Monthly Archives: June 2013

The Love List – Volume 1

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(Originally published on 25th October, 2001)

  1. Electricity pylons – utterly and quintessentially man-made objects, supplying modern civilisation’s most distinctive and vital resource, and dominating country skylines in testimony to our supremacy.
  2. BBC2 weatherman Daniel Corbett – a man who loves the weather, and loves telling you about the weather.
  3. Mint Aero Drinks – thick, creamy, sweet, minty and chocolatey, with a colour like comic-book toxic waste, and a taste that steals your soul.
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Worst Adverts of the Year 2010

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(Originally published on 11th January, 2011)

I didn’t watch much television in 2010, so I didn’t get to see many dreadful, hateworthy adverts. Good news for me, bad news for Worst Adverts of 2010. This year’s list is therefore much less extensive than last year’s. In fact, it’s just a handful of ads I happened to catch which annoyed me for various reasons. I’m sure there were much worse, which you’ll have seen and hated yourself, but here are mine.

At the start of the year, Renault managed to combine both a sneakily misleading claim, and a ridiculous bare-faced lie, in one advert. The former: launching a TV campaign on 1/1/10 which boasted that they would have zero emission cars “next year”. The latter: the claim that Renault has “been there for every revolution in society.” Really? Didn’t notice them at Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

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Worst Adverts of the Year 2009

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(Originally published on 29th January, 2010)

A Hate List spin-off, which I’d vaguely been thinking about doing for about 15 years before finally getting around to it. Presented in the lazy, tired format of an annual awards presentation.

The “I Want To Punch You, Not Buy Your Product” Award

Runner Up: Pringles

“Oh wow! They’re in a bag. I wasn’t expecting the bag.” Presumably because you’re a total cunt in a Pringles advert. Actually, I suspect the end of this vox pops was cut in editing: “I wasn’t expecting the bag… But I was expecting some foul, salty papier-mâché discs, and those expectations have been met.”

Winner: Envirofone

One of the worst vox pops adverts of all time. Every single person who appears in this heinous clip makes you want to kick them in the nuts or fanny as appropriate. There’s a lot more that’s wrong with this whole concept, such as the fact that the company name infers it’s a primarily environmental project, but the ad shoehorns in the issue of the environment right at the very end as an afterthought, after spending 95% of it telling you how much “WONGA!!!” and “READIES!!!” you could get. (Note to admen: try speaking to some real people. Seriously.) But mainly it’s a neck-and-neck competition to see who can annoy you the most in just a few words ham-acted to camera. For me, the “WONGA!!!” guy narrowly loses out to the chap who apparently has an orgasm at the idea of “ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POUNDS!!!”

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Why Deal or No Deal makes no sense

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The premise of Deal Or No Deal is that no-one – not even the imaginary Banker, i.e. the programme’s producers – knows the contents of the boxes. This makes the game a very simple game of chance, picking random boxes and making statistical decisions between offered deals and remaining probabilities.

This, at least, should be the mathematical premise of the show. The entertainment premise is the exact opposite – that the game is in some way tactically interesting. It is not. But every effort is made to persuade the audience that an intense battle of wits is being fought between the player, the Banker, Edmonds and even the non-playing contestants standing behind their boxes.

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Decaying Green Corpse

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When I first created a website in about 1997, I didn’t have anything to put on it yet. So, as a placeholder while I worked on some proper content, I posted a scanned image of a magazine cutting that I’d found on the floor. I labelled it “Decaying Green Corpse”.

Ever since, throughout every iteration of my web presence, from early GeoCities silliness, via the heyday of the tombell.net galleries, to today’s meagre offering, the Decaying Green Corpse has been there.

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