I've wondered what happens to comedy writers who fail to make an impact on TV because they're so awful at what they do. I reckon they try their hand at writing "funny" adverts. Sadly a lot of adverts these days end up being "funny", which is more than I can personally take. Too many adverts now involve a daft soap opera set up or whimsical characters that agitate you with their annoying voices or musical numbers.
The most egregious example of this advert "humour" would be the Go-Compare adverts. A lot has already been said about these, and whenever a list of the most annoying UK adverts in recent times is compiled, it invariably tops that list. Someone must have thought some guy singing opera about car insurance with a stupid moustache on was absolutely hilarious. Similarly, that CGI meerkat with a russian accent also tries to invoke some kind of humour. "Hahahah it's funny, cause he's Russian, even though meerkats aren't from Russia! It's also funny cause comparethemeerkat.com sounds really like comparethemarket.com, simples!" The other one I hate is that Ocean Finance one, where the guy is bald and dumb, and that's funny apparently. If the Simpsons are struggling to make that concept funny anymore, then what in the hell chance does Ocean Finance have of doing it.
The real problem I have with them is that they start to get caught up in their own hype. They take the original advert with its questionable but not yet outright insufferable attempt at humour, and then turn it up to eleven. Let's go back to Go-Compare. The first advert involved some boring City types having lunch while discussing insurance, before Luciano Pavarotten comes blazing in singing about the virtues of using Go-Compare. He reappeared in a suburban estate for the next advert doing pretty much the same thing. But it wasn't long before he was appearing in Egypt, space, silent movies, desert islands, the 18th Century and now in Cinderella land, all the while the theme tune was becoming even more offensively bad. "Hey guys, I bet we can make this character even more funny if we stick him in implausible situations and update the song with Egyptiany verses!" "Yeah Chuck that sounds awesome man lets do it!" I have no idea why I made those executives sound American. Americans don't piss arse about as much as us in their adverts I don't think.
The Meerkats are the worst for getting into their own hype. That bastard now has a back story stretching back to the Crimean War, and there's a whole town of russian meerkats now. Honestly, I don't get what the point of doing the adverts that way is. I forget they're even about insurance anymore, because of the riveting tales about how the town is dying over this simple name confusion, or how his great grandfather Vitaly didn't fight for meerkats to be confused with markets or some shit like that. They now even have stuffed toys and expensive ornaments made in the likeness of these creatures. I would know, I hate to sell them when I was working the summer before last. Thankfully, we realised that people were well and truly sick of them by 2011, so they did not reappear by the time I hade returned to work.
I only just noticed while writing this that it's always insurance or finance adverts that are guilty of these embarrassing attempts at being exciting or humorous. My guess is that because they're not selling a material product like an mp3 player to grab our attention with they have to resort to putting on some kind of ridiculous pantomime to get their point across. The adverts these days make the old confused.com adverts look informative and direct. I'm sure these adverts could be try to be catchy by using some decent music and simple visuals, but the hacks in the writer's chair still reckon humour is the ultimate form of expression. Which it would perhaps be if they were any fucking good at it.
Thursday 29 December 2011
Tuesday 27 December 2011
2012 and beyond
2011 is very nearly over, and I can't tell you how pleased I am. 2011 has been my annus horribilis, and feel free to mispronounce annus as anus, because it sums up much of the year in question. Don't get me wrong, there were some good times, such as working on GrayBurn's Whisky and Walking and our yet to be released sketch show, my holiday to Islay and taking up golf. But this was also the year of nearly quitting university, multiple driving test failures, crappy relationships, worsening hypochondriasis and getting overwhelmed by the prospect of a future of depressing mediocrity and failure after university. And this was the year that I swore to make the best of my life in my new year's resolution. I never thought I'd say it but I miss 2010.
As such, my resolution for 2012 is to immediately assume it's going to be insufferably bad, a quagmire in which I'd rather just drown than bother to wade all the way through to the end. That way, any positive development, no matter how tenuous, will be embraced wholeheartedly. I'm sure that will work out well enough. Although, there's all that end-of-the-world bullcrap to think about. If the apocalypse is really due in 2012, I'll not need to worry about my new resolution at all.
