Mobile phone adverts featuring some perma-grinning twot and no phones

ALL phone companies are guitly of this, Virgin Mobile are a case in point though. All, ALL of their billboard adverts feature a series of slogans about phones accompanied by a big glossy grinning twat in extreme facial close up. “Look”, it says, “look at what I can do for you! All those friends that will ring you for hours of pointless social contact thanks to ME Virgin phones.” No, that’s not how it works. Their TV ads (Melanie out of All Saints photocopying her arse? Christina Aguilera fucking a builder??!?!) are just as rubbish, but the company have persisted with the ’smiling faces will flog our average shit to those pathetic skin-tubes’  attitude.

Everyone’s got a phone, pretty soon most dogs will have phones in this country. Even those people with Virgin mobiles, and I was once one, rarely look like the beaming generation-x ballbags you see being zany on the ads. Truth is, the face is a headfuck. It shows you grins and happiness you’ll never know, least not as long as you’re enslaved by the preening pin-stripe joyboys in the city who’ve dreamt up these ads, or who take your money for facilitating millions of automated wireless electronic connections at a huge profit.

The ads that plague bus-stops and high-streets around the nation bear little resemblance to the drooling automatons that walk around them, all varicose veins, acne and verrucas rather than the glossy pinheads on the boards. These ads and all those responsible for them should be pulled into the middle of a busy street and burned for the greater good.

Know your enemy…For pure hateful twattishness, please visit here

Modern visits to the cinema

All cinemas these days apparently employ professional ass-hats to interrupt the film for other people. Whilst other cinema-goers are busily trying to concentrate on the flashy reflective screen in front of them the ass-hats are just trying to get their popcorn to move gracefully through the air on to other people’s heads or giggle as though they’d somehow used a secret handshake to get the usher to sprinkle crack over their bucket instead of the usual salt or sugar.
If the ass-hats aren’t enough then the people who genuinely want to see the film they’ve paid to see are then threatened by the film companies that they will be sued or imprisoned or something if they were to set up a tripod and a video camera at the back of the theatre to sell a dismal copy of the overblown crap they’ve just witnessed on a car boot somewhere. Not really an option, as most people will wait for the Americans to do it at some random preview and Bittorrent the shit out of things that aren’t quite worth paying nigh-on £7 to go and see.
The increasingly humourless Orange film funding adverts are far more entertaining than the traditional ‘turn your phone off’ graphics, and thus people increasingly forget to do so as the message is lost. Text messages and even calls are being taken in screens like never before…by wankers of course.
The films themselves are now so overblown and self-important that few major releases last under two hours, testing your bladder and ass-cheek numbness resilience to the max. Food is so prohibitively expensive that it’s cheaper to drink outrageous cocktails from a hollowed-out monkey skull at a beachfront casino in Monaco than it is watery sprite in a cardboard tube at your UGC, Odeon or Vue.
The fact is that the cost of visiting the cinema for the pleasure of all this bullshit that in ten years time everybody will have just saved all their money and bought a huge high-definition TV. Initially they will invite friends round to share their films on the massive screen with them, but the ultimate end for most will be a pasty bleary-eyed shell of a human, watching films in his pants alone surrounded by crusty tissues and pizza boxes waiting for the next online DVD rental to arrive. A brave new world.

Gordon Brown, mard-arse laureate

This supposedly ferric Scotch character-vacuum is our next prime minister. A pudding-faced dullard so profoundly expressionless as to make upper-class twit of the year David Cameron look like a viable alternative as prime minister.
Gordon is a boring name, Brown is a boring name. Gordon Brown is a boring, boring man and perhaps the least inspiring prime-minister ever ever ever. Always dark suits, red ties, always that tongue-clicking thing he does at the end of sentences. His dull, flabby face. His whole pointless existence.
For those who used to be interested in politics at all, he has instantaneously alienated you.
Even despite his dodgy decisions as chancellor, and there’ve been a few, I’m only claiming Brown to be rubbish based on the man’s absolute unutterable soullessness. He claimed to like the Arctic Monkeys, yet looks like the fat kid from P.E. that always played as goalkeeper because he couldn’t run like the other boys. Now he’s out for nameless revenge on his school tormentors and somebody made the bastard PM.

Gravity

“It’s a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they’d just stay right up there,” said American comedian Steven Wright.
Whilst it would be interesting to see a sky full of dead birds being swept by council officials with giant bird nets. We could burn their corpses for fuel, although I think the Mr Wright was assuming that the majority of birds die, mid-flight, of heart attacks.
No no no, I don’t hate the nice, friendly gravity that keeps dead birds on the ground or things on tables. I’m referring to the evil gravity; the side of gravity that knocks things off shelves, causes things to roll downhill annoyingly and inevitably will beat us all.
The insipid, snakey gravity which breaks our precious glass and crockery and scabs up childrens knees has caused oceans of tears as it injures, kills and destroys with impunity. Faces smashed into things, knees grazed, backs broken etc etc. When trying to casually throw some keys onto a shelf they inevitably slide too far and fall themselves. It would be nice if things didn’t hit the floor, but sort of floated down like a feather, but slower.
Say I was trying to casually toss some poorly-weighted set of keys on to the end of a wooden shelf. In normal circumstances median oafishness would see those keys slide off the end of the shelf and clatter loudly to the floor, alerting all nearby that their idiot has returned home. If gravity was reduced by say, 20 percent, people would have extra time to saunter over and place them down like they were meant to be in the first place. It COULD work.
The embarassing clatter of remote control on parkay floors could be abolished, and the world would be around nine percent better for it. Probably.

