There’s nothing worse than having to sit down and read loads of words. Especially if you’ve broken your leg or had your eyes ripped out by a sexually aggressive crow. That’s why we like to help you out by making some videos for you every now and then.

It doesn’t mean they’re good- as you can see Dep Ed Michael & ‘Spray scribe Euan have very, very shaky hands. That doesn’t matter though because, for your viewing pleasure, they’ve had a think about what Lawyers do when they’re not out chasing ambulances.

You may think the Super Bowl is all about a sporting event, but you’re wrong. It’s all about television and, specifically, the adverts that litter the game. American Football is the perfect sport for the advertising exec.

Why?

Well, not only is America filled with vain, greedy sporting superstars who are willing to shill to the highest bidder, but American Football is also filled with stop/start action and, for every stop, there’s a chance for a television advert. To many, the commercials are the whole reason for tuning in. IMAGINE! Anyway, if you can’t be bother with all that sport cluttering up a perfectly good break, here’s the ten best Super Bowl big game commercials.

It’s worth pointing out that, 2012 is a weird Super Bowl year. Away from the game, this year sees most of the big match commercials being put online prior to the game, which kinda takes out the surprise element which made the ads worth tuning in for.

Either way, they’re a talking point again, which will be good news to dead-hearted advertisers, who have all spent gigantic amounts of money for their precious 30 seconds of airtime.

Of course, if you live in the UK, you won’t see any of these because the Super Bowl is shown on the BBC, which doesn’t have commercials, so expect near endless punditry.

Anyway, here’s the ten best commercials.

The Seinfeld One

The One With Curtains Made From Pizza

The One Where A Woman Assaults A Man

The Star Wars One

The Awful Ferris Bueller One

The David Beckham In His Underpants One

The One Where The Bloke Nearly Dies

The One With The Man Who Has A Singing Shoulder

The One With A Vampire Party

The One With A Car Full Of Dogs

Pre-determination is something that the same fools who believe in superstition go in for in a big way. You might recognise it as fate or the ‘thundering approach to emotional and financial oblivion’. If you believe in fate then you probably married the first person who ever gave you an orgasm and are now woefully unhappy, only able to console yourself by watching romantic comedies.

Even as you do so, you realise everything seems to work out well for the shining-faced Hollywood elite. That is despite their belief and reliance on exactly the same concept which has led you to a life of raised voices and thinly veiled hatred. Fate worked out okay for them, didn’t it? Why not you?

Anyway, enough about your bitter, twisted existence.

You see, fate is a weapon which is used against you. From your formative years, you’ll remember the fairy tales where the prince always met the beautiful princess and guess what: they lived happily ever after. It was never a case of boy meets girl, girl meets other boy and they all lived horribly ever after, only communicating through lawyers, was it? Their fates were mapped out and they knew that the person they ended up with would be “the one” for them. That’s not just because royal families are notorious for marrying internally and producing offspring with webbed toes; it’s because the fates are strong with these ones.

As you begin to grow up, you’ll move onto “teen” things for “teens” and these are a little bit more angsty. You’ll see people going through highly glossed break-ups and angry retribution because you’re a teenager and this stuff is designed to fill you with the proper quotient of ire about the world you’re forced to grow up in. “Why can’t things be like they are in fairytales?” You’ll post on your Tumblr (or your diary, depending on how old you are) but let’s face it. Teen dramas always end with the two buff dickheads who broke up at the start getting back together or meeting their future spouses through their ex. There’s always the suggestion of serendipity, even if your warped teenage mind can’t get your head round it.

When you’re older, you think you’re wiser and you won’t fall for silly things like fate but just wait until that person you quite fancied at school adds you on Facebook and you’ll find yourself wondering ‘what if’. You’ve been conditioned to believe in fate and pre-determination. That’s why adverts have become so predictable.

Take this latest example of fuckwaddery from BT. Unable to tie ‘the berk from My Family’ down to a new contract, BT were forced to try and update THE GREATEST DRAMA OF OUR MODERN AGE without mentioning the fact that Whatsisface died in a horrifying Space Shuttle crash in the Adriatic Sea. They decided to go back to the start to when Whatsisname from My Family met Whoserface from other things by sending one of the irritating children to university. Presumably to study for a proper degree given that he’ll never get another acting job after this (I’m willing to be proved wrong on that one).

You see, if you go back in time to the original advert, Thingy and Whozit meet through a completely serendipitous moment. Fast forward to 2012 and here’s Young Whozit running into a girl who wants to live in the same flat as him. No looks are shared but you can tell where this is going.

There’s not much to say about the advert itself. You can all see the sheer idiocy of the creepy ‘geek’ who has an interest in touching the bits of Young Whozit’s future love and I’m quite sure you can visualise trying to make friends in your teenage years by talking about the speed of broadband (or dial-up… or fax machines… or how long it takes to dial a phone… or send a telegram). It’s not something that marks you out as an interesting human being.

It does show that BT are going back to the start and the cycle of fortunate events will begin anew. The two will enjoy a blossoming romance, held together by a love of superfast broadband (which isn’t superfast at all) while ‘the geek’ tries to ruin the blossoming romance by hilariously spiking the wrong person’s drink on a night out. Or something. It doesn’t matter. Four years down the line, you’ll be at a wedding in the ad break for Britain’s Got Talent and you’ll wonder where the hell we all went wrong.

Is it their fault for relying on the same old bullshit to shift Broadband plans or is it yours for buying into it from childhood?

Omens. Omens are what alarmingly superstitious people look for as they bounce eagerly from bad situation to bad situation. People who believe the old hokum about black cats and ladders invariably lay traps for themselves, only to be surprised when they fall into them, screaming in metaphorical agony. These are the people that don’t make jokes about Friday The 13th because they’re too busy wrapping themselves up in bubble wrap to protect them from the oncoming apocalypse of minor misfortune.

These people need us- the non-believers- to show them how good life can be away from omens, faeries, bad luck and fishwives’ tales. They need us to lampoon and mock the beliefs that they hold as fervently as an evangelical Christian holds onto a fading belief in a benevolent creator. We need to be out there, dancing jigs under ladders, crossing swords with black cats and breaking mirrors over the heads of Arch-Bishops.

We need to show people that you make your own luck and believing in omens and superstition will only lead you to dash yourself against the rocks of life! Unless they’re right of course. In which case, those of you who just threw your mobile phones at a mirror on my command might be in for a bit of a tough time.

