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?

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.

We can categorically guarantee without a shadow of a doubt that our readers know exactly what an experiment is. Some of you will have studied science in school and will have been involved in the dissemination of liquid from beaker to conical flask; some of you might even be scientists. If you are then can we suggest that you keep an eye on that petri dish over there as it appears to be sentient.

Even the regular readers who trawl the site looking for something to get up in arms about are familiar with experimentation, having been used as test subjects by a series of alien species with nefarious designs on the rectal areas of people who believe in a Michael Jackson-led arachnid conspiracy, coordinated from the moon.

Odd-balls, basically.

Unfortunately there are many advertisers who, like most of the simple concepts in the world, just can’t get their heads around the idea of an experiment. Take the lovely people from Bulmers as a case in point. Their latest advertising shtick revolves around rewarding ‘experimental’ people.

You can watch it here if you can handle the inane advertising drivel that goes along with it. It’s probably best that you at least try, otherwise a lot of what we’re telling you might be quite hard to digest.

For a start there’s the cider itself. Crushed red berries and lime, made with over 100 years of experience. Hardly experimental. crushed red berries go quite well with lime, anyone who’s ever tried a strawberry daiquiri can tell you that. Is the experimental element putting it in a bottle? As we already mentioned, much of science is decanting liquid from one receptacle to another. Perhaps that’s it.

Is it the stacked up TVs which are the experimental element? There’s nothing experimental about the systematic piling of television equipment unless Bulmers hope to create some kind of portal to another dimension using nothing but static electricity and cathode ray tubes.

Wait. Hang on just one god-damned minute. Is this the experiment? An un-named comedian (Humphrey Ker, to give him his due) standing in the street, acting like a charity mugger with a camera crew trying to get people to go to his “friend’s gig” round the corner? He’s handing out wristbands! Is that experimental in any way? Having a man in the street trying to get people to do something that they don’t want to do? Walk down any street in a city and you’ll see that en masse. There’s no experiment there.

Perhaps the gig itself is the experimental element? Maybe it’s some kind of Japanese musical installation where the band members only play sounds using construction components. Maybe we’ll hear the first ever drum solo played on a high-visibility jacket stretched over a storage drum.

Oh, it’s Plan B.

PLAN B ISN’T EXPERIMENTAL! The man would like you to believe that he saved soul music from the drudgery of the world but in actual fact he did nothing more than further dilute an already irritatingly shallow talent pool with music that doesn’t really “do it” for anyone but definitely sounds good when having a few drinks and nibbles before a dinner party. It’s the kind of music that David Cameron might listen to. That’s not terribly experimental.

Maybe there’s an element of sexual experimentation? Maybe the advert will end with Plan B taking sixteen women, three men and a Shetland pony backstage for a massive orgy that will only end when the police come in to break things up like the massive fascists that they are.

That never happens.

In actual fact, nothing experimental happens in the entire advert. That leaves us wondering why a company would create an advertising campaign based entirely around experimentation and the rewards that can come to those who ‘take a chance’ while having video evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps the experiment lies in finding out how many people see beyond the idiotic gloss of the thirty second advert to question the experiment itself. Perhaps we’ve now transcended to another level of existence where we can see through the nonsense in adverts and get straight to their core message. In reality though, this is probably another example of the “let’s hope they don’t notice” culture which is pervasive throughout the advertising community at the moment.
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Paula Abdul once sang a duet with a chainsmoking cartoon hip-hop cat, so she knows weird when she sees it.

But when a woman who a) looked like Paula, b) painted lifesize pictures of Paula and c) appeared on the TV show that Paula judges died outside Paula Abdul’s house surrounded by pictures and CDs all bearing Paula Abdul’s image in a car with a licence plate that professed her love for Paula Abdul, that may have tipped things to a new level.

Apparently Paula Abdul hasn’t slept in her own house since any of this happened. Well, duh.

Usually when a celebrity gets a stalker, it tends to confuse us a bit. For instance, we’ve had two and a half years to reflect on the fact that John Cusack has a stalker and we still can’t make head nor tail out of it – there are billions of people in the world, so why pin unattainable hero status on the bloke out of Con Air? It just doesn’t make sense.

But Paula Abdul, we’re sorry to say, seems like perfect stalker fodder. She ticks all the boxes. She’s pretty, she’s friendly, she used to be a popstar so people see her as a lost fragment of their youth and she often seems fairly incomprehensible, so people want to try and fix her when they meet her. Plus, if rumours are correct, she’s possibly OK with sleeping with people she barely knows.

But the main reason why Paula Abdul appears to be a likely victim for stalking is because she’s the nice one on American Idol – not only do thousands of deluded idiots pass in front of her eyes day after day, but Paula Abdul is often the only one who’ll cushion them from Simon Cowell‘s withering put-downs and stop them feeling like total failures.

It’s a dangerous mix, which is why it was horribly unsurprising when Paula Abdul’s number one fan Paula Goodspeed was found dead near her house three weeks ago. The blame for her death could be laid at any number of doorsteps – but that doesn’t hide the fact that a young woman died, and that’s terribly sad.

And now Paula Abdul has decided to talk about Goodspeed’s death and how it affected her. It’s probably no surprise to hear that Paula’s been avoiding her home as much as possible since the incident, as People reports:

“I’ve been staying in different homes and hotels, and I have security with me… It was very tragic and very upsetting to hear. She had tried to do this before, and it was just heartbreaking … It was in the middle of Hollywood week, and it happened while I was actually working at the Kodak Theatre, and it was devastating to hear.”

The superficial knock-on effects of Paula Goodspeed’s death are obvious – Paula Abdul’s house is now inevitably on the market – but what’ll be interesting is seeing how Paula copes with this event in the longer term. Will she be frostier to the American Idol contestants?  Will she continue to judge American Idol at all?

