This week’s Badvertising was half-written until something dropped through our mould-covered letterbox that was so awful, it couldn’t be left alone for a week. We subsequently scrunched up the previous Badvertising and set it alight, after all this incumbent piece was so sickening to watch that we felt as though we’d been eating another of Matthew Laidlow’s “special curries”.

Let’s give you a little bit of the history, shall we? Way back in Tudor times, men used to place a ball in the- no, you’re right, we’ll bring it up to date a bit. Last year, English Premier League club Blackburn Rovers were bought by an Indian company called Venky’s.

Venky’s sells chicken products and are therefore the perfect company to buy a team of perenially dull under-achievers with all the personality of a really weak stock.

Many moons ago, Blackburn won the Premier League under the guidance of now-Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish. Chris Sutton and Alan Shearer scored 50 goals between them that season, now Rovers are lucky if they can punt the ball forward enough to score 50 goals a season between their entire squad. Yes, despite being one of the least interesting teams in British football they keep managing to cling on to the trap door of the league and avoid relegation.

Bully for them but we’re quite sure you’re bored of all this football talk. After all, this isn’t a football site. So why are we taking such an interest in Blackburn today?

Their owners, famed Indian chicken-peddlers Venky’s have a reputation for being quite deliciously mad having tried audacious bids to bring the likes of Ronaldinho to Ewood Park. They’ve added ‘Orange’ into the colours of the kit so that it fits with their corporate image and they also replaced ‘relegation specialist’ manager Sam Allardyce with ‘unproven boring arsehole’ Steve Kean midway through the season to bemused groans from the Blackburn faithful but now they’ve really gone and taken the piss by having their first team stars appear in an advert.

Enjoy that? Of course not. It was bloody awful. Any fillet-brained fool could see that but it does mark an odd change in the attitude to football clubs by their owners. The idea that a team of professional athletes could be used to peddle what looks like under-cooked chicken is (with the exception of David Dunn), quite alien to most football fans.

Shall we carve the advert? Well, if you insist.

The opening shot is of the Rovers’ dressing room during what appears to be a mild earthquake and the camera pans out to the first team huddled together in one of the classic protection manoeuvres for falling debris. After all, they don’t want to get knocked out as that might impact upon their money-earning potential.

Cue a Pulp Fiction-esque shot of all the players looking down at the camera. There’s a look of steely determination on their faces. After all, the ceiling could fall in on them at any moment. There’s no escape, there’s nothing but the bright light of death beckoning them onwards towards… oh, it seems to have passed. They’re still alive.

It must time to celebrate with some chicken!

After they all cross themselves, implying a level of religious fervour in the sale of chicken that we here at hecklerspray were previously unaware of the camera reveals the feast. Chicken! Loads of horrible-looking, allegedly piping hot, under-seasoned chicken! Wow! Apparently it’s the taste that brings Blackburn Rovers to India. It’s not, it’s the fact that this advertising deal was probably in their contracts but it’s certainly the taste that will keep them in India.

After all, have you ever tried to take a long-haul flight with explosive diarrhoea?

Blackburn Rovers, eh? Now we know why they’ve been so drab and awful. They’ve all got tape-worms. It’s a real shame that professional athletes can be dragged down so far by the need to eat (and advertise) chicken products. Still, at least Venky’s are proud to own them, eh? That’s because Venky’s is good for you. Either that or you’d better know what’s good for you. Not questioning the integrity of these delicious chicken products.

Still, it’s not like Venky’s have been winging it (oh, come on) here. Their plan to bring Premiership football to India is a huge money-spinner and owning Blackburn Rovers will only help them on their way to making that money. However, they might not have long before Rovers’ fans are sick and tired of being a laughing stock in the football world and if fans start to fly the coup then they may be left with egg on their… oh, forget it.

We still don’t get the hype surrounding Nando’s and why people will fork out money for rubbery tasting chicken cooked in herbs and spices that tastes like a pub’s drip tray. But then again, we’re not young, hip individuals who want to be seen in one of the supposed coolest eateries in the UK.

As Wendy’s recently showed on these pages, combining hip-hop with motivational training videos doesn’t quite work.

However, we have to appreciate that Wendy’s pioneered this in the eighties when the world was a worse place. Nando’s has waited its turn and attempted to do the same thing, roping in “celebrities” including, Goldie, Andi Peters, Melinda Messenger, Johnny Vaughan, Lisa Snowdon, Chris Fountain (Hollyoaks), Andy Collins, Kyran Bracken, Chris Parker (Eastenders). What could go wrong?

Loads actually.

Seriously. This video has managed the impossible. The people of Nando’s have managed to make a promotional video that is actually worse than the food they serve AND more irritating than the jokes they have written on the walls of their restaurants.

It’s like someone doesn’t like hip-hop or something. The poor genre is yet again being used as a dismal pun, based on one of the fury-inducing chicken wraps you can order from Nando’s. Subsequently and horrifyingly, an internal video for staff was created and given the title “Wrappers Delight”. See what they’ve done there? Can we please get the geniuses behind this to come and work for us? It’s the Sugar Hill Gang who we feel sorry for the most.

In fact, scratch that. It’s anyone who owns ears and a short-term memory who we really feel sorry for.

This really is distressing viewing, to the extent where we are actively considering turning to the dark side and becoming one of those pesky vegetarians. PETA should use this video alone to convert people in to saving an innocent chicken before it’s subjected to this terrible song, covered in sauce and grilled to buggery.

What really annoys us the most is the lyric “we got more wraps than Dr. Dre and we serve them perfectly.” Yes, we get the point that everything will delivered on a paper plate to us immaculately, but including the hip-hop legend in a piss poor parody song and acted out by a bloke who probably suffers from learning difficulties is insulting.

Even to us.