‘Real’ humour

“Real Humour is 1000 times funnier than anything you could script” used to be the old adage. Whilst this may always be the case with series like Little Britain and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, some scripted programmes will always be almost infinitely funnier than their shit-flinging ‘real humour’ cousins.
Did it start wth Dennis Pennis? I don’t care. His celebrity interviews were the cultural high-point of the genre that most recently gave us the idiotic Balls of Steel and the cultural shitstain that is the Borat movie. Pennis acknowledged completely that mocking people face-to-face requires a brash, loathsome host swanning around in a purple suit. Pennis was supposed to be an asshole, he was.
Much ‘real humour’ takes a loosely-defined script, known only to a select few actors, and uses it to annoy people, y’know, for shits and giggles.. It offers us the entertainment equivalent of televised “Knock-a-door run”, complete strangers having a metaphorical burning turd left on their doorstep and we watch as their house fills with the tang of toasted poo, all the while being told that yes, it’s OK to laugh; this isn’t rude, it’s funny.
The presenters of Balls of Steel, far from having Balls of Steel have miniscule ice-cold chick-pea testicles, wanked into premature uselessness as they planned how to tell their parents about their career choice. “Mum, I’m going to be really, really annoying. Professionally.” Mum was just glad they’d found something they were good at.
Never are we allowed to linger on the lasting societal damage done to individuals or the sense of humour of Britain’s younglings. Needless to say, happy slapping is a direct product of techno-minded scrotes looking to recreate the entertainment they’ve seen on television and have a lasting memory to show their children that they too were once comedy genii.
Borat plays to the ignorant xenophobe market in its “Stupid little foreigner’ performance from Sacha Baron-Cohen. Enoch Powell would have been in stitches and, had he been alive now, would have almost certainly written “Did you see that Borat? That’s the kind of darkie-wogs we should be deporting!” into his “Rivers of Blood” speech. So firmly would the Powellists grip the strange-foreigners zeitgeist they would almost certainly have won him every election they entered. We’d be closing the borders and putting migrants on the next bus back to Albania, and we’d do it with a smile.
In five years time, when teenagers stab pensioners and/or immigrants openly in the street for a TV Comedy hour special, we’ll probably be sitting at home, hooting with joy as the newly dead corpse falls lifeless to the floor and ‘lands all funny’. We’ll dip our hands into artery-hardening buckets of foreign food and drift off to sleep, dribble down our triple-chins.
As we sleep foggy memories of a tall man in glasses and his diminutive wig-wearing sidekick skipping and singing in a giant brightly-lit studio drift into our thoughts and a gurgle of delight emits, momentarily, from our lips. A smile spreads, just for a second, and goes again as the two dance away, never to return again.

The Playstation 3

Sony Computer Entertainment revolutionised many a teenage life with the introduction of the Playstation in 1995. I was there, hungry and waiting – which is better, the Sega Saturn or the PS1? IN the end I was persuaded by Toshinden, a beat-em-up so middle-of-the-road it was depressing. Only a few short weeks later Tekken was released. If the two were forms of entertainment then Toshinden would be a mid-June episode of Eastenders compared to Tekken’s Terminator 4: Jesus Must Die, starring Jesus Christ as Himself and featuring a 1950s tap-dance finale. In fact, in Eastenders Dot would be complaining to Jim about having run out of cotton buds, while in the movie a new liquid metal Arnold Schwarzenegger would be battling the son of God on Calvary with an Uzi 9mm machine pistol and selection of spears.
Needless to say, the Playstation 3 has no such games. All of the PS3s games so far look like….well, toss. The console itself is roughly as powerful as the already well-established and supported Xbox 360, but costs just under twice the price. You’ll pay more money for the privilege of paying EVEN more money for the £40 or £50 a throw games, why? Because the old Sony, the one that thought making good stuff equated to good money, is gone. Now there’s just the money, they thought they had to be the most powerful to win, but that’s not the case. It seems even the slobbering masses would much rather have a Nintendo Wii at just over a third the price, than a PS3 with all its capabilities. Why? Because it’s all about the games, and Nintendo will always have Mario, or at least the promise of Mario to come.
If you were given a PS3 tomorrow, what games would you buy? Just think about it. So far, so rubbish.

The wedge with the flexible sole ad from Clarks

This is the advert currently on tv showing a ginger woman attempting to descend some stairs whilst trying to throw an invisible chimp off her back. The woman in the advert leans backwards and forwards and reclimbs several stairs as if to suggest a new-found freedom, all the while a lilting French acoustic guitar pseudo-folk ear-turd is being pooed out in the background.

