Tasteless, Inappropriate and Too Soon: One-liner #1

Terrorist attacks—and in India. It's just not cricket.

Another lengthy post

Here at El Twad HQ, despite Top Gear's unremitting policy of driving things through them, we continue to erect new, elaborate and frankly questionable out-buildings.

The latest such is particularly absurd: in it we use our political influence to have books that contradict our authoritarian world-view removed from public libraries. We also advocate torturing people to try to make them more like us.

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We call it the Palin-drome.

W trufax #89

—facts about George W Bush that are absolutely, definitely true.

#89: even he thinks Barack Obama is already president.

Adverts: the Good, the Bad and the Dubbed

I love watching adverts now - it's the best showcase of television. Why? Because the fickle nature of the human being is perfectly reflected in their ever changing ways.

They reflect the products we wish we had until we buy them and they upgrade them so that we want them again. They play upon recent socio-cultural changes to get the best impact, humour and relevance. Most importantly, perhaps, is that they now have to be brilliant to capture our attention enough to stop us from making coffee, picking up the phone or going to the loo.

Thankfully, I think they're getting much better. I actively watch adverts now just to see how a product is offered to the nation. Out of these, three ads have jumped out to me - all of which have consulted major advertising agencies to help them work - and work they do.

I think my favourite in recent months is the Brains-based Drench advert which actually made me remember the name of the brand. Although I think that the people who buy bottled water can be described as Evian spelt backwards, it hit the spot. Even if it isn’t full puppet work but computer generated, it taps into the nation’s nostalgia at a time where we need humour, stupidity and a breakdancing Gerry Anderson marionette.

The next lovable advert was more of a sigh of relief than anything. Vauxhall, advertising their relatively boring family hatchbacks, have done away with the two insufferable children from their Meriva and Zafira adverts. In several ‘original’ and ‘hilarious’ role-reversal adverts, the children were the adults and vice-versa, with the kids musing about their parents playing games and dropping plates, as well as talking to the Indian kid next door who couldn't act for toffee (although I assume the other two could, judging by their build).

The new commercial is, with the help of a decent advertising agency (which I believe to be Lowe), one of the cleverest concepts on TV and could probably be a good basis for a TV show if brainless executives weren't afraid of unique ideas like Arrested Development.

With people changing the landscape to suit their needs - buildings moving inwards to allow cars to drive down alleys, pushing goalposts away into the ground, that sort of thing - Vauxhall have hit the mark by reflecting this image back to their foldaway chairs and spacious MPVs. If I had £15k, a family, a need for a car and a no claims bonus as long as this rant, I’d actually consider thinking about buying one.

As a disclaimer to the final commercial, I don’t really like Saatchi & Saatchi. This is mainly due to Charles' marriage to sexy-but-a-pain-in-the-face Nigella Lawson, who insists on pretending to be a cook for the proletariat yet still insisting on inviting her "friends" to dinner on TV (which all happen to be multi-millionaires).

They did, however, make a very clever advert for Visa recently, based on the popular “get our card, get everything you need, especially if all of your friends are grade A idiots on your stag night” concept. A naked man in the desert runs, picking up various items along the way, to his own wedding, where he arrives suited and booted with a ring, a shave and a sharp suit. Very impressive.

However, advertising is not as blessed as I make it out to be.

Adverts can also show their slovenly side with the most ridiculous money-saving (read: wasting) technique used by European or international companies. The process is:

1) Get rubbish advert from the continent
2) Make no effort to change it to make it culturally relevant
3) Dub it with differently-accented voices
4) Throw it into the British market

The only one that ever got away with it was the ad for Ferrero Rocher at the Ambassador‘s Reception. Still, if you watch it closely it exhibits all of the symptoms of today's lazy advertising - which is a good 20 years forward from this precursor to the trend. I think, given it was the first of its kind, it wasn't too bad; besides, the set wasn't exactly cheap and it's still an immortal advert.

