Quite Random

Quality Indian TV ad

At last… I’m chuffed, I managed to get hold of an advert that made me chuckle all the way round India. Indian TV advertising is better than the dross we get here…

File Attachment: Indica V2 ad (Windows Media 3388 KB)

The C word

It makes me cringe. I find it offensive. It’s cheap, tacky, overused, and I’d hate to be called one.

Celebrity.

Celebrity Wrestling, Celebrity Boxing, Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, Celebrity Come Dancing, Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, Celebrity Fit Club, 100 best this that and the others. A barrage of bollocks all in order to secure a talentless slapper from Essex or an alcoholic ex-soap star another three years worth of nightclub PAs before they slip back into obscurity, and fill the TV schedules with cheap, recycled filler, the televisual equivalent of bubble and squeak.

Tonight on TV, Tom Parker-Bowles is cooking something. Why anyone gives a dingo’s kidney what Tom Parker Bowles likes to eat is beyond me, but apparently not beyond the person who commissioned the program. People in TV land seem to live in another world from most, one where Davina McCall makes a good chat show host, what Tom Parker-Bowles likes to eat matters to anyone other than Tom Parker-Bowles, and Chantelle Houghton holds any more entertainment value than picking your nose.

Programmes I’d like to see:

Celebrity Battle Royale – a group of celebrities get put on a small Japanese Island, and have three days to kill each other off. They all wear collars which explode if they break any rules, and everyone’s collars explode if there is more than one survivor. Presented by Davina McCall, who explodes on the third day.

Celebrity Moonshot – a group of celebrities are shot into the moon. That’s it.

Celebrity Restrained Awards Ceremony – a group of celebrities have to go to an awards ceremony without getting shitfaced on free champagne, stumbling into each other in the foyer, and getting into a fight with a photographer outside a nightclub.

Celebrity Modern Art – Kerry Katona, Jodie Marsh, Jade Goody, Adam Rickitt, Tom Cruise, Westlife, Jordan, Peter Andre, Donatella Versace, Mick Hucknall, and anyone who has ever been on Big Brother are pickled in perspex cases by Damien Hirst. And then shot into the moon.

Early bird

“Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.”

Those words from Marilyn Manson start the day. Truth be told, my day started yesterday morning because I didn’t sleep last night. I tried sleeping, tried breathing exercises, tried cooling off, warming up, emptying my mind, but my brain insisted on keeping me awake, and not even for anything constructive. I didn’t sleep a wink. As a result, I now feel rather badly coordinated, as if my brain is in another room, I can’t type properly, and I’m in danger of looking a bit like Marilyn, but without having applied makeup.

BBC News is on in the background, and for some reason the money guy who looks like Penfold out of Dangermouse is working on a Ryanair check-in desk. You can tell the BBC are trying to make the whole thing look comical as they’ve dubbed on tuba music. It’s amazing what a fanfare for clumsy fat blokes tuba music is. I can think of at least one other example – Otis in Superman, The Motion Picture. That’s the original Superman, where Christopher Reeve was brilliant, not Smallville, where Lionel Luther’s hair acts everything else off the screen and there’s no brass music of any kind.

Mini-Bush! You know what ah’m sayin?

It looks like there’s plenty more at home like George.

Don’t sit on the fence

OK, so the footage is edited, doubtless to eliminate gaps and further increase the impact of her tirade, but Arab-American psychiatrist Dr Wafa Sultan’s discussion (and a very one-sided one at that) with an Egyptian cleric on Al-Jazeera TV is a lucid, thumping denouncement of Islamic dogma. The video is here and the transcript is here.

In the light of the recent opportunist histrionics over the Muhammad cartoons, her timing is perfect. When the West has responded with an utter absence of backbone to the cowing of screaming fundamentalist loonies who exploited the cartoon controversy to claim even more protection from criticism, and openly threaten all ‘disbelievers’, this woman has had the courage to say what most wouldn’t. As if to prove her point, she has received numerous death threats.

Related

• For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats – NY Times
• Interview on Israel National News (starts 26 minutes in)

The IT Crowd - making sweet fun of IT geeks

The first series of Channel 4’s highly amusing IT Crowd is over, with an unlikely but brilliant cliff-hanger (of sorts). Anyone who enjoyed Father Ted will enjoy this series, coming as it does from the same creators. Chris Morris also does a good line in lunatic boss, and there’s much to like about any comedy that takes the piss out of a) office environments and their absurdities, and b) tech support geeks (the moment where Moss e-mails the Fire Department to tell them the office is on fire is inspired).

There are links to download each episode from the Geeks are Sexy blog, appropriately enough…

The best advert of 2006 so far?

Well, I think so. This advert actually makes me want a Honda, as if the other Honda adverts that came out over the last couple of years weren’t already better than most of the stuff on TV. The only other TV advertisement I can remember that was as effective for me was one that came out twenty years ago for the Reach toothbrush, where a clever-looking scientist type person transformed a toothbrush before my eyes, pulling it around like a Transformer to create longer bristles, a bent head, and other innovations to better shift plaque. I was understandably completely disappointed when mum brought one of the toothbrushes home and it wasn’t a Transformer.