The only evidence I can find which backs up the theory of ‘bad luck’ can be found in advertising. All the tales you’ve been told about the man who walked under a ladder only to have his house burn down at the same time are probably true but then again, he probably left the chip pan on while he went to clean his windows. All of these things are twisted and made into advertising gimmicks but what if there was one person who was the unluckiest person on earth. What would you turn their story into?

How do you twist the story of someone who is so monumentally unlucky that the cloud of bad fortune that hangs around them can be seen from Uranus’ orbit into something that can be enjoyed by all and sell a few of your shoddy wares in the process?

It’s easy!

Take Noah. He must be the unluckiest bastard in all of creation. Not only did he wake up one day to find that everyone on earth except him had been judged as unrighteous by bloody GOD himself, he was then forced to build an ark using only a flimsy set of IKEA instructions and an allan key. Does divine intervention and losing your local haberdasher to moral corruption qualify him as the unluckiest man in the world? No, probably not but having to fill his flat-pack boat with the world’s most dangerous creatures definitely bloody does.

The poor bastard was left to deal with the mountains of crap and carcasses left behind by the animals in his biblical supertanker without as much as a by your leave from the big bearded bastard in the sky. They’d have been eating each other, shitting all over one-another and generally making Noah’s life a living hell. So yes, he is the most unlucky person in history*.

Until now!

Advertising has jumped in and reminded us that while Noah may have been unlucky, at least his ark was fit for purpose. Unlike the poor git in the latest Lynx commercial.

You’re probably sitting there dumbfounded that I’ve managed to go through 600 words of a column about Lynx and not mention either the brand or the fact that it’s the sexist preserve of hormonal teenagers that have an innate desire to smell like vapourised cat vomit but that’s not the point! You all knew that anyway. I bet some of you occasionally walk past a group of teenage boys and make some flippant comment about the smell of Lynx and stale farts- and that’s okay.

Usually, I’d go for that angle as well but Friday 13th got me thinking about luck and how little luck this modern day Noah is having. There he is, given the task to build an ark and GOD hasn’t even given him any instructions, let alone the sacred Allan Key of Antioch that he gave Noah. He’s having to make it up with a rudimentary pencil carved out of the wood he’s being forced to work ON HIS OWN without the use of the flatpack Ark that Noah had.

It’s no wonder that he ends up with something that resembles an ocean-going pleasure yacht instead of a good, sturdy biblical ark.

The poor guy has done what any of us would do and modelled it on something he was familiar with. Will there be space for all the animals in there? Only time will tell. It’s not only that though, he’s clearly gone for comfort over substance with his tilled-wood interior and convenient fireman’s pole to allow him easy access between decks. He’s not leaving enough space to fit the animals in. No cages either. How will he keep the predators apart from their prey?!

I’m sure he has it all in hand. After all, this is GOD’s chosen man. The man who will lead all the creatures of this earth out of the darkness of the apocalypse and into a new world. A better world. A world populated by people descended from this brave but unlucky man. We should welcome the forthcoming apocalypse with open arms if this man is to make us better.

It’s no wonder he’s feeling a bit warm. He’s worked up one hell of a sweat working all that wood in time for the world ending. Having a spray of deodorant before the animals start to come isn’t going to make any difference, is it? Unfortunately for our plucky hero, all the shops had sold out of real anti-perspirant and he was forced to pick up a can of Lynx. Still, no matter. There will be no people to react to his smell of vapourised cat vomit where he’s going.

Here’s where our story comes to an end though, perhaps with the most unlucky element of all. It’s a well-known scientific fact that women cannot resist the smell of Lynx and will actively seek it out across continents if they have to. It’s not this man’s fault that he had to buy that can of Lynx. He’s going on to the birth of a new world, of course he needs some home comforts. Now his ark is suddenly full of beautiful women, attracted by the smell of his body tonic.

What is he supposed to do? Turn them away? The ark can very easily be converted to house people and the animals haven’t bothered to walk the lengths of themselves to join him. He tried to resurrect the world as we know it but was left with a giant wooden boat full of women that will eventually turn against him when ‘The Lynx Effect’ wears off and the can lies empty. He needed two of every animal but he didn’t get them. He failed GOD and when the waters subsided, he was left a broken shell of a man, completely ruined by his failure to create a new world.

The unluckiest person in the world stands, crestfallen, on the deck of that ark: make no mistake.

*Mythical history, that is. It’s a long-established fact that the unluckiest person in history is Adam Rickett.

OI! FATTY! IT’S JANUARY SO YOU’D BEST GET ON THE TREADMILL! Is what I’d be shouting at you if I wasn’t one of you; a Festive over-indulger that left a world of salad and steak for one populated almost exclusively by Toblerone and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. We’ve all been there and now you’re probably sitting clutching your list of New Year’s Resolutions desperately trying to convince yourself that you’ll achieve all of the things on it.

You won’t.

Why should you? You’re your own person and you don’t need a list of goals to tell you that you should probably crack open a bag of cress every now and then before you start to resemble Michelle MacManus & Rik Waller’s illicit love-child. You don’t even need a list of goals to tell you that it might be time to get yourself on a dating website and meet someone new before you fall into the arms of an ex-lover because you’re horribly lonely.

None of that matters though because there’s always something better than a list and in this case adverts are willing to take on the role of your conscience and the New Year ad schedule is packed with sanctimonious bullshit designed to get you out there into the world looking svelte and feeling amazing thanks to some pro-biotic yogurt.

That’s the thing about adverts, isn’t it? They play up to an accepted norm about the society that you live in. Take the hideous Morrisons advert in which two middle-aged children discuss the recession and the need for people to ‘tighten their belts’ in January. You think this is fine because they’re Northern but they’re actually creating a sickening dystopian vision of a world where children are no longer free to be children and have to think about food vouchers and Freddie Flintoff’s bath of gold doubloons. Of course, Morrisons are trying to add an innocent expression onto something that responsible adults seem to talk about all the time whereas some ad campaigns are just cynical.

Take a moment, shut your eyes and imagine a meeting room where six people are sitting. None of them are wearing suits or any kind of formal business attire and one is wearing a pair of tattered brogues with no socks. One man fiddles nervously with his spectacles as he examines the stoney faces around the room. They’ve been given the ultimate contract; a weight loss brand that needs a change of direction.

One woman in the group suddenly rolls back in her ergonomic back-supporting office chair and makes a loud exclamation of joy. “I’ve got it,” she shouts, “why don’t we show overweight people that if they follow the Weight Watchers plan, it’ll make them thin?!”

There is a stunned silence in the meeting room and the glass walls begin to de-mist as their collective breath is held. Everyone looks to the man wearing a rugby shirt at the head of the table. He nods sagely and the room erupts in applause. The creatives have done it again! Fat people can be thin and they will show them the light!

