If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

New Canal+ ad.

S’alright, innit?

Casinoel.

I just wish they really had the balls to go for it and pick a number instead of a colour. A Christmas party budget of £350k would allow them to have a proper party (i.e.: swimming in Cristal serenaded by Tanita Tikaram).

I just finished watching the first season of Boardwalk Empire. So much of it was extremely impressive: the sets and costumes, the direction of the pilot by Scorsese, the… um… the… er…

I’m not for a minute saying that BE is crap – far from it – but it’s not great either: the characters are a bit vague and not particularly exciting; there’s no real thrill when supervillain Ace Rothstein appears, or indeed when the bloke who played Omar in The Wire shows up; the plotting is fine, but not that compelling; situations (the gunman with half a face) deliver far less than they promise; the dynamics tend to go round in pointless circles (the Al Capone plotline, for example); and worst of all, Steve Buscemi is miscast as Nucky. He’s not intimidating or at all credible as the person who runs bootleg-era Atlantic City in the face of gangsters and the law. Oh, and Kelly MacDonald is a bloody awful actor, and her plotline is pretty boring.

Oh, I think I just made it sound crap. I really don’t mean that, I just mean that it’s not good enough to be considered great. We’ve been very fortunate in the last ten years to have been fed a mouthwatering diet of televisual perfection in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. That means that anything that falls short of that standard does so under the glaring spotlight of what is now possible in the medium of the TV serial, especially when it comes laden with the hype, budget, cast and ambition of Boardwalk Empire.

We now expect plotlines to intertwine with graceful, invisible ease. We want all characters to be complex, well-rounded and brilliantly portrayed. We notice when ten or twenty hours of drama is not conveyed with absolute consistency. In short, we have our antennae set for great and when anything falls short, it’s a disappointment, even if it’s actually pretty good.

That might be unfair, but it’s only a version of what happens in many areas of life. In the 70s, British people were happy with the prawn cocktail, steak and chips and black forest gateau of a Bernie Inn. Now if your soup hasn’t been passed through fractional distillation then the chef isn’t really trying. The standard is high and those who only meet the greatness of a couple of decades ago are dismissed as not up to scratch. In the 80s newspapers were grim, black-and-white affairs with a couple of pages of sport and maybe 25 pages overall. Nowadays they’re all-singing, all-dancing colourful daily digests of absolutely everything of note that has happened in the world, complete with online and ipad versions that link to clips and appear by magic on your at your bedside during the night. Animation used to be super impressive if it featured any degree of 3-D (remember the delight at this shot from 1992?). Now if you can’t see every hair on a dog move in a gust of wind or each glint of light catching on a dandelion spore you’re a halfwitted hack who needs to go back to marker pen school.

So does quality only exist in the context of other things or is there an ultimate standard of anything that we can look to? If there had been no Dickens, Shakespeare or anyone good, would we revere the work of Jeffrey Archer? Would the absence of The Beatles elevate Steps? Would my son’s finger paintings look better without the context of Michelangelo?

That’s it, isn’t it? Really bloody great stuff just ruins it for the merely good. No matter how fantastic you are, if there’s someone a bit better you’re suddenly worse, without your work changing at all.

I guess we’ll all just have to be brilliant. But, unfortunately, when everyone’s brilliant, no one is.

Damn.

I had the enormous privilege of watching this ad the other day:

Unfortunately, it didn’t make me want to shop at Littlewoods, but it did make me wonder why that big national chain that sells lots of different homeware and clothes has used the very well known face of another big national chain that sells lots of different homeware and clothes.

(This one’s from waaaaay back in 2012):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAtCD1k5DFw

So I think that’s a bit odd or lazy. When people see Myleene Klass, who has advertised M&S for several years, I’d have thought many of them just think ‘M&S’ and go back to doing what they were doing before the ad came on, which must be a bit of an own goal for Littlewoods. They have surely paid many thousands of pounds to have Ms Klass’s melted-shoe face adorning their generic Christmas messaging, so why spunk so many of those notes up the wall?

Even odder, though: when I Tweeted this oddness, someone sent me this link to show that Asda is now using Sainsbury’s famous old endline, Good food costs less at Sainsbury’s/Asda. Obviously, both are among the most prominent grocers in the country, so that’s quite similar territory, isn’t it?

Then again, Sainsbury’s haven’t used the line for at least ten years, but it was invented by Lord James Sainsbury in 1959, and it was declared retailing’s ‘best-known advertising and marketing slogan’.

But what I don’t understand is that there must be at least ten other bints who could do Myleene’s job without difficulty, just as there must be millions of other combinations of words that express the high quality and low price of food.

So why use the very famous property associated with one of your biggest rivals?

Dude playing the spoons to Insomnia by Faithless (thanks, B):

Beautiful portraits on maps (thanks, J).

I want to drink whiskey with this guy, and I don’t even like whiskey (thanks, D):

Sergeant Pepper cover shoot (thanks, T).

Dead flies art (thanks, S).

Weave silk (hours of fun; thanks, F).

Fart by mail (thanks, J).

10 hours of bacon pancakes (thanks, D):

The incredible beauty of a cheetah in motion (thanks, S).

Fun ways to die (thanks, J).

Reply from the Attorney General to the Grand Dragon of the KKK (thanks, N).

Ultimate falling on ice compilation (thanks, V):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kjE6aTnpKSs

Adam Buxton’s Summertime Blues (thanks, G):

Drum Robot (thanks, W):

Bill Murray’s Sally League Speech (thanks, P):

Carrier bags are truly fucking awful (thanks, D).

Sexy football managers calendar (Fergie and Dalgleish win this for me. Thanks, S).

The Hello video analysed (thanks, D):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtLeAnxAkk&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ-RIbBFQAk

It’s fun, different  and seems to fit with the brand like peaches and cream.

I’m just a little cynical about filmed reactions of members of the public. I’ve seen so many of these bloody things that I now find it very hard not to doubt the degree to which they are surprised/amused/delighted.

Sorry.

In my hobby as person who organises the Water Water Everywhere campaign (with brilliant assistance, particularly from George Floyd), I am always on the lookout for things that persuade people to drink tap water instead of drinks that come in bottles and damage the environment.

Here’s one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tE9U4mMqKP4

It’s just been banned because it trashes the soft drink industry.

Well, it presents itself as an alternative to bottled soft drinks by using an interesting aural/visual mnemonic.

That seems reasonable enough, so why ban it?

I smell some nasty lobbying from the soft drink manufacturers who prize their cash over the future of the environment.

Wankers.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Whether it’s this one:

or this one:

or this one:

or this one:

And let’s not forget:

And my favourite (thanks, John S. I was looking for this but couldn’t find it. When I was at college Tony just described it to us and I thought it was amazing. Very pleased to have seen it at last):

Oh, and this amazing one (thanks, S&C):

This one:

And this classic (thanks, J):

They are the best ads.

Here’s a lovely new campaign for Sail & Anchor beer from Droga 5 in Sydney.

The real kicker for me is that the copywriter was my former AD, Cam Blackley, and the Art Director is my former AD, Daryl Corps.

Now they’re the CD and Head of Art at Droga 5, so as you can see I was really just holding them both back.

Congrats, guys. The writing’s really good, as is the art direction and typography.