their front teeth hit with a toffee hammer every five minutes for the rest of their lives.

5. Twat ‘real’ dentist talking about how great Sensodyne toothpaste is. Yes, I’m a dentist. Yes, I’ve got a bit of time on my hands. Yes, I can happily overinflate the positive effect of your product on sensitive teeth, possibly after eating a huge slice of smug pie. Yes, you can put the money straight into my current account. No, I have no dignity, be it personal or professional. Yes, I understand my wife, children and parents and most of the people I know will look back on this advert as a low point in their lives simply because they are associated with me in some way. Yes, I realise that the toffee hammer you’re holding has 4 minutes and 59 seconds of dead time when not hitting the front teeth of the Guardian magazine advertising editor. Bell. End.

6. Trevi fountain/Expedia. Crap purely because the Trevi Fountain is an overcrowded and totally, disproportionally huge and an un-measurably overrated tourist trap. And it’s just a fountain. Please don’t go to Rome purely for this. Otherwise a vaguely bearable advert though it came with tooth grinding, sighing and angry red fingernail tracks on my thighs. My fingers, not ‘the wife’s’.

7. Art therapy. ‘The wife’ really hit the nail on the head with this one. What was being advertised as so call art therapy was essentially an unrealistically good looking, happy lady doing a colour by numbers, shit, kaleidoscopic picture and hanging it next to other previous efforts. What it should really have is someone with a genuine, long term, bi-polar condition telling the camera how actual art therapy has helped them find a reason to live and a genuine outlet for their mental pain. Or a stroke victim who paints with their toes. Sorry, that’s a bit too harsh. Anyway, the point is that it’s not art therapy. It’s colouring in for arseholes with way too much time on their hands.

8. Seriously Strong Cheddar. A nice product, for me at least, but sadly one which advertises in a similar fashion to the Lenor laundry expert strumpet. In this case it’s showing a very professorial gentleman with a beard and magnifying spectacles inspecting a block of cheese as if such a job is as intricate as open heart surgery. Or making a Faberge Egg. Jesus Fucking Christ. Here’s a check list for you –

a. Does it smell like Seriously Strong Cheddar Cheese?

b. Does it taste like Seriously Strong Cheddar Cheese?

c. Does it look like Seriously Strong Cheddar Cheese?

If the answer to these three posers is a resounding ‘YES’ then it must be fucking ready! You don’t need Stephen Hawking to whirr along and tell you that.

So that was it, the ad break between two episodes of Raymond on Channel 4 on a grey Saturday morning. Grey not only in a weather sense but also for humanity as a whole. Blimey, we’ve harnessed fire, invented the wheel, even landed on the moon. What next? Hi, my names Abigail Tits. Really, and what do you do for a living? I’m a laundry expert…

G. B. Hewitt 19.10.2015 (revised)

PS, a few great adverts!

• The old Milky Bar kid ones.
• The Hamlet adverts with Rab C Nesbitt. Much better than Rab C Nesbitt.
• The adverts for a now long cancelled chocolate bar called Nuts.
• The Fosters adverts with Paul Hogan.
• The Castlemaine XXXX with the two Aussie chaps.

I’m tired now. Someone put me to sleep.