“Wait though!” Cries the man with no socks. “How can we convince our target audience of saturated fatties that they want to be thin and beautiful?” The room falls silent again: all that can be heard is the nervous tapping of pens on the table.

“What about writing a song and getting a pop star to sing it?” The quietest woman suggests. “We could make the lyrics really motivational so that they really speak to our target market?”

There is some muted discussion in the room. It’s too quiet for us to hear but we all know that they’re discussing who to have sing it. Rik Waller and Michelle MacManus are busy making babies and Craig Colton from last year’s X Factor is far too shit. They need someone that people can aspire to be like. Someone sassy and respectable that will quite literally sell their soul for money.

If only there was someone that fitted the bill. They have a long conversation and seem to come up with nothing. They’re standing up to leave, presumably off to think about it over some champagne and oysters when a Britain’s Got Talent judge walks into their office, looking for scraps.

“Hark!” They cry in unison as this fictional account becomes alarmingly Dickensian. They’ve found their woman. A sassy, respectable woman with a big, idiotic face who would quite literally sell her soul for money. They don’t even need to negotiate with her. Alesha’s shaking hands with them all before they even name a figure. Her only stipulation is that she doesn’t have to touch any of the fatties and that she doesn’t have to rap. She’s moving in a new direction.

Now you know how the Play Weight Watchers campaign came into being, aren’t you a little more open to its message and its 3 minutes and 14 seconds of bad miming, worse dancing and sanctimonious ‘body positive’ thrust? Doesn’t the sight of these people who, you’ve got to hand it to them, look great inspire you to go out there and go to meetings, living by a strict ‘point controlled’ system which requires you to lose weight by emptying your wallet?

Or does it still make you want to tear your own eyes out and stuff them into your ears so that you don’t have to see or hear this abomination ever again? What’s it going to be, fatso?

By now the haze of Christmas parties is bound to have worn off and you’ll be sitting there with nothing to show from the festive period but a photocopy of your genitals and an unplanned pregnancy; you’re probably looking back on the month or so preceding this and thinking, “Where did it all go wrong?”

That’s simple. You’re one of these people who gets so excited about the concept of Christmas that you vomit all over your facebook with excitement the first time you see that terrible Coca Cola advert.

SO YOU’VE PROBABLY ALREADY GUESSED THAT I’M GOING TO RUB IT IN YOUR FACE WHILE YOU RUB YOURSELF AND WONDER IF YOU MIGHT HAVE CRABS.

After all, that’s what Christmas is all about.

Let’s talk turkey (aha!), the Coca Cola advert is an unmitigated disaster zone of hackneyed ideas and 50s’-style ‘buy this, it’s good for what ails ye’ advertising. The fact that so many people see it as a sign of the festive period beginning is enough to make any sensible person run out into the street with a bolt-gun to start euthanising children before their parents manage to indoctrinate them into believing that advertising has anything to do with the start of the Christmas period.

Of course, I wouldn’t do that as I’m far too afraid of the brutal honesty of children to ever go near them whether I’m armed or otherwise.

Regardless of that fact, the Coke advert signifies the beginning of Christmas to many people who like to pour onto social networks proclaiming, “OMGCOKEADVERTITZTOTALLYCHRIMBOYAAAAAALOLMAO.”

The obvious question is ‘What has Coke ever done for Christmas?’. That is, aside from inventing Santa Claus in his current form and covering up your relatives’ alcohol problem on Christmas day. Coca Cola isn’t a particularly festive drink and therefore they’ve taken to disguising it with picture-postcard, Werthers Original style visuals and a song that is, I’m afraid to say, worse than Cliff Richard’s Millenium Prayer.

Coca Cola doesn’t bring the joy of the season and the idea of millions of people suddenly rushing to put their trees up when the Coke advert comes on fills me with a sense of dread usually reserved for a nuclear holocaust and a new Michelle MacManus album. Have you ever actually seen a Coca Cola truck like that? Are they like TV License Detector vans? There’s only one and it spends its life on a thankless PR dirge around the country?

Yes, Coca Cola invented Santa Claus, the red suited jolly version at least and we’re supposed to be infinitely grateful to them for allowing us to use him in our children’s folklore. Of course we should be! Thank you Coca Cola! Given the size of the company, they could easily charge you royalties every time you put out a mince pie and a glass of sherry on Christmas eve.

But wait. If we are to assume that the ‘accepted’ version of Santa Claus as the big, jolly red-coated gent that we see today comes directly from the marketing bods at the Coca Cola Company* then we might as well be telling the children of the world that their presents will be delivered by Ronald McDonald or those dickheads from the Pepsi adverts. Christmas owes nothing to Coca Cola and the mere suggestion that it ‘marks the beginning’ of festivities is often made by the same people that complain when there’s Hallowe’en costumes in supermarkets in mid-September.

Still, if you are one of the bleating sheep that rely on Coca Cola to tell you when you can start being nice to people then think of it this way: when you’re a kid, you believe that Santa Claus is real and maybe you believe that he’s directly responsible for delivering Coke. Then you grow up and you find out Santa isn’t real and you actually have to go out and buy gifts for the people you love. Maybe you want to cling on to part of that Christmas magic and the first sight of the Coca Cola trucks gives you that sense of wonder and joy that you’ve been lacking since you hit puberty.

It’s a nice thought isn’t it? It still means you’re being manipulated into feeling an emotion by an advertising company though. Maybe that’s what Christmas is all about after all.

Still, Merry Christmas an’ all that.

*In fact the depiction of Santa Claus in his ‘current form’ predates the advertising of Coca Cola but given that Father Christmas is essentially a series of lies to build the hopes of children and amuse the dull lives of adults (much as Hecklerspray do), we thought we’d keep the lie going. You’re welcome. Merry Christmas.

Christmas is a time of giving and it’s also a time for making so much money that to view it all packed into one room would melt the mind of anyone from the working classes while simultaneously destabilising the economic security of a developing African country.

Of course, anyone with 70 pence and a reasonable idea of how to sell a Twix to a starving man can turn a profit in this world and if you keep scaling things up then eventually you’ll be left with enough money to buy Greece, pump it full of fake snow and turn it into a Winter Wonderland theme park in time for next Christmas but that doesn’t mean that Christmas is all about clawing at cash.

EVEN THOUGH IT IS.