Internal promotions like this are also a great way of seeing which celebrities aren’t getting much work and cashing in on any given opportunity. Goldie takes the title of biggest bell-end in this video as he appears as a shit James Bond villain that appears to have been shot as part of a student’s GCSE media studies coursework project.

If we can deter at least ten people from venturing in to Nando’s (and you should, as this review expertly points out *ahem*) – an upmarket KFC and inferior Dixy Chicken, we’ll be happy.

For once.

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Wall-E director and Pixar stalwart Adam Stanton attributes his film’s meteoric success to behaving like a free-range chicken.

No jokes, at a recent press conference, which we were surprisingly invited to, he actually said: “When we were making this movie there was no one checking up on me, so I was basically a free range chicken left to do what I wanted.”

You heard it here first.

And so it’s just as well he didn’t cluck it up.Wall-E is a bona fide summer smash. It may be a little soppy for some but what would we expect from an egg-laying director with a high-stepping past.

“Yes, I was in Hello Dolly in high school. I played Barnaby,” revealed a slightly embarassed Stanton.

It’s not surprising then that the Broadway smash features heavily in the movie, with a lot of the narrative based on some of the songs.

In fact, it has been such a hit, Broadway producers are already rubbing their hands with glee over the amount of cash they could make out of a Hello, Dolly revival. So that’s something to look forward to then.

Keen to get in on the jazz-handed act, Ben Burt – creator of the ‘voice’ for Wall-E and R2D2 amongst others – was also enjoying the Broadway vibe:

“You know what helped create Wall-E’s voice? It was the voice in that opening song, that Hello Dolly vocal that appealed to me in a way that just connected. I just couldn’t forget that damn song.”

The sound design legend, who has collaborated with Hollywood heavyweights like George Lucas and Ridley Scott, worked on the film for three years, unheard of for a sound artist:

“It’s not like other films, I’ve never been asked to give a motor noise more pathos or make a switch cuter before.”

Sigourney Weaver described herself as a ‘happy hitchhiker’ given her minimal part in the film.

Just as well really, the star of Alien, Working Girl and, ahem, Heartbreakers has been nothing but a well meaning cheering section in these latest PR jaunts.

The wallpaper probably gave juicier quotes.

But we can’t hold that against her. It’s a great movie from a great production team and a doff of the cap probably wouldn’t go amiss.

[story by Tom Henry]

It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. Or a normal-sized man inexplicably born with a floppy tongue the size of a cow's, at least.

By which we mean Jamie Oliver. As you all probably know, Jamie Oliver's latest campaign has been to make a sort of middle-class poultry snuff film called Jamie's Fowl Dinners all about the horrific mistreatment of battery chickens, and part of that campaign has involved Jamie lashing out at Sainsbury's.

And then, um, realising that Sainsbury's pays him £1.2 million a year to wank about flogging mince pies, causing him to backtrack spectacularly in case he upset his bosses.

Even though you've all probably been watching Big Brother Celebrity Hijack on E4 instead (what's that? You haven't?) you'll probably be aware that Channel 4 is in the middle of a Food Season. Well, it's not so much a Food Season as a Put You Off Eating Anything Ever Again Season.

Channel 4's Food Season is three-pronged. First there's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall showing how inhumane the battery chicken process is by, er, raising hundreds of battery chickens. Then there's tonight's Jamie's Fowl Dinners, which again is about the cruelty exposed to battery chickens – except that people will listen more to Jamie Oliver because, unlike Hugh, he looks like he washes occasionally.

Then, less relevantly, Gordon Ramsay – a man who advocates eating everything from horses to newborn babies' eyeballs on his ridiculous F-Word TV show – is going to cook some food and not mention battery chickens at all.

But back to Jamie Oliver. We all know that Jamie loves a good campaigning session, whether it's a campaign to make children eat food they obviously aren't interested in or a campaign to, um, wander about your enormous garden cooking food that one of your employees has sowed, grown and harvested for you. So when Jamie Oliver attacked the battery hen issue for Jamie's Fowl Dinners, he did so with an alarming amount of gusto.

So much gusto, in fact, that he pissed off his paymasters. You see, ahead of Jamie's Fowl Dinners, Jamie Oliver wanted to have a public debate about chicken farming with retailers, including Sainsbury's – the supermarket that pays him £1.2 million a year to advertise it by mooning around like a kind of oversized gammon-obsessed Edwardian Little Lord Fauntleroy. But Sainsbury's didn't show up, leading Jamie Oliver to howl the following angry diatribe:

"It is shocking that the people that I work for did not turn up on the day. I do not know why. The fact that your PR department has not even got the confidence to turn up and talk about what you do … how dare they not?"

Oddly enough, Sainsbury's has realised that it pays Jamie Oliver to gurn around babbling about its sausages and not to severely hurt its share prices by openly criticising its animal welfare record and so, after an apparently tense phonecall between Jamie Oliver and Sainsbury's boss Justin King, Jamie Oliver has written to everyone who works for the supermarket to apologise for his big gob:

"I am happy to confirm what I have said on several occasions: that Sainsbury's has the most to be proud of on this important animal welfare issue. Indeed I would not have continued working with Sainsbury's for so many years if I did not believe that you were showing real leadership. Your team have been particularly helpful."

With Jamie Oliver's Sainsbury's contract still up for renewal, it seems that this Jamie's Fowl Dinners fuss might have cost him a lucrative gig. Of course, the extent of the damage will be seen once Jamie's Fowl Dinners is broadcast on Channel 4 tonight – it looks like essential viewing for everyone.

Except us. We'll be watching Big Brother Celebrity Hijack instead. That Victor, he's nuff grep innit.

Read more:

Jamie Oliver says sorry to Sainsbury's staff over chicken outburst – Guardian