Still, after seeing an advert for a yoghurt made by Dr. Oetker called Paula (I mean, come on...), which is coloured like a cow (white and brown flavour, I assumed), I couldn't help but wonder why the company would go to such effort to make a single-language advert only to re-dub it to make it look shoddy.

If anything, dubbing an advert constitutes a lack of foresight in production. If it's an international product release, it needs a simple voiceover with moving images that can be changed to make it not sound like foreign muck when it hits our screens - just British muck, which is somehow better in our collective eyes.

Of course, we're not without our own disgraceful attempts at advertising. My favourite is definitely for Bold Infusions' White Diamond and Lotus Flower fragrance washing powder. Sorry, what?

What do they smell like?! I’m sure a lotus flower smells nice, but I haven‘t been to Vietnam recently to find out. White diamond though? Why would they market it as a potential fragrance for washing clothing? To make it sound as pretentious as possible? It’s like releasing dodo and panda flavoured crisps.

You can't advertise perfume and aftershave effectively, never mind fragrances that you know don't exist. Still, perfume manufacturers insist on communicating their scent via the strangest of advertising methods:

1) Get attractive man or woman, preferably a famous one you can pay £500,000 for 20 minutes of work
2) Get them to imply that beauty and attraction is all due to the perfume
3) Make it for a 5 to 10 second time slot
4) Make them look coyly into the camera, or make them lark about in general - skipping from post to post as waves crash behind them, for example
5) Show the bottle and say the brand name alone in a gruff yet sexy French accent like "LAH-COST-UH" or "CH'NEHL"

Whether it's Nicole Kidman talking rot for 3 minutes for a Chanel No. 5 ad made by Baz Luhrman that cost upwards of £20m (which they'd never get back through sales alone), or that unfeasibly attractive happy-go-lucky scamp on the Lacoste advert, it makes me wait for the day that Willy Wonka perfects his chocolate-via-TV teleportation technology so I can push a nuclear warhead through my TV just for them.

All-in-all, advertising is the glue that holds TV together - soon to be the foundations upon which programming is built, such as it is in the United States. Whatever happens, I’m not worried - the British humour will always leak through and produce some of the finest works of television. With money to be made and agencies to be hired, things can only get better - but others will still continue to counteract this platform.

Mme Sarkozy tenuously connects us all

Whoa, hey! Is this thing still here?!

Only kidding, folks: you’ve not been forgotten. We’ve just been incredibly busy here at The Twaddle HQ (in the sleepy county of Gunpointshire). At least, Gardner has.

Being a rookie journalist and all, he’s been spending his days plugging away tirelessly, deep in the bowels of the Journoplex. At the moment, his office …well, he doesn’t strictly have an office, really. It’s just a desk.

…

OK, so he’s got a pile of old pizza boxes he uses to steady his laptop, in lieu of any real office equipment. Anyway, that’s in the lower sub-basement of the Journoplex—where all the the junior news-botherers begin their broadcasting careers. It’s well grotty down there.

Deep in the lowliest, mankiest parts of the world’s journalistic hierarchy—that far down—the walls are unplastered, and the girders that barely hold them up have almost rusted away to nothing. Journalists: rubbish at architectural engineering.

Further up the ’Plex (as all the trendy young journos are calling it), wonderfully oblivious to the structural instability below, live the bigwigs—your Rupert Murdochs and your Huw Edwardses: journalistic royalty. And they’re treated as such: the floors are even numbered “92”, “93”, “Rageh”, “95”…

The further up you go, the shinier, spiffier and metallic-sheen-ier it gets. That, of course, is where Gardner wants to be going, and why he’s spent the last few weeks trying to attract the attention, approval and eminence of all those lucky people further up the reportage pecking order.

—The ones whose windows have a nice view of the sky, and some trees and things; instead of his backdrop of slimy sewer gunk, raw fossil fuels and rat crap. And whose windows have glass.

See-through glass.

In order to curry favour with the Journoplex’s upper echelons, then, he’s been investing all of his time in being furiously and resolutely distracted by Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife.