Some things at Christmas are more traditional like made up folk tales designed to force children to stop behaving like entitled little shits. No, not Santa. You’ll find that the Nativity story’s a pretty good moralising tale if you’re looking to instill the magic of ridiculous claptrap into impressionable youngsters from the moment they’re old enough to whimper the word “materialism”. If you don’t instill the wonder and merriment of Christmas into their soft-spots then they might turn out to be dribbling morons with less chance of interfering with the genitalia of the opposite sex than George Michael has of seeing in the new year with a glass of Asti Spumante in a public lavatory.

You know- like these people:

I had always assumed that it was the prerogative of retail companies to make their staff out to be the last bastions of good taste and intelligence. No doubt because retail workers are so often portrayed as being affected, surly neer-do-wells with all the wit and charm of a rim job from Piers Morgan.

Or at least they are in the sitcom I co-wrote which starts on Channel Whimsydoo on Monday at quarter-past-fucking-never.

Anyway, the point is that it’s very rare to see a retailer portray their staff as dead-behind-the-eyes shut-ins as opposed to the informed, sensible and professional dickheads that you catch thwarting Darth Vader in PC World adverts. Which is why the Christmas offering from The Range is so bloody surprising.

Their staff are apparently all lobotomy patients while it appears that their advertising team necked back a couple of bottles of vodka before declaring an entire country hilarious. You see, if you’re going to “reverse market” (don’t look it up, it’s not a real thing) then you could do worse than actually picking a product that doesn’t imply you sell spadeloads of tripe but that this particular national stereotype is a step too low even for barrel-scrapers like yourselves.

The Range claim that they sell pretty much everything you could ever need. I will wait with bated breath to see the reaction when someone nips in for some anti-venom to treat a particularly hideous cobra bite. Although, putting semantics aside for a moment, coupling your stores policy of selling everything ever invented along with staff that look like the forgotten victims of genocide and a racist megaphone that imparts the same wisdom as a Tickle Me Ku Klux Klan toy is a sure-fire way to find yourself being picked on by a keyboard bully with an outlet and bloodied stumps where his fingers used to be.

That’s me in this scenario.

The worst part of it is that this isn’t even the worst part of the advert. Two minutes of what I laughingly call research taught me that this dancing berk, who depicts- with alarming accuracy- the childish excitement of every retail manager I’ve ever come across, actually has a name and a back story.

You don’t believe me? This is on The Range’s Facebook.

Well HAR DEE BLOODY HAR. What a loveable nerd created almost entirely by committee to be a hideous amalgam of every character from The Office. Aren’t The Range a clever bunch for creating such a memorable and thundering cock to be the figurehead of their campaign. There’s even a video on Youtube where you too can learn to dance like Malcolm in an attempt to become as ironically cockish as he is. I’m not going to link to it because it doesn’t deserve any more hits. It’s had one too many. One.

So aside from cultural references to Star Trek and the fantasy genre as well as, for some inexplicable reason, reggae what is it about Malcolm that’s so wrong? Is it the fact that he’s closer to the image of an everyman that he almost becomes real and therefore comes out from the television until he’s tugging at your flacid genitals like some kind of penile necromancer? No!

It’s because the whole thing is so forced and foetid that it’s like being a fly on the wall in Chris Moyles’ studio. Not only the humour but the whole idea of the ‘viral character’. Remember the insufferable arsepiece that spouted the word ‘Wonga’ in a mockney accent before returning to his Hackney Cab? He wasn’t supposed to turn into the must have merkin attachment that he did, it just happened. Advertising companies are now trying to force these personalities down our throats until we’re left spewing up name badges and crying out for the end of days.

It’s become clear while writing this that although The Range’s campaign might not seem that bad on the face of it, it’s one of those ones that actually becomes significantly worse if you try to apply a little logical thought to it. Is The Range’s Christmas campaign one of the worst of all time? Probably not but it’s trying really hard and you have to give it some credit for trying to be so offensively crap that it might drive someone to suicide.

Probably me.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s not dilly-dally around the issue of Christmas advertising. It’s everywhere and it’s so aggressive that 90% of the time you feel less like it’s the most wonderful time of the year™ and is more akin to being drugged and lured onto a railway platform by a sexually excited Jeremy Clarkson.

It’s only really supermarkets that show any interest in being nurturing and suggesting that your entire Christmas experience will be easier if you shop with them. That is until you step through their front door to be confronted by a modern-day reenactment of the Battle of the Somme. You’ve all seen it. Grandmothers entrenched in the biscuit aisle launching barrage after barrage of garibaldis on the “boche” in their dugouts made from microwavable Christmas puddings and tiny tubs of brandy butter.

There’s obviously some digression in there. The long and short of it is that Christmas marketing is mostly lies and aggressive selling to make us feel bad that we haven’t spent enough money.

That is until you hit the kids’ market. What’s the best way to make you, the adult, feel like you haven’t spent enough on your little bundles of joy? That’s the easiest job in marketing. Tell the kids about all this great stuff that they don’t have. You don’t even have to mention it explicitly; kids are so inherently evil that they know exactly what features the latest all-singing, all-dancing Optimus Prime figure has without even needing to be told so marketing becomes even easier.

The real problem is, what do you do when you’re not shouting directly at the children? You need a song. You need a really, really catchy song. You need a song that people can recite the lyrics to despite not having heard it in 300 days. Why not try something like this?

Yes! That’s it, that’s the one. You’re singing it now. There could be anything written on this line and you wouldn’t have a bloody clue. Your child is hideously ugly. Anyway, let’s move on. Toys R’ Us gave us one of the most iconic Christmas adverts of all time with this effort. You can’t see any of the products but you know it sells toys and an absolute ton of them at that. Easy, right?

Subsequently they have updated the advert every year to take into account new advances in animation etc. As you can see in this one from last year they just updated the animation without removing any of the message from the advert. You can buy pretty much any toys you want from this superstore from a massive, anthropomorphic giraffe. Why change a winning a winning formula?

Well, they did and now we have this.

Oh.

Usually we’d spent another 500 words picking the ad apart and referring back to what was said in the opening paragraphs. That’s pretty much the structure of one of these articles. To break from the tradition though, here’s an impassioned plea from people who grew up thinking Toys R’ Us was the most magical and wonderful place in the universe (because we could bully our parents into buying us toys).

Toys R’ Us isn’t Argos. It’s not somewhere to pragmatically advertise the product and the price in a bland ineffective way. You’re trying to capture the imagination of kids without having to resort to a Bieber-esque musical number about remaining a target for paedophiles well into your late thirties.

Change it back.

Go on.