Ultimately, though, we hope that Paula Abdul realises that this was an isolated – though unfortunately extreme – incident, and that not everyone has the same mental issues that Goodspeed appeared to suffer from.

As we’ve said before – it’s when Randy Jackson gets an obsessive fan that we’ll realise that the world has turned to shit. When that day comes, you’ll find us cowering in the bottom of our cupboard clutching a bottle of gin and a cricket bat.

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There’s good luck, bad luck, awful luck and then there’s Britney Spears luck – and Britney Spears has probably just edged a new level.

On Sunday Britney Spears got to take her children out of California for the very first time since she lost custody of them. And that’s the exact moment that her two-year-old son Jayden James decided to get hospitalised for an allergic reaction to something he ate. Apparently kids don’t take too well to eating shards of broken Lego bricks wedged between slices of frozen animal piss. Who knew?

Oh, we’re joking – Britney Spears’ son wasn’t hospitalised for anything Britney did, and he’s now been released. In fact, we get the feeling that he only went to hospital because all the men in white coats reminded him of when he used to live with mummy.

There’s just something about Britney Spears, isn’t there? It doesn’t matter what she does, she just can’t quite seem to achieve total across the board happiness. The happiness of Britney Spears’ marriage was ruined when she realised that her husband was a cornrowed redneck waste of skin. The happiness that should have accompanied the freedom of her divorce was shattered when it properly sent her mental.

And now this. Britney Spears might be on the brink of a full-scale professional comeback with her Womanizer song doing so well and her next single Kill The Lights looking set to do the same because it’s basically the exact same song, but that hasn’t stopped something genuinely upsetting from happening in her private life.

Last weekend marked the very first time that Britney Spears was allowed to leave California with her children since she lost custody of them to Kevin Federline earlier this year. It was Britney Spears’ big chance to prove that – after the dangerous driving and the skull fractures and all the rest of the frenzied crap that resulted in Britney Spears losing them in the first place – she could actually be trusted around her children.

And then one of them wound up in hospital. Whoops.

It was reported yesterday that Jayden James, the youngest of Britney’s kids, had a seizure and was rushed to hospital. Luckily, though, that diagnosis has now been downgraded to ‘allergic reaction’, and Jayden James has now been discharged. Newsday reports:

Jayden James, 2, was admitted to the Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center on Sunday after having “a reaction to something he ingested,” a representative for Spears’ family said in a statement, according to The Associated Press.  The hospital is near Spears’ home in Kentwood, La., where she was reportedly staying with family.

Although ‘something he ingested’ sounds worryingly vague, we’re positive that whatever it was had nothing to do with Britney Spears’ state of mind or skills as a parent. We just hope that this ends here – after all, if Jayden James realises that he can get some time away from Kevin Federline and Britney Spears by going to hospital, God knows what he’ll do to get back there next week.

The shock pregnancy of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears has shocked all kinds of reactions of people, be it sadness, anger or – in the case of all grubby old men – vaguely muttered sexual arousal.

But Jamie Lynn Spears needs support in this difficult time, and who better to give it to her than everyone's favourite overbearing soul diva with ideas half a notch above her station Mary J Blige. While the rest of the world tuts in disapproval and mumbles things like "terrible parenting," "statutory rape" and – in the case of all grubby old men – "haven't you been a dirty girl?" Mary J Blige is there for Jamie Lynn Spears, snapping her fingers, popping her neck and representing for the sisterhood so hard that it looks like she's having some kind of bloody seizure.

In no particular order, the shocking announcement that 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant has caused the following reverberations: Jamie Lynn's sister Britney Spears denies it all completely, Jamie Lynn's mother Lynn has had her ridiculous Christian parenting book pulled, Jamie Lynn's boyfriend Casey Aldridge did a sadface on MySpace and the police have started to think about arresting Casey for statutory rape, tattooing the word 'hooker' across Jamie Lynn's forehead and putting a spike through the baby as soon as it's born to teach all slutty teenage girls a lesson.

But at least there's someone on Jamie Lynn Spears' side and it's Mary J Blige, the R&B singer whose past includes drug addiction, alcoholism, child abuse, rampant promiscuity, suicidal tendencies and a natty sideline career of telling everyone exactly what happened to her in excruciating detail over and over again, has decided to come forward and speak out on the Jamie Lynn Spears predicament.

Mary J Blige sent her message of support to Jamie Lynn Spears through MTV which, in Biblical terms, makes Jamie Lynn Spears the virgin Mary, Mary J Blige the three wise men, MTV the Bible and – here's where the analogy falls down a little – it makes Casey Aldridge God, Britney Spears the virgin Mary's slutty baldheaded sister and Kevin Federline, like, Moses or something. Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, the message:

"Stay strong, baby girl. If that's her choice [to keep the baby] then congratulations. Hope she's responsible and I hope she understands what that brings. You have to change your lifestyle so [your children] can look at you as an example. It's all about Mommy being an example, Jamie. That's what it's about."

Hah, that's… well, actually that's fairly decent advice. We were sort of hoping that Mary J Blige was going to go with "Microwave ovens make excellent baby cots," or "You know what babies love? Dirty heroin syringes."

But no, Mary J Blige has somehow managed to give a decent piece of advice that doesn't sound as if it's been stolen directly from the pages of Chicken Soup For The Soul for once. Let's hope Jamie Lynn Spears does herself a favour and heeds Blige's advice, at least a little bit more than she does with Britney's advice.

After all, learning to babble relentlessly in a made-up language is an arduous task, and can take up to three years of being married to a pointless redneck. Jamie Lynn just doesn't have that sort of time. 

Read more:

Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy: Mary J. Blige reacts - Yahoo