Well, part of me actually likes the notion of a post-apocalyptic nightmare world as shown in the likes of Mad Max and countless other films from the 1980s and beyond. Right now the only prospect facing me and a lot of my friends is a banal existence as either a wage slave, or on the dole. There just aren't enough jobs anymore, and the degree, once a sure a guarantee of a well paid job, won't save thousands of us from long term unemployment or doing a low paid job which utilises none of the skills our university courses have supposedly tought us. But in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, such dull concerns are rendered moot, and we'll all go back to what we were supposed to do from the beginning: fight to survive.
Imagine a dark, dusty landscape ravaged by war and natural disasters. Towns and cities have been transformed into fortresses, where money has been replaced by simple bartering and trade for important resources. Sometimes, those resources are just taken by force by those strong enough to do so. People no longer hoard material goods or waste time writing stupid blogs on the internet or boring each other on facebook, because mass communication met its end with most other things back in 2012. There is no longer law to protect peoples rights; they protect their rights by arms. There are no nations and ideologies, just individuals out to survive. A horrible, yet primal and simple existence.
Imagine a lone hero, sitting on a motorbike, riding down long lonely roads. He's armed to the teeth with whatever guns and blades he has picked up in his countless battles, battles over the one commodity everyone is desperate for: oil. He doesn't dream about the future, his mind is firmly in the here and now. Short term survival is all that keeps him going since he has nothing else to fight for. And he's good at it. His reputation for badassery is well known in these parts, and he is often sought by those too weak to defend themselves in order to fight their battles for them. His price is their oil, so that he may keep travelling the long roads to better places.
Oh, did I mention that was supposed to be me, if you can believe I'd actually end up as cool as that post-2012. My apologies to you though. I was going to try and make a point about how, to a certain extent, there is something more meaningful in a primal struggle to survive than a banal existence in 21st century society, but I ended up shoehorning in my own ideas for a post-apocalyptic science fiction story into the narrative. If you liked that somewhat carbon copied idea though, give me some money and I'll make it into a motion picture. That really would make my 2012 something worth talking about.
As such, my resolution for 2012 is to immediately assume it's going to be insufferably bad, a quagmire in which I'd rather just drown than bother to wade all the way through to the end. That way, any positive development, no matter how tenuous, will be embraced wholeheartedly. I'm sure that will work out well enough. Although, there's all that end-of-the-world bullcrap to think about. If the apocalypse is really due in 2012, I'll not need to worry about my new resolution at all.
Well, part of me actually likes the notion of a post-apocalyptic nightmare world as shown in the likes of Mad Max and countless other films from the 1980s and beyond. Right now the only prospect facing me and a lot of my friends is a banal existence as either a wage slave, or on the dole. There just aren't enough jobs anymore, and the degree, once a sure a guarantee of a well paid job, won't save thousands of us from long term unemployment or doing a low paid job which utilises none of the skills our university courses have supposedly tought us. But in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, such dull concerns are rendered moot, and we'll all go back to what we were supposed to do from the beginning: fight to survive.
Imagine a dark, dusty landscape ravaged by war and natural disasters. Towns and cities have been transformed into fortresses, where money has been replaced by simple bartering and trade for important resources. Sometimes, those resources are just taken by force by those strong enough to do so. People no longer hoard material goods or waste time writing stupid blogs on the internet or boring each other on facebook, because mass communication met its end with most other things back in 2012. There is no longer law to protect peoples rights; they protect their rights by arms. There are no nations and ideologies, just individuals out to survive. A horrible, yet primal and simple existence.
Imagine a lone hero, sitting on a motorbike, riding down long lonely roads. He's armed to the teeth with whatever guns and blades he has picked up in his countless battles, battles over the one commodity everyone is desperate for: oil. He doesn't dream about the future, his mind is firmly in the here and now. Short term survival is all that keeps him going since he has nothing else to fight for. And he's good at it. His reputation for badassery is well known in these parts, and he is often sought by those too weak to defend themselves in order to fight their battles for them. His price is their oil, so that he may keep travelling the long roads to better places.
Oh, did I mention that was supposed to be me, if you can believe I'd actually end up as cool as that post-2012. My apologies to you though. I was going to try and make a point about how, to a certain extent, there is something more meaningful in a primal struggle to survive than a banal existence in 21st century society, but I ended up shoehorning in my own ideas for a post-apocalyptic science fiction story into the narrative. If you liked that somewhat carbon copied idea though, give me some money and I'll make it into a motion picture. That really would make my 2012 something worth talking about.
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