Seriously. You know what you’ve done, that’s why you’ve disabled the comments on your new ad. You know it’s terrible as well. You’ve paid good money to inflict that upon the public and now you can’t take it back. We know that and we don’t blame you for it. Next year though, eh? Let’s see a triumphant return to the good ol’ days.

If you don’t, you’ll probably lose an entire generation of Toys R’ Us kids, kids, kids, kid, kid, ki, ki, ki, k.

It’s christmas. Woopdeedoo and loop de loop and all that. Yes, that’s right, since you all asked so fucking nicely, we didn’t bother to do a video this week as it’s the festive season and is therefore all about building up your hopes in order to dash them.

In fact, we’re so set on driving you all to distraction that we’re going to have Christmas specials every week now because that’s exactly what christmas is all about. Incessant disappointment until you eat so much chocolate and drink so much cheap sherry that you may as well check into Dignitas on Boxing Day.

Still, euthanasia aside, it’s always best to start the Christmas period as early as possible because that’s where you make the most money and since all of you dribbling gits out there in internet land believe that the Christmas period can only officially begin when the Coca Cola advert has tugged its way around your heartstrings, we decided to start as soon as they do.

Really early.

Christmas adverts take a few very set, very distinct and very dull paths. They either play to your sentimental side like Coca Cola or John Lewis, they play it for laughs like DFS (no, they really are) or they traipse out some washed-up celebrities in order to point at them and shout, “LOOK! THESE CELEBRITIES ENJOY CHRISTMAS AND THAT MEANS IT’S OKAY FOR YOU TO HAVE A NICE TIME AS WELL!”

That is unless you’re a child, in which case the advertising is still shouting at you but it’s more likely to be saying, “YOU WILL FORCE YOUR USELESS PEON PARENTS TO BANKRUPT THEMSELVES BUYING THIS TOY THAT YOU WILL PLAY WITH A MAXIMUM OF FIVE TIMES BEFORE IT BREAKS AND IS FORGOTTEN ABOUT IN A BOX! THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! BUY OUR PRODUCTS!” It’s a tough lesson but it’s one that children should learn from an early age.

Some adverts actually go out of their way to combine all these elements into 30 second mini-dramas with a narrative and a heart and real, genuine drama. Step forward, Very.co.uk.

Drama. It opens with a Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone duel close-up. The forlorn strings of a guitar warble out in the distance. The slightly odd sight of two television presenters going up against the Il Duce of Christmas himself is completely offset by the sudden sense of tension…

…oh, what’s that hyper-irritating version of ‘Anything You Can Do…’ doing there?

In an effort to explain the sudden appearance of this jaunty brainworm, spokesmorons and celebrity bum-chums Holly & Fearne are quickly shown beating Santa at his own game of counter-intuitive housebreaking. Where Santa seems to fail is that he can’t just wander through someone’s front door at 8 in the evening.

Why?

He’s not bloody famous, that’s why.

Besides Fearne thinking she can ‘bring back’ a hairstyle that looks like a ploughed field, they’re showing him up by interacting with a family. It’s cosy, it’s sentimental. That’s where TV presenters and Santa Claus differ you see, Santa Claus isn’t a self-praising narcissist. If they really wanted to do Santa’s job better than him then they could do worse than to disappear from existence in a puff of smoke, becoming a lie that parents tell their kids so that they don’t grow up to be self-involved twat baskets.

Look at that family mocking santa claus. “He’s not even real!” they mockingly cry as the poor old bastard tries to stuff a wooden train under their smart-price christmas tree. Holly and Fearne look on with derision. Humour. Sick, sick humour. How can he ever hope to gain the thanks of millions of children all over the world with his paltry offerings of wooden toys, handmade with love and affection by tiny little people than Ricky Gervais thinks are hilarious? None of these things are a Nintendo 3DS (CHILDREN! YOU WANT A 3DS!)

Dirty tactics! That’s what it is. Holding back the poor, decrepit old man who just wants to finish his annual paper route without being held back by two tarts with a glorified catalogue. Sure they might have more presents than ol’ Sanity Clause himself but do they have the magical powers to skoot round the earth delivering presents like they’ve just inhaled a kilo of amphetamines and broken the face of Bernard’s watch?

Of course they don’t. They’re bloody TV presenters! TV presenters can just smile and read from an autocue. They can’t even drive that van. They had to get the cameraman to move slightly to the left because Fearne Cotton just sat staring at the pedals like a brain-damaged horse. There’s no magic there.

So what’s the outcome? Have the spokesmorons actually managed to upset the balance of Christmas forever? Will the festive season ever be the same again? Does their defeat of Santa mean that Fearne Cotton & Holly Willoughby will become an ethereal, fictional presence that children make macaroni images of in primary schools?

FIND OUT IN PART TWO!

There’s nothing better than the smell of a burger chargrilling over an open flame. That is, unless you’re vegetarian or can’t eat pork for religious reasons. Maybe you don’t like burgers. Okay, so there are several things that are- in reality- better than the smell of a burger chargrilling over an open flame but we can assure you of one thing, a fast food burger is not one of them.

It’s not for us to tell you the problems with fast food and to preach to you like grimy facsimiles of Nigel Slater would be hypocritical. We’ve all been drunk, hungry, in desperate need of an escape from the rain that we’ve been in one of the American burger giants- there’s no denying it. Find us someone who’s never been over the door and we’ll point and gawp in sheer amazement.

We can however, tell you the problems with fast food advertising. After all, that’s the entire point of this column. You see, fast food chains suffer from the same problem as booze peddlers: when all’s said and done, they’re advertising something that’s bad for you.

So how do you dress it up?

It’s relatively simple and you’ll be familiar with the way it’s done almost instantly. Groups are the usual ones like the KFC adverts where, on a lovely sunny day instead of having a barbeque, a group of family and friends have opted to share a feast of KFC delights that must have cost somewhere in the region of £13,000 to put on the table. They’re laughing, larking about having a great time. Why? They’re sharing that grease around. Bargain bucket for one? Why not make that for four and quadruple your lifespan?

It’s easy.

However in recent years McDonalds- the last bastion of the seedless bun- have opted to show as many demographics in their restaurants as possible to prove that McDonalds is a classless, raceless, genderless outlet designed for both everyone and no-one in equal measure. It’s much like their customer service model.

They’ve moved away from gaudy luminous furnishings and away from the restaurant model that they began with in the 50s’ as a car-service diner. They’ve replaced most restaurants with a dull green ‘eco-cafe’ which is designed to “remind” their customers that what they’re eating is actually 100% beef that can be traced right the way back to the cage it came out of.

Their latest advert takes these values which they have espoused from on-high over the last couple of years and turns them into implied values, perhaps the most dangerous of the values.

