This Ad Will Not Make Even The Smallest Dent In The Grotesquely Distended Stomachs Of The Nation’s Youth.
Here’s the government’s new, 90 second anti-obesity ad.
It’s part of a £275m campaign to stop the nation’s kids turning into a bunch of lardy bastards.
“Change4Life has a critical ambition. We are trying to create a lifestyle revolution on a huge scale, something which no government has attempted before,” said public health minister Dawn Primarolo.
“We have adopted ideas from successful movements such as Make Poverty History and Comic Relief. We want families to engage with the campaign and understand that obesity is not someone else’s problem.”
Problem (with the ad at least): it doesn’t seem to be telling anyone anything new in a compelling way.
It seems to me that they’ve decided to adopt the tone of a 3-year-old’s TV show to impart some crushing yet obvious information: ” …which meant they’d be more likely to get horrid things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer…their lives might be cut short. And that’s terrible, because we love the little blighters.”
Indeed, cancer is a pretty ‘horrid thing’. And thanks for explaining why the premature death of our children might be a bad thing: because we love them.
The country isn’t really this thick, is it? Do we really have to tell people that cancer’s bad and we love our kids? And if not, surely this isn’t the best way to persuade people the change their behaviour.
On top of that, we can add the fact that the government thinks this is the best way to spend £275m of our money.
As an ex-porker (I weighed 15 stone when I was 15), I’d like to make a small alternative suggestion that might at least persuade the teenage section of the target market to drop a few pounds: point out the effect that being fat has on your chances with the opposite (or same) sex. That thought alone got me to drop 5 1/2 stone in 6 months.
I’m sure it’s un-PC to point out that most people find fatties physically unpleasant, but it’s true, it’s motivating and it could make for some thought-provoking ads.
I’m envisaging a 96-sheet of a dribbly pair of pasty man-boobs with the line: ‘If your tits are bigger than hers, you’ve got no chance’.
Something like that, anyway.