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I, meanwhile, have been paying attention to world events. I’ve seen enough scripted television dramas—and what is life if not a scripted television drama?—to know that seemingly-unrelated concurrent events are always related.

And then there’s that bit when all the loose ends come together and tie up neatly just before the credits roll. Now, I’m not suggesting that you’re gonna wake up next Friday to find the sky covered in scrolling text, compressed to 47% of its supposed size in order to accommodate a massive picture of Adrian Chiles’s face, and interrupted by a voiceover describing this evening’s edition of The One Show—that’s quite unlikely.

But hear me out.

On the 13th of July 2001, Beijing was named as the host city for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Four years later, a pungent slap was delivered to the collective face of the French by London becoming the venue for the 2012 Olympics.

Come 2008, the Chinese government is under international pressure over its relationship with the people of Tibet (…to put it mildly). 2008’s Olympic torch relay, in which a flame is symbolically carried around the world by a succession of former athletes and Blue Peter presenters, as an evocative symbol of both the Olympic Spirit and the Third Reich, arrived in London this week.

It was met by angry mobs of peaceful protesters, angrily—but peacefully—protesting, in mobs. Their logic being that if the relay is disrupted every ten seconds, Chinese state TV won’t be able to show it off and censor the outside world’s reaction to the Tibet situation, without someone having to push the big, red, star-shaped “Censor Me Hard!” button every ten seconds. Eventually, that person’s gonna get bored and/or tired, and unilaterally abandon the whole censorship approach. Or something.

In addition to this well-meaning—albeit non–censorship-penetrating—disruption of its journey, the torch was also met in London by our fearless leader Gordon Brown.

Or not. ’Cos if Tony Blair taught him one thing (apart from “no, it’s still my turn”), it was that spin is crucial. You have to be seen to be doing something that looks—to a Sun reader—like it’s probably the best idea at the time.

And that means going “Yeah, China! How ’bout some Tibet? Eh?!” loudly, in capital sans-serifs, next to a picture of Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife’s knockers looking “statesbooblike”.

But the Olympic Games are nothing if not a brand—not even Formula 1 can out-sponsor an Olympiad. The International Olympic Committee would never have let Murray Walker within a 500-mile radius of a Grand Prix, because his surname carries connotations at odds with the ethos of motorsport.

The Olympics’ professed ideal of “One World, One Dream” (and I’d be genuinely unsurprised if the IOC complained about my unauthorised use of their slogan here) is adhered to relentlessly. It would harm the Olympic brand—and purse—if the 2012 host was seen to be anything but a Barney the Dinosaur–grade best fwend (yes, with a W) to the current Olympic brand-wielder.

And so Gordon needs to be seen to be huggably friendly with, and sternly critical of China—simultaneously. Too stern, and he’ll arouse the ire of the IOC, and make investing wadloads of cash in Britain (and Scotland) seem imprudent. Too friendly though, and at the next election he’ll be even voted-outer.

If only there were some way he could covertly disrupt the Olympic flame—perhaps make it look like bad luck that its journey was impeded. Or maybe it wouldn’t even arrive at its destination at all…?

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Back to 2001: (yeah—he was really thinking ahead, but with Tony around, he had no choice;) on the 20th of November, planning permission was granted for a fifth terminal at London’s Heathrow airport. On the 14th of December, less than a month later, there was an annular solar eclipse.

Not really relevant, but it happened nonetheless.

This Terminal 5 idea had been knocking about since the 1980s, but it was only finally approved in 2001, just a few months after Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics.

Fast-forward back to 2008… —Fast-forward forward to 2008… —In 2008: Terminal 5 has been built, complete with its revolutionary new baggage-handling system (so we’re told). And on the 7th of February, there was another annular eclipse, though again, that’s not really relevant.

The new terminal was scheduled to open for business just a week or two before the Olympic torch hit Britain: long enough beforehand to make sure that any delays to its opening had been resolved, but not (evidently) long enough to work out all the kinks in that revolutionary new baggage-handling system.

Trillions—literally trillions—of suitcases, briefcases, miscellaneous cases of other kinds, and all sorts of exotic luggage have been delayed, misplaced and lost since Terminal 5 opened.