This particular ad shows a loner. A cheery loner, we’ll grant you that but a loner nonetheless. It’s quite a concept to spend most of an advert for fast food with most of it spent wandering the streets of (what we assume is That London) and not focussing on the burgers and how full of meat they are. They’re implied values though. Wide demographic of people, home-spun, clean-cut chap doing some walking. He’s picked up a paper (probably The Mail) and is singing a song about being on the street where his sweetheart lives.

Nice, isn’t it?

“On The Street Where You Live” is a song which was originally used in the musical ‘My Fair Lady’ and has since been covered by a huge range of artists from Bobby Darin to Steve Hogarth from Marillion and is, largely speaking, quite a romantic number. Isn’t it the perfect song to sing to your sweetheart?

It’s not a huge leap of logic to assume that the young man in this advert is singing the song to the Big Mac which he is about to sink his teeth into. He’s about to eat the object of his desire. He’s fallen in love with a burger that he’s then going to devour. It’s a one minute tragedy.

If you’re to believe this advert, you’ll believe that McDonalds encourage the love of burgers with a strange serenade from a lovestruck 20-something. Does it make you want to eat one of their heavily-salted treats or vomit into a happy meal box? Either way it doesn’t matter. Where you stand on McDonalds, their products and their advertising is of little to no importance in the grand scheme of the Happy World of the Golden Arches. All we’re trying to say is; bring back the Hamburglar.

There is a definite trend of companies recycling their expensive adverts of yesteryear in order to save themselves a bit of cash. To be honest, there isn’t a lot we can say as a criticism of that. Times are tough and if your product hasn’t changed very much then why bother going to the effort of making a whole new advert to extoll the exact same virtues.

While there’s nothing wrong with it on the face of it, some ads remind us that they were completely awful in the first place and, like last week, we’re looking into the murky, sugar-loaded world of soft drinks.

Are they a bargain? ‘Cause everyone loves a bargain, and don’t try to pretend that you don’t. There is evidence to suggest that we are more likely to buy things if they are on some kind of offer, be it ‘buy one get one free’, ‘two for the price of one’ or ‘buy six and get thirty free pictures of stick-men in various sexual positions’.

However sometimes getting two for the price of one isn’t as good as it may seem.

Take this prime example from Fanta:

Let’s not waste too much time on this. Why are these cuddly cartoon characters partying it up with Fanta? Fanta with no alcohol in it. Perhaps it’s a very British attitude to have but alcohol is party juice. We’ve never had a sip of Fanta and felt compelled to crowdsurf, unless it was to crowdsurf to the Coca Cola Company’s HQ and tell them that it doesn’t taste as good as it used to and ask them if they’ve tried Orangina.

Still. Perhaps this ad will teach us the best way to recover from awkward social situations at parties. This las recovers using mime as a form of modern dance. MIME! If you used mime as a method of recovering from an embarrassing door-face-interaction you’d be laughed out of that party into the waiting arms of a junkie who would promise to take you back in time to 1936 when that move was cool.

Boys don’t like to be phantom-lassoed. Just a hint there, ladies.

Demographically, the first part of the advert is confusing. This party infested by Bieber/Jonas-ites (similarity to parasites withstanding) who don’t want to drink or have crazy sex at a party but just stand around and drink Fanta. Who’s the demographic for this advert? Is it only being shown on the Disney channel?

We thought that this train of thought might peter out but then we popped on to Fanta’s official website and saw The Fantanas; a girl band manufactured to sing songs about the beautiful taste of Fanta.

Is it too much to hope that Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato will be sharpening their bitch-sticks and trimming their mullets ready for some kind of gimp-pop showdown with these girls? Coming to Disney Channel Pay-Per-View soon!

Still, let’s move onto the tagline, shall we?

“MORE FANTA. LESS SERIOUS.”

More Fanta, less serious is the entire tag to this advert. Less serious about fun, less serious about taste, less serious about music, less serious about styles of dancing that aren’t entirely anachronistic, less serious about advertising.

Possibly the thing that irks us the most is the fact that it’s not over yet.

You probably don’t want to buy a bottle of Fanta yet so let’s have an entirely different advert with an entirely different feel. Why they did this, no-one knows, but we can only imagine that the graphics people were on a roll and just launched straight into a new advert.

They’ve taken the most boring situation possible, some kind of lecture where the lecturer stands in silence, reading the latest Dan Brown novel and ignoring the class. They’re bored of the lazy, untalented writing style which oozes from the page like a noxious gas. This putrid, useless pile of paper is scarcely worthy of propping open the door of this classroom. The door through which the class are about to rush out of into the Friday sun to their friends and Fanta and a complete lack of fun or entertainment.

The clock dings (helpfully, it says Friday so it saves you having to climb inside the television and consult a calendar) and suddenly the room is transformed into a club. A club. It’s 5 o’clock on a Friday! Go home and get changed. Have some dinner or something! Responsible drinking kids. Drinking Fanta in excess will make you all gassy.

“GRAB A TASTE OF FRIDAY.”

Answer us this, ladies and gentlemen. Does Fanta taste like Friday? Just because it’s alliterative? Of course it doesn’t. For a start, we’ve seen one of these things on a Tuesday. What are they saying to us?

“You still have most of the week to get through before you’ll be able to lick any surface and it will taste like Fanta! Ha!”

How dare they.

What’s a true taste of Friday? Revomitted vodka. Get to work, people.

This week’s Badvertising proves that the really piss-poor elements of advertising live longer in the memory than the really good ones. What do you remember most? Those Nescafé ads where Anthony Head gets his end away or that insurance advert where Michael Winner tells people to calm down before disemboweling them with a rusty fork? We can’t even remember which one’s meant to be the bad one in that comparison.

What we’re trying to say is, this isn’t a new advert that we’re picking on today but the minute you see it, you’ll remember it.

Fizzy drinks. People like fizzy drinks. We know in a health-crazed culture where everyone’s going out of their way to look like some tanned bell-end from The Only Way Is Essex, it’s not fashionable to say that. Why not have a smoothie instead? Piss off. The people want sugar and strychnine!

That being said, these drinks are popular and force global drinks conglomerates to diversify and look for other opportunities and markets. That’s a good thing if you like to pop open a can of fizzy juice and get all hiccupy of an evening.

That being said however, it’s always been a struggle to sell the ‘great taste of Pepsi Max’ when in reality it tastes like sucking sweetened chicken-vomit through cheese-cloth. That’s why they tend to go in more for adverts which appeal to the EXTREME element of calling a product MAX which will appeal to MEN!

