It’s not easy to be nasty professionally. For a start, people automatically assume that you have no heart and that if you do, it’s a blackened, flaking husk that makes people unable to spend time in the same room as you. Admittedly for the most part, that’s true. Sometimes, you also have to poke fun at something that you wouldn’t usually consider an acceptable target.

However, here at hecklerspray we don’t “hate on” people unnecessarily (unless they’re a celebrity) and, to that end, we don’t want our readers to think that this article is going out of its way to disrespect its elders. hecklerspray writers are regularly in contact with the elder members of our community and, once we’ve stolen their wallets and purses, we sometimes give them their bus passes back.

Not always though. We wouldn’t want people to think we’re soft.

Older people in themselves aren’t the problem here and we wouldn’t be so lazy as to spend hundreds of words having sly digs at pensioners for not being able to use a computer as we’re blatantly aware that most of them are better at it than us. Our very own Lauren Mullineaux performs most of her computer-based tasks by hacking wildly at the mouse until something happens and even our editor Mof Gimmers spends a good portion of his day smashing his face off his keyboard in a desperate effort to make words appear on the site.

Of course, the elderly are pretty great. They lived in the eras that your nostalgic love of vintage clothing is rooted. They’ve seen things than we can only imagine by looking them up on Youtube and sometimes they need a bit of help. It’s not our responsibility to outline the problems facing British pensioners, we write funny articles and to outline actual tales of strife or poverty on it would be irresponsible and ill-advised. We don’t seek to poke fun at the impoverished or ill in this world.

Okay?

Good. What we do seek to do however is sigh indignantly at this awful pile of utter claptrap from Age UK’s advertising people which seems to be entitled ‘Thank You’.

Of course it shouldn’t be called thank you, should it? It should be titled “Who The Hell Do You Think You Are Getting Us To Do This Degrading Crap?”. The people in this advert seem as though they’ve gone off their own backs to make a lovely message to all the people who have donated to the campaign but- as with most adverts- it’s composed almost entirely of odious stereotypes and ‘bawdy’ humour.

It’s designed with the sole intention of making you think “Aw, look at those ol’ cards out there having a good time.” Incorrect and you know it. The first time you saw the advert you stared in dumbfounded silence at these old men and women allowing their good nature to be sent up.

Admittedly, it’s quite nice to see a light-hearted advert for a charity. There are so many awful things happening in the world right now that it’s a brave step not to show a 40 second black and white advert of a frail old lady hunched and dying alone in front of The Wright Stuff. However, there are better ways to do it than playing up to clichés and making these poor old bastards look like idiots on national television.

Stereotypes?! We hear you cry. Well, yes. Here’s a Top of the Pops-style list in chronological order.

• “Yer granny cannie sing.” – It’s a well-established fact among advertisers that old ladies can’t sing or, if they can, they’re usurped by a gravel-faced crone before they can belt out a note.
• “Some old ladies are a bit saucy.” – Yes, you’ve seen Calendar Girls and you probably got a little bit excited. Believe it or not, old people have sexual urges just like you and advertisers love playing up to it. It’s only a matter of time until a sexual element is introduced to Werthers’ Or- [LAZY PAEDOPHILIA JOKE REMOVED IN SELF-EDITING].
• “An arhythmic black gentleman” – Well… no, that’s actually not a stereotype at all. It is quite unusual to see a black person portrayed in advertising as something other than gyrating like James Brown with haemorrhoids. Although he is dressed as a janitor. We’re not saying that was deliberate.
• “Belly dancing!” – You’re retired and there’s nothing better to do than go to classes in a traditional Middle Eastern dance, is there? Well, that’s what ‘creatives’ think.
• “Go to Egypt!” - Oh. Well. That’s actually a bit culturally insensitive, isn’t it? But that’s okay though because in advertising, elderly people are culturally insensitive! So “walking like an Egyptian” while wearing a Fez and carrying a giant representation of the power symbol of an ancient and noble culture is totally fine. Old people, eh? Insensitive bastards.
• “Hula girls!” - Actually, no. This is getting a bit weird now. Apart from the dancing going on in the background and the shop-mobility dodgems, everything’s getting a bit odd. There’s a grinning man in his seventies juggling on a unicycle. Is that a thing?

Of course, it loses it there and everything goes off into tangental weirdness because the people who have been hired to produce the advert seem to have precious little knowledge of pensioners. We’re not suggesting for a minute that pensioners aren’t ‘wacky’ but the entire minute long film has a sneering air of being penned on a whiteboard by a preening public school turd called Tarquin who has only ever seen one pensioner and they were in a box at a Wake.

The same goes for Wonga’s new advert which sneers at pensioners by portraying them all as ‘street’ talking puppets. Still, at least it’s better than some of their previous offerings. Unlike the money-grabbing loansmen, at least Age UK is a cause worthy of people’s attention even if they’ve chosen to market themselves in a really stupid way.

