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.

Kanye West seems to be continuing in his quest to win at everything forever.

Not content with taking the world of music by storm, the world of blogging by monsoon, the world of being cool by tsunami and the world of producing by… drizzle… Kanye West is now moving on to the world of making people fat by feeding them fried patties of ground up cow-knees.

Not personally, of course – that would be surreal.

No, Kanye is merely opening ten Fatburger fast food joints around Chicago, rather than actually serving all who walk through their doors with his priceless smile and boundless arrogance. And a burger.

West’s company, KW Foods LLC, have picked up the rights to build the stores around the Chitown area, thus infecting countless local residents with great big wodges of fat to force down their gullets. A sound business move, we’re sure.

But why, aside from wanting to kill lots of people by making them fat, would Kanye West want to open ten fast food ‘restaurants’ (using the term as loosely as possible)?

Maybe it’s to get away from his music career and down to a more homely, normal job than he’s been used to over the last few years? At least working in a burger joint he wouldn’t be all that bothered were he to turn up to work eight hours late.

In fact, he’d just get sacked for that.

Yes – that’s clearly it. He’s tired of being in the limelight, tired of all the attention, all the ego boosts and all the times he pretends to be Jesus – Kanye West must certainly, definitely and absolutely be edging towards a career flipping burgers. Maybe.

After the success of Kanye’s The New Workout Plan it could be said that maybe he’s something of a hypocrite, opening stores that will sell fatty foods. But then, that song wasn’t a call to arms trying to make the world a thinner place, unfortunately, it was something of a piss take, meaning we’re stuck on that one.

Though it didn’t always work for him.

Nevertheless, Kanye’s quest to make people in Chicago (and some in Los Angeles) eat what is likely to be fried up floor scrapings will begin in September, when the first of his stores opens, adding to the 90+ Fatburger foodatoriums already spread around the US.

It is as of yet unconfirmed whether Kanye will be performing Evel Knievel-style stunts at the opening of the first store, though this time he’s far less likely to be sued for it. For not only did they end up being best buds forever, but Evel is also dead, meaning he probably doesn’t care too much about suing people any more.

We await Kanye West‘s Fatburger theme-o-rap with bated breath – one rhyme for the store’s name we can suggest: ‘twatmurder’. But hecklerspray has exclusive copyright on that now, so unluck-o.