MEN LIKE EXTREME THINGS! It’s true.

Gentlemen, the next time you go to the supermarket, take a look at the deodorants. Many will say EXTREME, ULTIMATE, INDEFATIGABLE (well, maybe not), UNBEATABLE, MAX etc. That’s because the manufacturers want you to feel invincible as result of using the product. We can say with some degree of certainty that if they could have an image of a man surviving a nuclear holocaust, shielded by an eerie white shroud as a can design then they would.

Much in the same way that if they could get off with making an EXTREME toothpaste that tasted like metal filings, we’re quite sure they’d go for that too.

Surely this is the kind of thing that Badvertising should be looking at, we hear you scream (silently)! Well, yes but in an effort to stick to the formulaic nonsense that we confine ourselves to, we have to look for an advert that accentuates those elements. Oh…

It’s probably best to set up an overview of the advert in the minds of the advertising executive. A Pepsi Max account exec definitely didn’t say:

“The Asteroid campaign gave us the ability to show the consumer that people who drink Pepsi Max are go-getters who are willing to do absolutely anything it takes in order to get what they want be that in their professional life or their personal life.”

Of course, what they’ve ended up with in reality are a group of people who don’t take no for an answer. The primary thing we have to realise here is that our friend or the ‘protagonist’ of this piece (if it’s correct to call him that in such a depressingly misogynist piece of advertising) is a desperate, pathetic man who is so sure that he’s going to crash and burn with any woman that he meets in that bar that he’s enlisted a number of his friends using expensive television broadcast equipment (even if it’s only in the other room) to get a girl to sleep with him. He is, in many ways, like many current and former hecklerspray staff members.

Sure, on the face of it the implication that women are stupid enough to fall for a ploy which was at least partially ‘masterminded’ by someone who was in American Pie Presents “The Naked Mile” is deeply offensive to anyone with even a laughable IQ but maybe this poor loser is to be pitied.

Phwoar! Look at that apprehension! She's totally into it!

For a start the protagonist, or “Defendant 1″ as we’ll be calling him, is friends with someone who was in American Pie Presents “The Naked Mile” who is now apparently so desperate for an acting gig that he’s willing to put “Conspiracy to Sexually Assault” on his CV.

Second of all he’s running a risk giving this guy the ‘reporter’ gig in the first place. What if the girl or ‘target’ as we’re quite sure Defendant 1 wouldn’t want us to refer to her as had seen American Pie Presents “The Naked Mile” … actually. No. Fair enough. We take your point. No-one’s seen it.

Naturally this advert was cleared by the ASA who, according to our friends at Bitter Wallet claimed that it was too fantastical a situation to offend. Of course it is but what if people begin to try it out, eh? What if young men everywhere are suddenly asking for expensive broadcasting equipment for their Christmas?

Best Served After Forced Penetration

Maybe this advert is part of the government’s cost-cutting plans. Surely it would be cheaper to keep a note of those buying expensive TV equipment and hiring Steve Talley than to actually keep an up-to-date sex offenders’ register? Kudos to Ms May if that’s the case.

The exploitative and offensive nature of this advert is what makes it so reprehensible and to see the three rapists (because that’s what they are) congratulating each other on a rape well done is enough to make you sick to the very pit of your stomach. Unless you’re a rapist too, presumably.

So there you have it. EXTREME advertising doesn’t work if your idea of EXTREME is forcing your unsheathed penis on a woman with no desire to have your disappointing, shrivelled prune of a peen anywhere in her vicinity.

Don’t get any ideas, okay?

PLEASE NOTE: It’s only fair to mention that Steve Talley also starred in the slightly less successful American Pie Presents “Beta House”. It was also shit.

Popular culture is a wonderful thing, especially for the people that made those classic television shows, films, cartoons, songs etc. that were actually pretty rubbish in their original incarnation but are fondly remembered by those with a penchant for nostalgia as being the finest things ever crafted by human hands.

These are people who form pop culture opinion, the people who are talking heads on nostalgic talking head shows in which talking heads regale you with tales of how they sit down with a plateful of Findus Crispy Pancakes just in time to watch the latest episode of Baywatch. These people manage to create some kind of time-capsuled ‘tweet’ of what they had for dinner 25 years ago and share it later for money.

That’s the dream folks.

The question of what sees something slip into the annals of pop culture while some things pass unnoticed into the bargain bins of Blockbuster Videos all across the land. The thin criteria between ‘cult hit’ and ‘what the hell’s that?’ is most marked in the 80s’ action drama clique. Where shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team have become TV classics, shows like Airwolf struggle to get a repeat viewing on backwater freeview channels.

Is it about memorable characters, fine writing and excellent direction? No. If you can force a supernatural talking car in there, you’re pretty much onto a winner. That brings us to the concept of shoehorning in television. Anyone with a degree in media (or anyone for that matter) knows that if you overload a show with gimmicks, it doesn’t work. If you stick to one like transforming inanimate objects, a talking car or Pamela Anderson in a snug red swimsuit then you’ll be made in the shade.

This doesn’t apply to advertising. Please see Exhibit A below.

Let’s open with KITT, the car from Knight Rider performing a wonderful, screeching J-Turn into a parking space and then instantly receiving a parking ticket from the excitable warden on duty. Let’s forget the moral grey area of whether it’s Michael Knight or KITT himself who has to fork up £60 because even in the short to medium term, it doesn’t matter.

Especially not when that Müller truck is about to transform into a giant, gurning white orb. Of course, it’s a reference to Transformers but given that the rights to the Hasbro license would have been more expensive, they’ve gone for a terrifying rolling snowball with big dumb eyes and Inspector Gadget‘s arms. You’ll also be pleased to hear that Müller condone the consumption of traffic wardens, as long as you can transmogrify them into beloved Hanna Barbera characters. Yes, that’s right folks. It’s Yogi Bear, that famous traffic warden. In fact, the only link we can see between traffic wardens and Yogi Bear is that they both wear hats. There’s no shoehorning of references going on here though. None.

In a nod to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the physiologically altered traffic warden doesn’t require the usual 13 years of psychological therapy needed to recover from such a fundamental trauma and instead shrugs off his new lot in life with a smile and a desire for pic-a-nic baskets.

Watch out though! There’s people on the streets of a city and Yogi looks terrified. “Look at them all,” he thinks, “I used to be just like you before I became a two-dimensional bear.” He’s terrified! Gaze with panic at what the transformation has done to this poor bastard’s fragile mental state.

