I’ve had a number of reasons to pause for thought over the last few days and my train of thought was prompted by DM’s question to me this morning “what song have you got?” This is a game we play – he believes (and as soon as he said this to me it made perfect sense) that you always have a song in your head. For me at this precise moment it’s “Hi Ho Silver” by Jim Diamond, which I’ll come to later!
Anyway, the question yesterday left me saying “bibberdy bobberdy boo” and so when I said this morning in response to the question “give a give a give a garmin” I knew I’d been watching too much TV because “bibberdy bobberdy boo” is the Homebase ad and obviously “give a…..” is the ad for Garmin sat navs!
So – just to show some advertising is going in and sticking – here is my top 3 and bottom 3 for this Christmas season:
1. M&S – cool ad, cool song, retro styling – very cool all together – however, I doubt it’ll make me buy anything from there this Christmas!
2. Sony Bravia – sheer bunny heaven and that Stones song too…..ooooh Mick. Now to be honest, we have just bought a new telly and guess what? It’s a Sony Bravia, however, we bought it NOT because of the wonderful ad, but because we did our research and it uses less leccy than any other telly, both when it’s on and when it’s on stand-by. It’s surprisingly difficult to research electricity consumption of a TV as there is no requirement to publish the data, unlike “white goods”, “brown goods” don’t have to tell you what they consume.
3. Ferrero Rocher – perfect James Bond spoof, beautifully done and this ad has recently taken on a new delight for me for reasons I won’t go into today on the basis that we’ll be here forever!
The utter dross…..in no particular order…..
“celeb” supermarket ads – I don’t give a monkeys that “Mums go to Iceland or that the Spice Girls shop in Tesco – I just don’t wanna know.
“you too can smell like Kylie, the Beckhams, Christina Aguilera or whatever other stupid vacuous celeb who thinks they’ll make a few more bucks by selling a perfume so you too can smell like them” – oh please – get real – do you seriously think you want to smell like Posh Spice????? Even if you do, do you seriously think Posh Spice wears the crap that’s sold with her name on it? This is truly plumbing the depths.
Setanta – anyone persuaded to buy anything because some dippy model is showing her cleavage while a bloke goes on about puppies – well, they deserve it really.
The other bit of my rant is about food – again. I have been reading a book called the Vitamin Murders, which wasn’t really what I thought I was buying but nonetheless it had some very interesting facts in it about the food that we eat and how the nutritional values of it have been eroded by the addition of chemicals and the use of agrochemicals. I was appalled to read that the chickens that are sold in supermarkets for human food are around 5 weeks old when they are slaughtered – that makes them the obese children of the hen world. I wonder how anyone thinks that is good for you. Apparently too, there was a big reported increase in bone breakages in a school where butter had been replaced by margarine and when the butter was reinstated, the breakages stopped. These are just two of the disgusting facts in the book, which was really about the murder of Jack Drummond, the most influential nutritionist this country has ever known. It was chilling reading in every sense.
These “coos” do at least live a normal family life, in mixed groups, with freedom to roam and a natural diet. Lucky them – they could so easily have ended up on a factory farm.
Oh yes – and “Hi Ho Silver” – well, it’s the theme to Boon, one of my fave TV shows of all time and it’s on Men and Motors at the moment, perhaps that’s why I’ve been exposed to that demeaning Setanta ad.
Last year, Eden - that place has a lot to answer for - that's where the Vitamin Murders book came from.