There are so many calls to move away from the traditional standards of advertising, especially when you’re focussing on one group of people. Nothing ever changes in the advertising world, as we hope reading Badvertising will prove. Things that are seen as fresh and imaginative usually aren’t. You’ll have seen the same clichés and bastardisations of themes trotted out time and time again. People think that their ‘markets’ are too stupid to realise.

You’re not.

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Although it’s Labor Day and most of the media is preoccupied with hurricanes and politics, we’ve still got all the big celebrity news for you.

And when we say big, we mean big. Like, for instance, James Gandolfini got married on Saturday. That’s right – a man from a TV show that ended over a year ago just got married to a woman we’ve never even heard of. In Hawaii. And, um, that’s about it.

Just kidding – loads happened. For instance, James Gandolfini’s eight-year-old son was the best man. And also, James Gandolfini’s wife walked down the aisle to some harp music. Why, James Gandolfini’s wedding has got to be the happiest, harpiest, Hawaiiest, eight-year-old boyiest wedding to happen to anyone who played the lead in The Sopranos ever!

Warning: the following story may contain padding.

Poor old James Gandolfini. For close to a decade he’s defined himself by playing Tony Soprano, but now that The Sopranos has finished he has to find new ways to occupy his time.

Sure, there’s always more acting, but one look at his IMDb page – and the revelation that his upcoming slate contains both a film about shoes and a John Travolta vehicle – won’t exactly thrill anyone to death. And perhaps that’s why James Gandolfini has decided to concentrate on his family life, by getting married to Deborah Lin in Hawaii on Saturday.

Who’s Deborah Lin? She’s James Gandolfini’s wife. That is literally her only defining characteristic. Oh, and she used to be a model. But, hey, who didn’t?

Do you want the details of James Gandolfini’s wedding? What? You actually do? Even though we’ve already told you about Hawaii and the harp and the weirdly young best man? Seriously, we don’t know what’s wrong with you people. Fine. Here’s how E! Online described it:

The intimate 20-minute ceremony was held at the island’s Central Union Church. A harpist played the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” as the bride walked down the aisle in a white, Italian lace gown. Gandofini’s best man was his 8-year-old son, Michael.

Are you happy now? Are you happy that you got to hear about the Italian lace? Are you? You’d better be happy. Italian lace indeed. Cuh.

So that’s it. That’s the biggest news of the day. James Gandolfini got married to a woman who was wearing Italian lace and likes harps and there was an eight-year-old best man.

Still, we wish we’d been there for the best man’s speech. There’s nothing like watching an eight-year-old boy nervously allude to his own father’s sexual promiscuity in a humorous way, is there?

The only time Kelsey Grammer had previously been associated with a sense of impending doom was when people heard he was going to be an X-Man.

But that changed in Hawaii this weekend, when Frasier star Kelsey Grammer suffered a heart attack. Don’t panic, though – it was the just the normal kind of mild heart attack that you’d expect from someone with a history of cocaine and alcohol addiction, and Kelsey Grammer is currently recovering in an undisclosed hospital.

Reports that David Hyde Pierce has also had a mild heart attack that was more pernickity and gay-seeming, just to make Kelsey Grammer’s mild heart attack look more normal are rubbish. Seriously, we made them up just now.

The human body is a wonderously complex machine, but it has its limits. Fire one out of a cannon into a wall or try and ram an electric whisk up one’s bottom and you’ll end up with a criminal record and a gigantic dry cleaning bill. There are some things that the human body just doesn’t want to do.

Take Kelsey Grammer, for example – recently he signed up to star in a Tim Allen-directed comedy about crazy mental patients, and now he’s had a heart attack. Coincidence? Years of abnormally heavy wear and tear? Or was it Kelsey Grammer’s own body protesting about star in a crap-sounding Tim Allen movie? Nobody knows for sure, but it was probably the last one.

Anyway, the point is that Kelsey Grammer has suffered a mild heart attack during a visit to his holiday home in Hawaii. Apparently, though, it’s nothing enormously serious and he’ll be out of hospital by the end of the week. BBC News reports:

Frasier star Kelsey Grammer is recovering after having a mild heart attack, his spokesman has said. The 53-year-old experienced chest pains on Saturday morning while paddle-boarding in Hawaii where the actor has a second home. Spokesman Stan Rosenfield said the star was “resting comfortably” at an undisclosed hospital. The actor was with his wife off the Kona coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, when he experienced symptoms.

As dreadful as it must be for Kelsey Grammer and his family at the moment, a heart attack isn’t really that much of a surprise given some of the stuff that Grammer’s been through.

His father was shot dead by a madman when he was a child, his sister was raped and murdered, he’s had difficulties with drugs and alcohol, one of his ex-wives miscarried during a suicide attempt, he’s been accused of statuatory rape, his best friend is a 2,000 year old ghost called Alex, who teaches him about right and wrong and, perhaps most chillingly of all, he was in X-Men 3. It’s not a life many would envy.

Anyway, get well soon Kelsey Grammer. And hurry back to work - X-Men 4 won’t be the same without you. On second thoughts, you should probably just concentrate on your recovery for the next decade or so.