Uniform Dating adverts
Uniform Dating, as far as I can tell, is an online dating agency for people who work in uniform – or just like uniforms. I suppose this includes various armed forces, medical staff, police, darts players, burger flippers and sewage workers.
I can't really work out why this should be considered a good idea. Although there must be a lot of people in the UK who wear a uniform to work, I'm unclear on why it should theoretically bring them together.
Why not dating websites for other groups of people who are notionally bound together by something that actually bears no relation to their personality, outlook, lifestyle or sexual preference? Why not dating sites for people who have fungal nail infections, enjoy watching snooker or only have a short space of time to live instead?
Saying that, I'm reminded of the Bacchanalian excess of student nights that were put on by medics, in particular, at my university.
Seemingly hellbent on destroying their own livers as they were studying those belonging to freshly-dead corpses, the medics would head to a nightclub in Liverpool called The Blue Angel, where the prospective doctors of the future would get together with the prospective nurses of the future and promptly knob them into the middle of next week (a ritual I'm informed continues well beyond graduation).
So perhaps there's logic to uniform dating after all. The medic pound seems like it's probably a fairly lucrative one. And I haven't even got round to describing what male and female acquaintances in the armed forces get up to...
Eric Kelly’s gym
Apparently this is some sort of advert. Whatever it is, it's fricking funny.
BA London Calling Olympics ad
This is an advert I simply don't understand. Getting the soundtrack right is a strong start – and the imagery of jumbo jets taxiing around the London sights is visually engaging, but...
But what does it mean? If you fly British airways you'll crawl around at 5mph? Get on one of our planes and we'll take to you East London via the M4?
"Don't fly"? Don't fly? OK, I won't. Good news for the UK economy. Bad news for BA. Maybe there's a very British self-deprecation thing going on here, but I'm not really buying it.
But showing it in the UK suggest, rather like the ridiculous Eurostar ad with Jarvis Cocker, that BA wants you to go abroad and then fly back into Britain. It's daft.
There's a clear effort to tie in BA with the Olympic Games, so I'd guess that this ad – or one like it – is being shown around Europe, or even the world. And in that context it sort-of makes sense. No doubt lots of people who work in ad agencies will be telling us how clever all of this is, while rubbing base into thier eyeballs and bell-ends, but hey ho.
Maybe having spunked a load of cash on The Clash and lots of expensive CGI, BA figures this will put their domestic airline back at the forefront of people's minds as the premier UK airline. Or maybe they'll connect BA to a nuclear catastrophe?
Home Advantage? Not in this case, BA, not in this case.
Peugeot 208 Let Your Body Drive advert
If my body picked me up in a Peugeot 208 I'd kick its fucking head in.
Go Compare Save the Nation advert
You know when someone says something that's a bit surreal or off-the-wall that kind of has the potential to be funny but falls very flat?
It comes across as just a bit awkward and try-hard – like it was pre-meditated and someone decided that they would say it and it would be hilarious and make out that they were just being spontaneous and wacky?
But it's someone who isn't know for being spontaneous and wacky – it's someone know for being deeply unfunny and even a bit of a knob.
You feel sorry for them, because they're making an effort. Most attempts at humour are really some sort of attempt to ingratiates oneself in a social situation. But when someone tries it an it falls flat it's embarrassing for everyone involved.
You know those moments? The awkward silence? Someone attempting to humour them? Their own obliviousness to the fact that their joke just fell flatter than a whaffer-thin mint?
That's what this Go Compare ad is. And if you missed the reference that's how Go Compare should have done this new twist on the Gio Compario story. Sue Barker blowing him up with a bazooka? Tragically unfunny.
This is a shame, because this new ad starts really well - Gio running over to a couple of singing the 'Go Compare jingle at them. They're disturbed, unsure. There's a ot of comic potential here – but it's all wasted in a kerrayzee (in reality more lame than a John Bishop gag) pay-off that has everyone involved staring at their shoes in shame.
An opportunity missed – and quite possibly the start of a shit new campaign that has Bruce Forsyth, Christine Bleakley and Gary Linekar trying to finish off the fat fuck.
ETA: Now with added Stuart Pearce. Literally everything I wrote above applies to this too.
Sky – Believe In Better
I'm not especially a fan of Sky, the Death Star of the TV world that's currently busy hoovering up everything value it can possibly get its grubby mitts on as part of Rupert Murdoch's (the Emperor) endless attempts to destroy the BBC.
Sky's thing is all about convincing you that it's a premium product, but it has never really been any such thing. Weighted down with an embarrassment of riches of US imports and sport it's a serious proposition, but Sky's efforts to craft its own programming over the last 20 year have frequently been cringe-inducing.
Perception, however, is everything with stuff like this - and a new generation of TV consumers will grow up thinking Sky is a necessity; that perceived value everything in this context.
Which makes this poster I spotted a couple of years ago all the more embarrassing. Ha ha.