Of course the strange movements we’re witnessing are more a result of some spinal bending than a revolution in footwear. The shoe in this video is still just the thing between foot and ground, nothing more. Rather than pretending to ‘reinvent the shoe’, Clarks would absolutely make more money if they showed shoes as a thing that humans grudgingly put on their feet to keep them warm and stop them from bleeding too much. If their campaign, was more honest and said “You’re going to have to get some new shoes eventually….why not think about us eh?” I’d have a lot more respect for it.

As for this objectionable advert, bleugh!

Gameshow tension music and accompanying ‘heartbeat’ sound effects

In the last ten years or so gameshows have evolved from their gaudy tinsel-encrusted 1980s high-camp peak to develop a much more stern, authoritative tone. The Who Wants to be a Millionnaire school of gameshows does away with klaxons, bright lights and innuendo replacing them with uncertainties, risks and failure.
Since Chris Tarrant first screwed his giant custard-skinned face up into a mangled frown, gameshows have offered contestants either  life-changing sums of money or public humiliation. Studios are now dark, lit only by the occasional halo of a blue spotlight on a contender.

The quiz now reflects the society it lives in. A cuddly toy and a washing maching are laughable prizes, and a late-1990s entertainment industry looking to distance itself from the naff, decided that life-changing money could be offered instead, forcing people to take them seriously.
A by-product of this was the development of the gameshow tension chord and accompanying heartbeat sound effects. Every gameshow in the lineage of Millionnaire uses it through “Deal or No Deal” to “For the Rest of Your Life”. At a moment when perhaps the contestant didn’t want to remind their frail physical corpse was close to cardiac arrest with the tension of their imminent failure, the chord arrives, lights go down and Chris/Noel/That Dickhead Off Watchdog start asking them if they’re sure. Are they sure this is the answer/box/lightbulb. The chord and the heartbeats prolong the tension, the show and the tedium.
Who Wants to be a Millionnaire, if filmed in an open field on a balmy August Day, would look like the shambolic high-stakes pub quiz it really is (Henry VII? No, wrong. Bye!). Deal or No Deal would be over in two minutes (box 11? £20 Box 9? £50k, unlucky…Box 3? 1p…hometime!) with Noel free to make embarassing passes at any contestant he wanted.

We, as a nation, gain nothing from the silly ’bmp-bmp’ of the heartbeat noises or the accompanying chord. It’s just rubbish.

Jeremy Kyle and the Jeremy Kyle Show

Jeremy Kyle is a presenter so bland and uninspiring that he resembles an underused supply teacher.

Of course looking underwhelming is Kyle’s advantage in the daytime TV stakes because underneath his mild-mannered exterior is a TV god. Occassionally he will stop the stream of self-pitying heroin-addled bottom-feeders passing by his barren two-chaired stage and confront them as though the show represented judgment day and he had been empowered by the Alpha and the Omega himself to smite the sinners before him.
Occassionally so moved will Kyle become that even with his superhuman self-control he cannot quell the raging sense of injustice fermenting behind his blank, hobbity face. Kyle will infrequently confront infidelitous lovers, particularly men, and offer his advice to them in simple terms via the medium of shouting.

A typical Kyle outburst would be “You’ve cheated on her, the mother of your children! You’ve got to be a man about this, look her in the eye and tell her. Tell her it won’t happen again and you’ll be off the smack again for good this time.” Sometimes Kyle will use his face as punctuation in his self-righteous monologues. Many finish with Kyle having stalked close enough to his quarry to perform a detailed dermatological examination, before withdrawing the face with a flourish, waving his prompt card in the air and appealing to the pleb-filled audience to whoop and holler, sharing his indignation.

Kyle is rubbish because he’s got the knowledge of what would make a good show, but not the charisma to pull it off. Who is he, where did he come from? Why is he towering over the daytime schedules as he does? He’s the last breath of anger left in the daytime confessional format, one which leaves most sane people feeling hollow. Jeremy Kyle should instead don a cape and become a modern day Batman, anything less is just mindless airtime filler.

Sharon Osbourne

The braying, vulgar fish-wife of the world’s most famous narcotics casualty, Sharon Osbourne has a track record of being rock’s most successful spouse. With a voice like a pantomime witch and a surgically experssion-limited facade,  Osbourne’s distinctively pleading promotional style can be seen endorsing just about anything following the cancellation of the Osbournes.

Be it Gala Bingo, Asda or indeed some TV singing competition, lack of qualifications does not stop Sharon from pretending to be able to judge talent (she married Ozzy), spot a bargain (She will never have to) or play bingo (her bingo wings now reside in some plastic surgeon’s bin rendering her useless).
Her nouveau-riche squawking is mistaken for an earthy reality, but for every 15 minutes she spends back in dear old Brum you can bet she’ll spend nine months under her the power-shower in her LA Mansion thanking the lord of darkness himself she’ll never have to go back to smelly old poor people again.
In fact, marrying someone rich is up there with playing football or being the Queen in the top list of surefire moneyspinners of the modern age. Forget everything anyone ever told you at school about the joy of knowledge and hard work making you rich. Instead find a shambling drugs-wreck, marry him and bear his demon-seed.