Tag: andrex

How Dirty Do Andrex Clean Routine Adverts Make You Feel?

I asked people how dirty they felt after watching the Andrex Clean Routine adverts.

Here’s what they said:

• As dirty as Katie Hopkins secretly feels every time she utters some hateful words she only says for money.

• As dirty as Mark Oaten’s briefcase.

• As dirty as Amanda Holden.

• As dirty as the money in Sepp Blatter’s bank account.

• As dirty as John Travolta’s [redacted].

• As dirty as every penny Kelvin MacKenzie has ever banked.

• As dirty as everyone involved with Andrex’s advert feels.

andrex clean routine adverts

In all seriousness – as far as one can be serious about this sort of gash, anyway – just how funny is the concept of wiping your arse? It’s certainly not as funny as the people in these adverts make up.

And the gibberish responses uttered by these children – at the off-screen urging of the adults who probably wrote these lines – are not funny either.

Children are occasionally funny. But they are often not funny at all. Certainly not when forced to be cute for the jaded, listless amusement of adults in advert and television programmes.

I find something vaguely awful about press-ganging children into entertaining adults in this way: in music, in television and especially comedy.

It doesn’t hurt that I am utterly immune to the mediated cuteness these media forms always take. To hear a child laughing might be a wondrous thing; for an advertiser to harness it in an effort to make us buy something is to sully its wondrousness, its innocence.

The affectedness of the Andrex Clean Routine adverts make me cringe, frankly, as it should any sane adult as far as I’m concerned.

Having tried to make us vote for what we do with our soiled toilet roll in the scrunch or fold campaign, asked us how wiping our arses makes us feel and forced minor celebrities (Dawn Porter and Arielle Free) to humiliate themselves for cash in an attempt to make us block up sewers, it seems we’re now stuck with watching children come up with euphemisms for cleaning their rectums. The world’s gone fucking mad.

How do the Andrex Clean Routine adverts make you feel?

Let me know how you feel about these adverts – and send a message to Andrex – below.

March’s Worst Adverts

M+Ms advert

What a strange time for awful adverts. I can only assume it’s something to do with the Conservative government. March doesn’t just herald the arrival of adverts that are truly appalling – the sort that you only have to see once to recognise its hideousness – in the shape of the Admiral advert, but enduring efforts such as the Just Eat advert, Go Compare advert and Big Bad Wolf Moneysupermarket ad – or even commercials back from the dead, such as the M&Ms ‘I could really use a snack’ advert, arse-wipe Andrex effort and Travelodge muppets spot.

All are currently making people hurl their remote controls, pets or even spouses across the room in the vague direction of the television. An ad break that featured all of the ads mentioned above might just lead to the sort of outbreak of spontaneous mass violence that JG Ballard would have written off as too horrible to contemplate.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a confluence of truly terrible adverts. As a result I’ve been forced into a kind of mini Worst Advert of the Year poll, a bit like an Treasury Autumn Statement. Choose your most hated ad with care – you only get one vote. I understand that’s a bit like having Piers Morgan, Michael Gove and Louise Mensch in the same room and only being able to throw rotten tomatoes at one of them, but there you go.

If you must – and you can bear to put yourself through it – you can remind yourself of the horror of it all below. Just be warned – watching all of them in one go could turn you into hermit crabs.

Andrex advert

A hideous confluence of sickly kid cutesiness and someone asking you how you feel when you wipe your arse.

MoneySupermarket Big Bad Wolf advert

More omnipresent than Olivia Coleman and more awful than The One Show.

M&Ms advert

Containing the most hideous phrase you can possibly see on television right now, apart from anything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth: “I could really use a snack.”

Just Eat adverts

The Just Eat advert is less of an earworm and more of an earparasite. Don’t expect to be free of it any time soon.

Travelodge advert

Jim Henson’s gift to the world, hijacked in this unlovely evocation of business-trip misery.

Admiral advert

Frankly a misfire that is astonishing even for advertising. The Admiral advert is an absolute horrorshow of what happens when something goes wrong and no-one can stop it happening.

Go Compare advert

It’s clear now that we will never be free of Gio Compario – just like you’re never really free of sensitive skin, bad knees or Irritable Bowel Syndrome.