Harvester advert. Fucking hell

Every time I see this I resolve to run home, knocking over children and old ladies along the way and running over hapless animals as I do my best to get to a computer and give it a good, hard AdTurding before I forget.

But I always do forget, so somewhow this has survived until now. I’m not sure when I first saw it, but it seems like a long time ago. And it’s still getting the odd run-out. Oh, Harvester, if you’d only nipped it in the bud at the start of the year, I wouldn’t have to do this.

Why. Why on earth has someone decided that:

Help yourself to salad;
… all the salad that you want!

should constitute the opening gambit of a rap about a horrible pub chain that is famously the butt of every stand-up comic’s or sitcom writer’s joke about shit food?

viz: Felicity Kendal: Oh, you never take me anywhere!
Karl Howman: I took you to that Harvester last week!

Be imaginative for fuck’s sake. Rhyme ‘gammon’ with ‘salmon’ (would you like some salmon?Yes I’ll have it with my gammon!’).

Rhyme ‘corn cob’ with ‘gob’. (‘Would you like a corn cob? Yes please – shove it in my gob!’)

Rhyme ‘Harvester’ with ‘depressing canteen-like grief hovel with cheap overcooked food that leaves you with a strong sense of self-loathing and despair’. Well, you can make up your own there.

What the fuck is a a comma piri-piri, comma peking garlic sauce or a comma… EH? Do these things really exist? Comma? Peking garlic sauce? Hold the corn on the cob? What are you talking about?

This has not gone down well on Youtube, which is like a Mary Bell victoria sponge not going down well at a Women’s Institute. Currently the second most popular comment on the full fucking-hell-is-it-really-a-minute-long? version is ‘Boycott Harvester’.

It’s the only sensible reaction to an advert so ill-conceived it makes Jenson Button’s dandruff advert look like Black Narcissus.

NB. There’s a ‘making of’ film featuring interviews with the PR and Marketing bods, director and a fucking food stylist. Filmed in Staines. Fuck.

PPS. Here’s an utterly dreadful ad for Harvester from yonks back. Funnily enough I quite like this one though. At least it knows it’s shit – like Terry and June or something.

PPPS. And here’s another that suggests that you’ll love Harvester because it’s just like your home (what’s the point of that then?) and then goes on to show a grotesque pair of Worzel Gummidge and Aunt Sally mannequins that will have your little ones weeing their bottomless Cokes into their beds for the next month. Weird. But I like this one too.