You may have seen this advert complete with badly-dubbed voiceover. It’s making a clever comparison between servicing your car and servicing your razor, you see.
This is a strange comparison to make, to my mind, because everyone associates garages with being ripped off with the same level of brutality as a blading from a Dickensian gangster.
So, rather than nodding and agreeing like a particularly dozy Churchill dog, the clean-cut guy with the blunted blades should be eyeing the balding chap with paranoid distrust, eyes flicking nervously over the invoice being prepared by the garage’s sole female employee in a dingy lean-to office.
Soon every razor will have 20 diamond blades on it, and will be hand-made by Bentley. It’s the only way the people who make razors blades can keep ramping up the price of small bits of metal that we don’t even need.
I don’t have much time for adverts that are trying to tell me that shaving is important, because it isn’t. On my list of ‘important things to do’ shaving comes somewhere between ‘darning socks’ and ‘writing name in inside cover of books I own’.
Yet we’re assailed by the need to exfoliate at every turn, it’s even become something of a social taboo. It’s a wholly invented need, and it’s a bloody expensive one at that. Which is why these ads keep getting more and more insane, with big celebs and absurd visuals and silly names like Fusion and Phenom.
Except, this one clearly isn’t that expensive. It looks and sounds pretty cheap, and it’s a lousy concept. So, where did all the big names go? Where are the golf balls turning into planets? The billion-dollar shit-eating grins of overpaid celebs? Where are our depilated masculine role models that Gillette blew millions on?
Oh yeah.