Ever gone on holiday on your own? It’s an immensely dispiriting experience. Stuck in an endless round of shitty hostels, ignored by fantastically beautiful Europeans, so desperate?for any sort of human contact that you end up having the same mindless conversation with identikit dunderheaded Australians about “where the totally awesome party is at”.
This always results with you being dragged to a grubby nightclub serving the same noxious test-tube shots and playing the same foul Eurodance you’d have endured if you’d have just stayed home and gone down the local cattle-market in Crawley.
Forget spiritual enlightenment and finding yourself, unless of course you mean finding yourself face-first in a Ibizan gutter, bloodied, alone, and howling for your mummy.
Apart from it’s not like that at all, according to Spanish lager/swill-merchants Estrella; we at hecklerspray have been doing it wrong all our long and lonesome lives! Apparently, what happens is that you just roll off a ferry straight into the fragrant embrace of a pair of local supermodels and spend the whole summer nuzzling between their four stupendous breasts. Wow, we’re idiots! Here, have a look.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this gargantuan festival of smug wankery, but let’s start with the sheer length. Three and a half minutes. In advertising terms, that is beyond an epic. That is days, decades, aeons, and the procession of tortuous cliches barging over the screen (lantern-lit beach party…hammock among candles…sunset sea frolics… That’s smug wankery, HOUSE!) makes you feel every one of those 211 seconds like a poke in the kidney. This ad goes on forever, and it’s a little like sitting in an organic cafe enduring your richest, dullest friend showing you all 7,000 Hipstamatic-filtered photos from their six-month South American honeymoon on their iPad while you try and resist the temptation to melt their face off with green tea.
And who is the beneficiary of all these moments of made-up Mediterranean magic? Why, it’s a Dave Grohl-faced straw-hatted cock-end! Swanning onto a Balearic island with his double denim and insufficient luggage, he waltzes straight up to the first pair of honeys he sees and bam, he’s got himself a whole summer of pleasure. Which would be fine, if he wasn’t such an undeserving dreg of humanity.
At no point during this marathon break does he help with the driving; offer to wash-up; he doesn’t even have the decency to cop off with both lovely ladies, Wild Things-style. Instead he chooses to gawp at the two of them in the shower equally, but slather his affections all over the brunette, presumably leaving poor old Blondie with night after night of clamping a pillow round her head to drown out the awful moaning and cursing the day she ever agreed to hang out with such a flighty slut. The Dave Grohl-faced straw-hatted cock-end does not deserve one iota of this paradise. hecklerspray despises the DG-F S-H C-E.
But the DG-F etc etc is not the worst thing about this 4-minute bath in advertising hellfire. That song. Oh, God, that song. Sung by an approximation of Perry Farrell, if he had a massive nervous breakdown and decided that his new musical direction would be “kinda like a more slappable Jack Johnson”, the refrain of “tonight tonight tonight tonight” is likely to hang around everyone who hears it like a malleable toxic guff, impossible to shake off.
Not that that seems to bother our Estrella-guzzling trinity of numpties, though, who seem perfectly happy to go to the same party, night after night, listening to the same song, over and over, with no ill effects. What are you saying, Estrella? That your paltry Pilsner will cause untold neurological trauma and short-term memory loss? That if you drink enough, you won’t care that you’re trapped in a soul-destroying beach-hipster Groundhog Day of fairy lights and twee acoustic guitar and necklaces made from dead molluscs? That is not exactly the best selling point we’ve ever heard.
Yes, thanks very much, Estrella, but please take your “lo bueno nunca acaba si hay algo que te lo recuerda“, or “the good thing never finishes if there is something remembers it to you” (cheers, Babelfish. Another triumph of programming there) and shove it up your culo. We can remember our solo holidaying adventures without needing to chug on one of your brews. Unwise tattoos praising someone called Nathan and herpetic rashes tend to make pretty good aide-m?moires.