Now: I don’t know how the Olympic torch is supposed to be leaving Britain. But if a revolutionary new airport terminal designed for international flights had just opened, and I were in charge of deciding, it would be flying BA.

…once they’d found it again, anyway.

The lengths we go to to construct tenuous puns...

The Twaddle HQ's grounds, as you may be aware, are vast. In addition to the HQ itself we have a number of satellite outbuildings, each with its own specific function.

Obviously, we have a kennel for the Hounds of Love—the Kennel of Love. We were only supposed to be looking after them for Kate Bush for a couple of months (while the Futureheads were busy filming their own cartoon), but she still hasn't been back round to pick them up. We think she might've got distracted in the meantime, trying to recite the digits of π. So anyway, the Hounds' Portakennel became a permanent fixture.

We've also got a mini-village–type thing for the beloved El Twad HQ dinnerladies. It currently holds the European record for “most restaurants per head of population”.

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Just recently, we unveiled the latest addition (though we're not entirely sure to whom we unveiled it—while conducting the ceremony, Terry Wogan seemed understandably bemused; mind, he usually looks similarly bemused during Children in Need)—our own, purpose-built, private cinema.

We've got it rigged up to play a non-stop 24-hour-a-day mix of A Fish Called Wanda, Monty Python (about 75% of which consists of the Parrot Sketch; much of the remainder is taken up by the Lumberjack Song, and the rest is just the phrase “he's not the Messiah—he's a very naughty boy” on a loop ...interrupted at random intervals by the Spanish Inquisition), and a plethora of warm-natured BBC travelogues.

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We call it the Palin-drome.

Ba-dum-tsh!

W trufax #31

—facts about George W Bush that are absolutely, definitely true.

#31: in a futile attempt to broker a Middle East peace treaty, he once attended a football match between Arsenal and Crystal Palace.

Fat kids banned

The country is currently in the midst of a nationwide obesity epidemic. It has recently spread to urban areas, affecting towns, cities, villages, hamlets and macbeths all over the United Kingdom. And even in Scotland.

Aaaaaarrgh!

Last October, meanwhile, The Law™ was changed so that people under the age of 18 could no longer purchase tobacco. This has made it somewhat difficult for those people to smoke cigarettes—apparently this was the intention.

Lots and lots and lots and lots of medical research has shown that smoking can cause deadness, which currently suffers from a very high mortality rate in NHS hospitals. By preventing under-18s (officially referred to as “kiddywinks”) from smoking, the Government intends to make fewer kiddywinks dead.

It seems to have worked: since last October, absolutely no kiddywinks at all have smoked anything, except for one thirteen-year-old from Runcorn who mistook a cigarette for a Fireman Sam lolly. Unexpected side-effects of the ban have included the obsolescence of the popular incredulity-expressing phrase “What are you smoking?”.

Similar legislation, regarding under-18s drinking alcohol and under-16s engaging in intercourse sexytime, have resulted in near-zero wankeredness and herpefication rates respectively.

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So, in an attempt to repeat the successful eradication of kiddywinks' naughty behaviour in these areas, and as part of his “vision for Britain (and Scotland)”, Gordon Brown—our sunny-textured Prime Minister—has introduced new legislation designed to “meet the rising aspirations of health standards in Britain (and Scotland)”.

To enthusiastic applause he told the House of Commons today: “We will not reproduce obese children, and will legislate to prevent them”. From this October, it will be against the law for children under the age of 18 to be overweight or obese.

Bathroom scales are to be electronically limited at 155 lbs, and shops will be prevented from selling clothes intended for children of a specific age to younger, fatter children. Schoolchildren's plastic chairs will also be required to abandon much of the structural integrity they have gained over the last decade by reverting to a flimsier design.

In line with the other three naughty behaviour laws, businesses caught disobeying the rules will face fines of up to €1000; they will also be issued a Kiddywinks' Naughty Behaviour Order. Health campaigners have described the move as “an ungainly step in the right direction”.