Well, well, well.
Don’t look for him – he isn’t there. Frankie Cocozza that is. Not happy with cutting his bits from the new M+S / X-Factor clustershag advert, poor old Francis has actually been painted out of the latest version of the ad, which is presumably causing some headaches at M+S headquarters.
Mark and Spencer’s Christmas ad for 2011 is designed to be modular, so that when poor unfortunates get voted out – or dropped for not being sufficiently headline-grabbing – they can be excised from the ad, as if they were never there in the first place. Heartwarming stuff.
Clever, huh? Well, I think not for reasons I detailed here.
But M+S presumably did not see the fact that Cocaine Cocozza – as the tabloids are probably calling him – would get embroiled in a bit of sex-and-drugs rumpus and then get spotted looking totally mashed in the advert’s group shots.
M+S has been playing a bit of Youtube hide and seek, hiding and deleting various ads and uploading new ones as contestants have been voted off.
But the most recent development sees Cocozza actually painted out of the group shot, like Trostsky from various Bolshevik photos.
It’s a remarkable piece of TV flotsam revisionism and perhaps the perfect example of why I thought these ads were a bad idea.
Unless ‘anything your heart desires’ included a week of coke-fuelled shagging followed by the swiftest career plunge in history I rather doubt Frankie is digging the M+S advert at present.
That’s assuming he hasn’t been erased from existence altogether.
The previous version
Cocozza appears, looking mashed, in the top right-hand corner at 47 seconds
The latest version
And now… a blank space!
Oh well, at least Frankie can still be spotted on the M+S Youtube page, just
EDIT: Actually, they’ve even painted him out of him that Youtube home-page background now.
EDIT 2: And here’s the most recent, with Kitty removed from history, replaced by Amelia Lily like it’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers via X Factor.