Oh wait! All is well! Here comes another reference! It’s the Sony Bravia bouncing balls! Or, if you’re not into that, maybe it’s the Sony Bravia paint! Either way, it’s a reference to another advert which is pretty pathetic, even in amongst this moronic display of lip service to 3 millions childhoods. What do the balls do though? Surely they coat these drab looking business types in paint and everyone gets to play in glorious technicolour!

No. Instead they turn into Mr. Men. You’d think that’s all well and good, wouldn’t you? The Mr. Men are a loved part of many of our childhoods. Although, the Mr. Men are essentially one dimensional “people” marked out by their individual character flaw. Mr Lazy, for example, is lazy where as Mr Happy smiles in the face of death and destruction. These people in suits, these people with families and homes, mortgages and car repayments have been murdered and replaced with flawed cartoons. It’s all getting quite dark.

Luckily there’s some unicorn-driven chariots to pass by and distract us from the woe. Is that a reference to Charlie the Unicorn in there? The shape of the face is certainly similar. Could this be a wide-ranging reference to the chariot racing scene in Ben Hur? Is that a ridiculous stretch? Isn’t that the point?

We’ve had a think and we’re genuinely not sure what the small house is supposed to be. It’s not the gingerbread house from Hansel & Gretel but it could be the homestead from any Disney cartoon film ever. Luckily it’s saved from demolition by another Hanna Barbera mainstay, the conniving Muttley.

Muttley manages to throw a hammer made from a Müller rice pot into the demolition ball, sending it flying into the sky where it turns into a flock of colourful birds. It’s a definite rip-off of something but in deference to the ad’s dark undertones, we’re going to claim that it’s a tip of the cap to John Woo’s Hard-Boiled doves.

The ant carrying a giant pot of Müller yoghurt could be many things but in an effort to ensure that we don’t burst an aneurysm, we’re going to assume that this ant is just a really strong ant. It doesn’t stop there though. Even assuming the rainbow is just a rainbow, you might recognise those yoghurty hands that bundle up the clouds and send them on their rainy way. Could it be a subtle look in the direction of one Michael M. Mouse?

Probably.

This advert comes in at a whopping 1 minutes and 30 seconds which, if you assume the usual television advert lasts for only 30 seconds, the equivalent of a film in ad-land but in that relatively short space of time the people from the Müller dairy have managed to squeeze in FOURTEEN references to popular culture. That’s only the ones we noticed. Feel free to tell us if we missed any.

The dynamic may now have changed. In order to pass into the Cult Following Hall of Fame, you might have to be shoehorned into a confused, ill-considered advert from a yoghurt company hellbent on proving to the world how much money they have to throw away on paying for licenses for fictional characters from the past.

Snigger that into your fruit corner, Muttley.

Chocolate! It’s a wonderful invention. Not only did it get thousands of American soldiers laid during the second world war, it’s also a tasty treat that you can give your kids. Your kids who will die of a fatty liver by the time they’re 25. Not only that, it’s an indulgent treat for you to force down your gullet at every available second while telling yourself that it’s just a little slip-up.

It might not surprise you to learn that there are loads of ways to advertise chocolate because it’s such a universally beloved product. The big question is that of the target market. If there isn’t an established target market for product then we end up with mad-eyed children, planting ideas about milk chocolate in your head through a hypnotic eyebrow dance.

That kind of confusion might spark ‘water-cooler’ conversation but it doesn’t make anyone want to eat a bar of Dairy Milk, no matter what anyone claims.

That hardly matters though. Especially when there’s women around to advertise to. Remember how we tell you, almost every week, that advertising companies think that everyone fits into two or three snug categories that they can tailor their advertising to?

Yes? Good.

Well, aside from playing up the notion that women love chocolate and that some are cold-blooded thieves, it seems that advertisers have now resorted to editing old adverts as the recession bites the advertising budget of the big companies and forces them into revisiting successful adverts from the past.

This isn’t the version of the advert with the edit, unfortunately. It’s probably seen as being so trivial by the pedants of youtube that no-one has even bothered to upload a version, clumsily shot on a camera phone. This means that our creative faculties will be put to the test as we try to point out the subtle change.

IT’S THE CHOCOLATE! The next time the ad comes on television, remember this moment. Keep in mind everything we’re about to tell you:

THE CHOCOLATE BAR IS CGI! LOOK AT IT! IT’S NOT REAL CHOCOLATE! IT’S FAKE!

Right, we’re off to accuse Editor Mof of eating our bar of Galaxy. Unfortunately, we’re not smart enough to keep one hidden away so we’ll just beat him to death and consume him instead. Cannibalism is much better than badly edited chocolate.

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There’s no video content for this week’s Badvertising, primarily because caretaker of the advertising corner, Michael Park, has become the victim of legal action after a woman’s head exploded after seeing his smug, self-involved face on her computer screen more than the appointed twice in a month. This means that it’s back to plain ol’ words!

When you’re making an advert, it’s important to establish a relationship for the sake of the viewer. Now, what do we mean by that? There are myriad different types of relationships in advertising from the authoritarian ‘expert’ who spends a worrying amount of time bellowing out of the television, to the ‘friends’ who love nothing more than snuggling up on a couch eating Maltesers and taking intravenous injections of air freshener.

There are antagonistic husband and wife duos as well as the brother/sister combo and occasionally you get to see a couple of children sitting around being accosted by a rip-off mouse. It’s just how advertising is. Relationships are usually established pretty damned quickly.

Except here…

Who is this woman? Aside from being someone who breaks into people’s houses and demands cups of tea while speaking like Margaret Thatcher after she was forced to chain-watch all six seasons of Sex In The City, she appears to be an apparition who believes solely in the spread of bingo.

Perhaps she belongs to the Church Of Jesus Christ & The Latter Day Tweak of the Thumb. Who knows. She could be the Queen Bee or the Dancing Queen. She’s definitely not one of the Two Fat Ladies. There we go, we’ve got rid of all the woeful bingo puns in one paragraph that you could have ignored if we’d had the good grace to warn you beforehand.

Once this mad bat has cracked her laptop out, she begins indoctrinating her shocked victim into the ways of bingo until the poor, bemused fool is too broken to even question this woman’s presence in her kitchen. There she was getting on with a spot of ironing and the next thing she knows, some vampiric whore who has just eaten a live chicken to sustain her blood lust is hovering over her talking about her father liked to engage in orgies.

Everything happens so fast, even the audience is left completely unaware of who this woman is. One thing’s for sure, she must have an endless supply of laptops if she’s not even bothering to take it with her. Do vampires have a lot of money? That’s a thought for the Hallowe’en special…

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